adam bien's blog

NetBeans 6.8m2 is already surprisingly stable. I used the development build of NetBeans 6.8 in a workshop last week and it worked without major problems on different operating systems. Major features are:

1. NetBeans 6.8m2 comes with Glassfish v3 b66 and so with already well integrated, embedded EJB 3.1 container. See working sample.
2. The JSF 2.0 editor does support code completion and JavaDoc for JSF tags as well as auto-completion for managed bean value-binding. So you can navigate in the expression from a managed bean, into a session bean and even bind JPA 2.0 entities directly to the UI-elements.
3. You can create page flows with the JSF 2.0 flow editor. It will create the faces-config.xml for you. In JSF 2 you don't have to -> you can use annotations as well.
4. JPA 2.0 + Bean Validation are supported and already integrated with JSF 2.0. It means: it is enough to annotate an entity - the error will be displayed directly in the JSF 2 without any additional overhead (<h:messages/> is required). An example (LeanJSF2EJB31Component) was checked in into: http://kenai.com/projects/javaee-patterns/.
5. Incremental deployment with Glassfish v3 b66 is extremely fast. It takes less than a second in general. Class, interface, method changes are immediately recognized and deployed. 
6. The HttpSession is preserved during deployment. You don't even have to re-login after the deployment of your application.
7. Java EE 6 is now supported in maven projects. You can create a Java EE 6 maven project from wizard.
8. JIRA is directly supported for kenai.com. Additional plugins are no more needed.