NetBeans is an integrated development environment (IDE) for developing primarily with Java, but also with other languages, in particular PHP, C/C++, and HTML5. It is also an application platform framework for Java desktop applications and others.

The NetBeans IDE is written in Java and can run on Windows, OS X, Linux, Solaris and other platforms supporting a compatible JVM.

The NetBeans Platform allows applications to be developed from a set of modular software components called modules. Applications based on the NetBeans Platform (including the NetBeans IDE itself) can be extended by third party developers.

History

NetBeans began in 1996 as Xelfi (word play on Delphi), a Java IDE student project under the guidance of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague. In 1997 Roman Staněk formed a company around the project and produced commercial versions of the NetBeans IDE until it was bought by Sun Microsystems in 1999. Sun open-sourced the NetBeans IDE in June of the following year. Since then, the NetBeans community has continued to grow.  In 2010, Sun (and thus NetBeans) was acquired by Oracle.