In this interview with Sun's director of engineering for NetBeans, Steve Wilson, guest producer Scott Mace delves into the history of NetBeans, Sun's integrated development environment (IDE) for Java, which is available under Sun's open source license. Wilson also explains the components of the NetBeans IDE, its new performance profiling and wireless development tools announced at JavaOne, synergy between Sun's Java Studio Creator and NetBeans, and application lifecycle management options for NetBeans. And no discussion of NetBeans would be complete without Sun's perspective on Eclipse.