Sun Microsystems and the NetBeans developer community have introduced the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) 6.7.

The company claims that this new version of NetBeans features integration with Project Kenai, Sun’s collaborative hosting site for free and open source projects. The integration with Kenai.com is expected to allow developers to stay in the IDE to create projects in the cloud, get sources from Kenai projects, query, open and edit issues for them using Bugzilla.

Jim Parkinson, vice president of developer products and programmes at Sun, said: The advances in the latest version of NetBeans will have a huge impact in the productivity of developers. The integration between NetBeans and Kenai allows developers to stay in their IDE and quickly navigate between Kenai.com, local code, bug reports, IM chats and project wikis.

Instead of interruptions, interactions with code, or looking for project information, team members become a natural part of the developers’ workflow.

Other features of the new version include, support for Maven, a community software project management and comprehension tool; new Team menu that provides access to projects on Kenai.com; automated integration system with Hudson, for developers to integrate changes to their project, and support for Zembly, a single registry and repository of Web APIs.

The company said that the new offering also supports PHP and GlassFish software. Support for JavaFX 1.2 technology is currently available for NetBeans IDE 6.5.1 and will soon be available for NetBeans IDE 6.7.