NetBeans, a popular Java IDE formerly supported by Sun Microsystems and later Oracle, has graduated from the Apache Software Foundation's incubator to become a top-level project, where it will benefit ...

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

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.

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.

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