NetBeans IDE 6.8 is the first IDE to provide complete support of Java EE 6 and the GlassFish Enterprise Server v3. The NetBeans IDE Bundle for C/C++ supports C/C++ and FORTRAN development. Additionally, the NetBeans Enterprise Pack supports the development of Java EE 5 enterprise applications, including SOA visual design tools, XML schema tools, web services orchestration (for BPEL), and UML modeling. NetBeans IDE 6.5, released in November 2008, extended the existing Java EE features (including Java Persistence support, EJB 3 and JAX-WS).

The project entered the Apache Incubator in October 2016. The move was endorsed by Java creator James Gosling. In September 2016, Oracle submitted a proposal to donate the NetBeans project to the Apache Software Foundation, stating that it was 'opening up the NetBeans governance model to give NetBeans constituents a greater voice in the project's direction and future success through the upcoming release of Java 9 and NetBeans 9 and beyond'.

Under Oracle, NetBeans competed with JDeveloper, a freeware IDE that has historically been a product of the company. In 2010, Sun (and thus NetBeans) was acquired by Oracle Corporation. Since then, the NetBeans community has continued to grow.

Sun open-sourced the NetBeans IDE in June of the following year. 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. 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.

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