A beta release of the open source NetBeans 6.5 IDE is being offered by Sun Microsystems on Wednesday.

The beta, available for download, has features such as an IDE-wide "QuickSearch" shortcut, a more user-friendly interface, and an automatic Compile on Save feature.

Developers can build applications for Java, PHP, C/C++, Groovy, Grails, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and AJAX. Web frameworks are supported such as Hibernate, Spring, and JavaServer Faces. The Glassfish application server and databases also are supported.

The general release of NetBeans 6.5 previously has been set for Oct. 2. Sun also has expressed intentions to eventually add Python language support to NetBeans.

Also on Wednesday, Jaspersoft is announcing the availability of business intelligence development capabilities for NetBeans and upgraded business intelligence support for Sun's MySQL database. The Jaspersoft iReport plug-in for NetBeans is a graphical report and dashboard tool for JasperReports, which is an open source reporting product. The plug-in had been available in a beta release since December.

Reports are delivered via JasperServer, which includes a repository, dashboards, scheduling, and reporting.

Jasper for MySQL version 3 is an optimized version of the Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite that features capabilities of Jaspersoft version 3.