NetBeans IDE 6.9 Stabilization Update

NetBeans IDE 6.9 is in the middle of its stabilization phase, so let's take a look at the progress made so far according to the NetBeans community, which plays an important role in the process. Since 2004 every NetBeans release is Beta tested by a group of 60 - 90 volunteers who enjoy playing with the newly developed features in their daily development and providing early feedback. We call it NetCAT. Version 6.9 is no different and here is an excerpt of the latest NetCAT 6.9 status report.

• NetCAT team so far reported >850 defects with stable income of >100 new bugs weekly. NetBeans developers were able to resolve majority of them and only about 40% remains open.


• Quality of Editor significantly influences overall perception of an IDE which logically reflects main focus of NetCAT participants. This team effort for example discovered many regressions introduced by new View Hierarchy code.


• Performance is the second most discussed topic. Whereas startup time benchmarks look good, we must concentrate on slow/unnecessary classpath scanning or slow debugging now. Recently several NetCAT participants reported OutOfMemoryErrors and helped us fix two memory leaks (see #183993).


• There is a wide range of feedback coming in. Some people decided to test brand new OSGi Interoperability, some used Annotation Processors support, others verify online tutorials.


• Beta Quality Criteria were successfully met and NetBeans IDE 6.9 codebase is approaching High Resistance milestone.

Complete NetCAT 6.9 Status Report #5 is publicly available in the web archive.

There are not only good testers in the NetBeans community, though. Some people prefer contributing code and for this kind of individuals there is a NetFIX program. NetFIX 6.9 team consists of 15 developers who simply query NetBeans Bugzilla for sympathetic bugs, fix them locally, and provide patches. Isn't that lovely? For more details read the latest NetFIX 6.9 Status Report.