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Major Description
NetBeans releases versions roughly every year. Unfortunately that means that major plugins, such as the one for PHP support, does not get updated for 12 months or more. So when a major PHP version is available (7.1), NetBeans users still have to wait for several months before being able to benefit from new features, despite the fact that the plugin was already updated (5 months ago, and counting).
Of course we can use dev build in the meantime, but unfortunately those dev builds are far from being stable. I regularly get Java exceptions and everything seems to be slightly slower than a production release.
This lead to a lot of frustration for end-users, as can be seen there. And I believe this is not specific to PHP plugin, but must also happens for pretty much all other language/frameworks that are not Java related.
The solution seems simple to me. Since NetBeans already is architectured with plugins in mind and those are already auto-updated. We only have to allow plugin author to release their plugins at their own pace.
In fact this is exactly how it is done for the plugin to add support for TypeScript (https://github.com/Everlaw/nbts). Its release cycle is not tied to NetBeans and it's working great.
So I am kinda wondering why does PHP need to be tied to NetBeans release ? what are the advantage for end-users and/or developers ?
amano@kthree.co.jp, do you know whether it would be technically possible to release PHP as a independent plugin more often ?
It seems to be a purely organisational issue. And if it could be fixed with the move to Apache, that would be awesome.