Today, January 5th, 2012 netbeans.org team announced, that NetBeans IDE 7.1 released. Congratulations!
I use NetBeans as my main integrated development environment to work with PHP. So, I downloaded it just got the notification email from netbeans.org. What is first impression? First impression is right the most of the time. On my Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation was smooth and fast. After 1st start NetBeans as usual asked permission to import settings from the previous installation. Finally, it started and worked as it should. The main part – debugging with FireFox browser still works. So I can continue my Web development work under this version.
Small negative – I don’t know where the reason, but I caught the situation, when NetBeans editor window lost cursor focus.

Developers of popular free NetBeans IDE announced at netbeans.org, that version 7.1 beta (including PHP support) is available.
What’s new this version offers for PHP developers? According to official release information page web developers can find this enhanced features in upcoming 7.1 release: Support for CSS3, Code completion and documentation for new CSS3 elements, Browser specific properties, Improved PHP debugging, PHPUnit test groups capabilities, Support for Smarty templates, Faster uploads with keep-alive for (S)FTP client.
Let’s take a closer look at NetBeans version 7.1 Beta.

Congratulations! November 19th, 2010 Netbeans team announced that NetBeans IDE 7.0 Beta is available for downloads. The final release of NetBeans IDE 7.0 is planned for March 2011. NetBeans IDE 7.0 Beta is available in English, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese, as well as in several community-translated languages. NetBeans Platform with version 7.0 got general performance enhancements (less intrusive checking for external changes when switching between the IDE and other programs) and tight integration with Profiler. New features useful for PHP developers are: HTML5 editing support, JSON formatter, Generate PhpDoc, Rename refactoring, Safe Delete Refactoring, PHP 5.3 – Support for aliases.
Read more details about NetBeans IDE 7.0 for PHP enhancements at this page.
What important thing should you know before install NetBeans IDE 7.0 Beta on your desktop?

NetBeans 6.9 for PHP is available for download. NetBeans IDE runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris. It is open-source and free. See what is new and cool in the latest NetBeans 6.9 release. The NetBeans IDE is an integrated development environment for software developers. It provides the tools you need to create professional desktop, enterprise, web, and mobile applications with the most of modern programming languages, including of course PHP.
If you interesting not PHP only you would like to know that NetBeans IDE 6.9 introduces the JavaFX Composer, a visual layout tool for visually building JavaFX GUI applications, similar to the Swing GUI builder for Java SE applications. Additional highlights include OSGi interoperability for NetBeans Platform applications and support for developing OSGi bundles with Maven; support for JavaFX SDK 1.3, PHP Zend framework, and Ruby on Rails 3.0; as well as improvements to the Java Editor, Java Debugger, issue tracking, and more…

Good News! May 26th, 2010 NetBeans.org announced that NetBeans 6.9 Release Candidate 1 is available. NetBeans IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is cross-platform (it is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris) product very good suited for PHP, JavaScript and AJAX developement. I wrote about the main staff of NetBeans IDE for PHP at NetBeans for PHP development. It is the open source solution and thus, available without any charge.
Some new features added to NetBeans 2.9 were described at NetBeans IDE for PHP 6.9 beta.
Now we have 6.9 Release Candidate 1. I switched from 6.8 to 6.9 beta at the end of April, 2010 and didn’t meet any bugs. It is fast, convenient and comprehensive IDE for the most PHP developement tasks.