I welcomed the opportunity to review Java EE 6 Development with NetBeans 7 for several reasons. First, I frequently use NetBeans 7 and look forward to learning new things about this IDE.

Mills claimed that NetBeans 7 is the first open source IDE to support the new Java (though JetBrains offers a beta of its IntelliJ IDE that also supports the draft specification).

Support for Java 7 standard edition (SE) is the focus of the new toolset and Oracle claims it is the first open-source IDE to support the JDK 7 preview.

On Tuesday Oracle announced the release of a new version of its NetBeans IDE, 8.0, that takes advantage of the latest enhancements in Java SE 8, among other changes.