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Digital civil liberties organization Open Rights Group and Knowledge Ecology International and software developer Richard Stallman told the EC in a letter that they are both concerned with Oracle's possible squashing of competition in the database market by abandoning MySQL
- Two software industry groups, including one led by free and open source software community leader Richard Stallman, said Oct. 20 they are opposed to Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems and urged European Commission regulators to block the $7.4 billion deal. If the transaction, which ...

John Ferguson Smart examines how Maven support in NetBeans 6.7 makes working with Maven projects a breeze.

The NetBeans team is pleased to announce the availability of NetBeans IDE 6.8 Beta. Download NetBeans IDE 6.8 Beta Learn more about NetBeans IDE 6.8 Beta NetBeans IDE 6.8 Beta is the first IDE to offer support for the entire Java EE 6 spec. Highlights include support for JSF 2.0/Facelets, Java Persistence 2.0, EJB 3.1 including using EJBs in web applications, RESTful web services, and GlassFish v3. The IDE's integration with Project Kenai, a collaborative environment for hosting open-source projects, now offers full support for JIRA and improved instant messenger and issue tracker integration. PHP support has been extended to include the Symfony framework and PHP 5.3. The release also supports the JavaFX SDK 1.2.1, and comes with added features to the IDE's Maven and database integration, and improvements to the editor and tools for Ruby, Groovy, and C/C++ projects. NetBeans IDE 6.8 Beta is available in English, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese and Simplified Chinese, as well as in several community-translated languages. Release Highlights: Java Enterprise Edition 6 JavaServer Faces 2.0 for web interfaces and the ability to use EJBs in web applications Java Persistence JPA 2.0 and RESTful web services support Broader use of annotations instead of deployment descriptors Deployment, debugging and profiling with GlassFish v3 JavaServer Faces 2.0 (Facelets) Code completion, error hints, namespace completion, documentation popups, and tag auto-import for Facelets Editor support for Facelets libraries, composite components, expression language JavaFX Support for JavaFX SDK 1.2.1 Improved navigation, code completion, and hints PHP Full PHP 5.3 support Symfony Framework support Kenai.com: Connected Developer Full JIRA support Improved issue tracker integration Maven Improved support for Java EE 6, Groovy, Scala projects Customizable dependency exclusion in dependency graph Ruby Support for JRuby 1.3.1, Ruby 1.9 debugging, and RSpec 1.2.7 Improved rename refactoring, type inference, and navigation C/C++ Profiling: New tools for I/O Monitoring, Thread Analysis and Race Detection Faster synchronization during remote development Learn more about NetBeans IDE 6.8 Beta. The final release of NetBeans IDE 6.8 is planned for December 2009. Download Beta today and give us your feedback about your experience using the release. You can also join discussions about the NetBeans IDE on our mailing lists and forums. If you blog about using NetBeans add your blog to Planet NetBeans. Follow NetBeans on Twitter for updates about NetBeans news and development.