NetBeans, the free open source IDE for Java and PHP, has reached version 7.2 which provides new static code analysis capabilities in the Java Editor and integration with JavaFX Scene Builder.

This new release comes six months after NetBeans 7.1 which was an important upgrade in that it was the first IDE to support JavaFX 2.0.

The improvements in this version are designed for an "improved performance and coding experience". One major feature is new integrated static analysis tools that allow developers to analyze large code bases and to catch bugs quickly and early in the development process.

The video below gives details of other editor enhancements and  improved performance and other new features including integration with JavaFX Scene Builder for editing of FXML files and associated CSS.

Support for PHP frameworks now extends to Symfony2, Doctrine2 and ApiGen framework and PHP 5.4. This is probably more important because the main alternative open source IDE, Eclipse, has abandoned standard PHP support and may well have reverted to a maintenance only mode.

There is FTP remote synchronization and support for using Hudson to run PHP projects. Groovy support has been updated to 1.8.6, the most recent stable version with better Groovy code completion; and C++ support had been extended to C++11 with better parsing performance. NetBeans bundled tools have also been updated with Ant version 1.8.3 and Maven 3.0.4 now included,and TestNG has been added as an alternative testing framework for projects.