The latest version 5.5 was released in October and it is being promoted with the just released version of the Java Standard Edition (called Java SE 6 or Java 1.6 depending on where you look.) Development of the NetBeans IDE is a free open-source project heavily promoted and supported by Sun. Although NetBeans is primarily a Java IDE, it is a development framework that can also be used with Fortran or C/C++ using add-on modules. First lets look at what's new in Java 6 that is related to XML and Web services.
New XML tools in Java 6
Sun puts most XML tools in two groups, the Java API for XML Processing, or JAXP, and the Java Architecture for XML Binding, or JAXB. The Java 6 Standard Edition brings us version 1.4 of JAXP with major new capability. It supports the W3C's level 3 version of the Document Object Model (DOM) by adding new methods to the existing DOM classes. The SAX (Simple API for XML) parser classes also have new methods to support level 3 concepts. These additions should not cause any problems for legacy Java code.
