When Netbeans 6.1, or was it 6.0?, introduced JRuby support a lot of work was done to enable the support of any dynamic languages within the IDE. Although JRuby was the catalyst for building in the support infrastructure needed by dynamic languages such as Ruby and Groovy , it has provided the platform necessary to add others quiet quickly.
PHP support in Netbean 6.5
I recently downloaded the beta version of Netbeans 6.5 to try out the PHP support and, for someone like me who is used to using glorified text editors with some basic syntax highlighting for PHP coding, it was like discovering fire. With code completion of both php and javascript building AJAX applications has become a far more rewarding and enjoyable experience.
The javascript auto completion feature will even bring up documentation on methods, their parameters and what browsers support the feautre of the AJAX library you are using!
Netbeans to gain marketshare
Netbeans 6.5 also promises Groovy and Grails support! With these features, and given Eclipse's seeming inability to make a stable release with easy to use plugin support (how long have they been promising PHP support?) I reckon Netbeans will be gaining significant market share both with Java and dynamic language developers.
