Oracle (News – Alert), a computer technology company, has released its latest version of NetBeans, an integrated development environment for developing Web apps on its Java platform. NetBeans 7.3 is the latest update and is geared toward allowing developers to more easily build HTML5-based user interfaces for both mobile and Web applications.

A new HTML5 project type enables developers to include widely known JavaScript frameworks. These include the likes of frameworks such as Backbone and jQuery, downloaded from public content delivery networks. The IDE also includes a newly developed wizard that can generate JavaScript client code to gain admission to a server’s Java-based REST services.

The outcome of the wizard is generated JavaScript code using the Backbone.js library and an optional HTML file. The HTML includes an outline that shows a sign as to how the generated code can be customized. While coding, the editor offers completion capabilities for HTML5, JavaScript, CSS3, and jQuery.

The debugger and JS editor has been completely re-written using Oracle’s JavaScript engine Nashorn. Recent reports say the Nashorn JavaScript engine will replace Rhinoa as Java’s default JavaScript engine in Java 8. Support for common JavaScript documentation options such as ScriptDoc, Ext-Doc, and JsDoc are included in the editor.

The IDE plans to help developers when debugging user interfaces on the Web. When in the IDE, HTML previews are provided by an internal WebKit-based browser. At the same time a Chrome browser extension utilizes the WebKit remote debugging protocol to enable the debugging of Web applications from within NetBeans version 7.3 itself.

Local files included in the HTML5 application and also remote JavaScript files linked to the application are both supported by the debugger. However, they are not included in the IDE’s sources. Outside of Web programming, NetBeans 7.3 includes a newly developed stand-alone Java Persistence Query Language (JPQL) editor that enables developers to test the JPQL queries directly from the IDE.