Apache NetBeans IDE ships the second candidate for its November release
The Apache NetBeans project published NetBeans 32 Release Candidate 2 today, marking the second of several weekly pre-releases on the path to a full GA launch. Not a feature drop. Just four maintenance pull requests, a release-audit tweak, and a warning aimed at platform developers.
RC2 was tagged on the apache/netbeans GitHub repo under 32-rc2, committed by release engineer Eric Barboni. That's the same person who cut RC1 two weeks earlier and now handles the project's release engineering on top of everything else. It's a pre-release, so treat it as a test build, not something to point your production toolchain at.
The build is feature-complete. From here it's bug-fix-only until the community votes.
What's actually in the package
Between RC1 and RC2, eleven commits landed on the master branch. Four became pull requests, the rest were routine weekly delivery-branch merges and a report-formatting change. RC2 is almost entirely housekeeping, which is exactly what you'd expect at this stage of the game.
The one item worth flagging is a platform note, not a feature. Setting a content type by MIME string for NetBeans editor kits is no longer supported and will break on JDK 27 and later. The project wants you to pull the EditorKit directly instead.
// old: no longer supported, breaks on JDK 27+
jtextarea.setContentType("text/x-properties");
// new
jtextarea.setEditorKit(CloneableEditorSupport.getEditorKit("text/x-properties"));
You can silence the warning with nb.disable.editorkit.hack=true, though that just mutes the alarm rather than fixing anything. Ignore it and a JEditorPane renders with a plain-text kit, which tends to look wrong fast. This is part of the same cleanup that also showed up in RC1: shedding deprecated APIs ahead of JDK 27 support.
The four PRs themselves are small. Marek "mbien" Bumped fallback Maven versions, fixed a null terms query in parsing.lucene, corrected a path-sort comparator, and improved that editor-kit warning. Barboni handled shrinking the release-audit report by relativizing paths. Maintenance, all of it.
The real substance is in RC1
If you want to know what NB32 actually brings, read RC1. It came out on October 15, the feature-freeze date, and it carried 196 commits across 2,246 files from 19 contributors. That's where the actual features live.
The Java core is the biggest slice. The debugger now hyperlinks variables and values straight from the console, code completion handles intersection types more gracefully, and the bundled Apache Tomcat finally jumped from the 9.x line to 11.0.26. JavaFX picked up its first genuinely fresh feature this cycle: a bundled openjfx-fxml library for FXML support. Git can now sign commits over SSH via JGit 7.7.1, and the indexer moved from Lucene 9.12.3 to 10.5.1.
Build tooling got a modernization pass too. Gradle is on 9.8.0, Maven kits actually run on JDK 27, and Ant can treat a whole folder of JARs as a single classpath entry. There's even a small change to multi-module navigation: nested projects now render co-located and indented with subprojects opened by default, the kind of thing you don't notice until you're drowning in a multi-module build.
Not cheap in terms of scope, though the JDK 21 runtime floor stays put, so you don't have to be living on the bleeding edge to run it.
The steady core behind the 32 line reads like who's always there: Marek Bien, Jaroslav Tulach, Matthias Bläsing, Nicola Isotta, Jahodaj, Laszlo Kishalmi, Pepness, and Emilian Bold. Two new contributors joined this cycle.
Where the timeline points
NetBeans has run on a fixed four-times-a-year cadence since 2019, and NB32 is following the script. Feature freeze hit on October 15. The community vote lands November 7 to 15. The GA release is slated for November 15 to 30, assuming the vote passes cleanly.
A blocker could push it. The schedule looks comfortable either way. Each candidate needs a clean plus-one vote from the Project Management Committee, which is standard Apache process but never guaranteed on the first pass.
For context, NB31 shipped on August 10 and brought initial JDK 27 support. NB30, from May, is what dropped the runtime floor to JDK 21. So this cycle continues the JDK 27 work rather than restarting it.
It's worth remembering that RC2 is the second of these weekly candidates. The project started tagging them the week of the feature freeze and may tag more before the vote. If you want to test ahead without waiting, the project also publishes unsupported daily development builds.
Try it out
RC2 and RC1 both have community installers and archives attached to their release assets on GitHub. The GA will land on netbeans.apache.org under an nb32 path once released. Daily builds and source live at the project's dev page, and the API changes reference for NB32 is already updated with debugger enhancements worth a look.
For the record, this IDE that started as a 1996 Czech student project called Xelfi has racked up more than 18 million downloads since then. It's still free under the Apache License 2.0, with nothing feature-gated, and it's holding its corner of the IDE market remarkably well for something nobody pays for.
Head here to the GitHub release page.
