NetBeans is supported by Oracle and is continuously developed. It contains components, such as the NetBeans profiler, that became part of the Oracle Java distribution. You may notice that when you start Visual VM and start the profiling, the Java process started has netbeans in its name.

Generally, NetBeans is a framework to develop rich client applications and the IDE is only one application of the many that are built on top of the framework. It supports many languages, not only Java. You can develop PHP, C, or JavaScript code using NetBeans and have similar services for Java. For the support of different languages, you can download plugins or a special version of NetBeans. These special versions are available from the download page of the IDE and they are nothing more than the basic IDE with some preconfigured plugins. In the C package, the developers configure the plugins that are needed when you want to develop C; in the PHP version, they plugin for PHP.