That's it, NetBeans 4.1 is now in Release Candidate state. It means that the code is frozen, and only a handful (or less) of bugs will be fixed. To benefit from the out of the box experience in J2EE land, make sure you download the co-bundle with the J2EE 1.4 Application Server. This Application Server, in its standard edition,  announced today a Best-In-Class Price/Performance result for the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark.

The same day, the profiler module team announced the support for the Visual GC tool  from J2SE 5 or 6 (after a download of the jvmstat technology). This tool can attach to an instrumented HotSpot JVM and collects and graphically displays garbage collection, class loader, and HotSpot compiler performance data.

On top on that, the Java Swing team announced a fix for a Swing issue that removes the 'flashing' redraw effect, and makes NetBeans UI as responsive as native applications...As  a side effect, it also means that NetBeans 4.1 works like a charm with J2SE 6 builds. Of course you can still create J2EE 1.4 compliant applications by selecting the correct Source level, as seen in the attached image. To conclude, if you want to know more about NetBeans 4.1, ANT support,  and Demi Moore, (and more, like http monitoring and JBoss support), you have to read this nice blog (Entry from 20050421). Ludo