Sun Microsystems and the NetBeans Community announced new third-party support for the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE). These new modeling, business intelligence and mobile application development partner offerings continue to enhance the productivity and choice that developers have with the NetBeans platform.

Visual Paradigm International Ltd announced its release of the award winning modeling extension for the NetBeans IDE, Visual Paradigm Smart Development Environment (SDE). A leading vendor in modeling solutions, Visual Paradigm's offering helps ensure NetBeans developers have access to advanced UML functionality, in addition to the current UML functionality in NetBeans.

Mobile Distillery announced the availability of a new NetBeans plug-in. This plug-in allows developers to use the latest version of Celsius, Mobile Distillery's award winning mobile development and automated porting suite, directly from within the NetBeans development environment. Additionally, Elixir Technology announced their freely available NetBeans 6.5 plug-in for their latest release of Elixir Repertoire. The plug-in provides a set of features for NetBeans users to incorporate integrated BI features within their applications developed in NetBeans.

With the continued growth of the NetBeans partner ecosystem and to ensure more support for the NetBeans partner community, Sun also announced that the NetBeans Partner Program will merge with the Sun (SM) Partner Advantage Program. The Sun Partner Advantage Program is based on progressive membership levels and addresses a wide range of partner engagement models. The program enables partners to collaborate with Sun to help create demand and leverage Sun's entire portfolio of offerings.