"When you're doing SOA, quite a large amount of your work is actually in mapping and orchestrating data exchanges between various applications," and this feature helps with that, Roberts said.

Also for SOA, BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services)-based orchestration is featured via technology gained through Sun's acquisition of SeeBeyond. "BPEL allows developers to actually create those orchestrations and express how those components talk to each other," Roberts said.

Version 5.5 features production-level support for C and C++. Supporting these languages in NetBeans is critical to the developing applications for mobile computing, according to Sun. "For our developers in the mobile space, they've really been asking for help and support for native coding," Roberts said. C and C++ tools can be used to build native code on Windows. Support for C and C++ compilers is featured as well as a basic debugger for these two programming languages.

Eclipse, for its part, has had support for C and C++ development.

Sun with NetBeans faces the challenge of Eclipse but has the backing of developers, said Shawn Willett, principal analyst at Current Analysis. "I would say this about NetBeans: It does have grassroots support among Java programmers," even if it has not had a lot of vendor buy-in, Willett said.