Java experts have questioned Oracle's support for Java, but Oracle swears it's fully behind Java Enterprise Edition and NetBeans.

Sun Microsystems has announced plans to discontinue Sun Java Studio Enterprise and Sun Java Studio Creator developer tools, encouraging users to migrate to NetBeans.

Along with the Java platform NetBeans IDE 7.0 supports PHP, JavaScript, Ajax and C/C++. But Hilwa noted that the new release drops support for the Ruby programming language.

Version 7.4 of the IDE extends the HTML5 support provided in the previous release to Java EE and PHP applications, and becomes the first IDE to provide support for JDK 8 developer preview builds.

For this release, NetBeans includes FindBugs, a static analysis tool for Java programs. Static analysis inspects program code for possible errors or defects, reporting errors and suggesting ...