Soon after, they were contacted by Roman Stanek, at the time a Director of Operation in an IT company, that wanted to build his own company and was looking for talented programmers. He was looking for a good idea to invest in, and discovered Xelfi. He met with the founders; they hit it off, and a business was born.

The original business plan was to develop network-enabled JavaBeans components. Jaroslav Tulach, who designed the IDE’s basic architecture, came up with the name NetBeans (from Network and Java Beans) to describe what the components would do. The IDE would be the way to deliver them.

When the specification for Enterprise Java Beans came out, it made more sense to work with the standard for such components than to compete with it, but the name stuck.

In the spring of 1999, NetBeans DeveloperX2 was released, adopting the javax.swing. package names from the previous com.sun.swing. ones. NetBeans was the first tool in on the market to support these new package names, and that increased a lot the awareness of NetBeans.

The performance improvements that came in JDK 1.3, released in the fall of 1999, made NetBeans a viable choice for development tools. By the summer of 1999, the team was hard at work re-architecting DeveloperX2 into the more modular NetBeans that forms the basis of the software today.

Along the way, an interesting thing happened. People began building applications using the NetBeans IDE’s platform, together with their own plugins, often creating applications that were not development tools at all. In fact, this turned out to have quite a market.

Later, in 2000 and 2001, a lot of work went into stripping out pieces that made the assumption that an application built on NetBeans was an IDE, so that the platform would be a generic desktop application suitable to any purpose. This work turned out to be healthy for the codebase of the IDE as well, encouraging a clean API design and a separation of concerns. This is the reason why some of the modules of NetBeans are called org.openide.

The first year (through NetBeans 3.2), the project spent trying to find its feet. The next few years involved learning about what worked in terms of open-source processes. (In the first two years, the development process was so open that more time was spent debating than implementing.)

The growing pains paid off. With NetBeans 3.5, huge strides in performance were made, and tests and processes put in place to prevent regressions. With 3.6, the windowing system and property sheet were reimplemented, and the user interface cleaned up tremendously.

NetBeans 4, released in December 2004, was a complete change in the way the IDE worked. A new project system not only revamped the user experience, but also made it possible to replace infrastructure that had held the NetBeans back.

The release introduced a project system based on Apache Ant, added JDK 1.5 Support and had initial support for mobility projects.

The NetBeans 4.1 release (may 2005) was built on top of the new project infrastructure of 4.0, and added more features and full J2EE support.

NetBeans 5 (january, 2006) introduced comprehensive support for developing IDE modules and rich client applications based on the NetBeans platform; an intuitive GUI builder (Matisse); new and redesigned CVS support; support for Sun ApplicationServer 8.2, Weblogic 9 and JBoss 4.

NetBeans 5.5 (october, 2006) and 5.5.1 (may, 2007) supported the Sun Java System Application Server PE 9 and 9.1 (Glassfish) as well as Java EE 5 API compliance (JPA, JAX-WS, EJB 3), and through "Enterprise Packs" included enhanced support for Mobility, C/C++ Projects, SOA applications and BPEL.

NetBeans 6 (december, 2007) focused on improved developer productivity through a rewritten, smarter and faster editor, together with the integration of external NetBeans products into one IDE.

In August, 2010, NetBeans 6.9.1 was released with OSGi support, bundling the Apache Felix OSGi container. It also supported JavaFX 1.3.1, was Java EE 6 compliant and included support for PHP, Ruby, C and C++ and many other features.

NetBeans 7 was released together with JDK 7, providing editor tools for working with new JDK 7 language constructs, together with support for JavaFX 2.0.

NetBeans 7.1 introduced Netigso from (Net and a reversed OSGi). This was reused in Oracle’s JDeveloper as well, with important performance enhancements.

Releases from NetBeans 7.2 (january, 2012) to NetBeans 7.4 (october, 2015) continued introducing important features (HTML5, Cordova application development, enhanced JavaScript support and more) and improving performance.

NetBeans 8.0 (march, 2014) introduced full JDK 8 support for working with Profiles, Lambdas and Streams. Java ME Embedded 8 support and a wide range of JavaEE compliant application servers (WildFly, WebLogic, GlassFish, TomcatEE).

It also continued improving support for Maven, HTML5, PHP, C/C++ and JavaScript.

The 8 series last release was NetBeans 8.2 (october, 2016) that introduced ECMAScript 6 enhancements and experimental ECMAScript 7 support, while improving node.js, Oracle JET and PHP 7 support.

In July, 2018, the Apache NetBeans Team released Apache NetBeans (Incubating) 9, the first release of the Apache NetBeans (incubating), with the main objectives of IP clearance from the Oracle code donation and adding Java 10 support.

In October, 2018, Apache NetBeans (incubating) was honored as a Duke’s Choice Award Winner.

In December, 2018, the Apache NetBeans Team released Apache NetBeans (Incubating) 10, the second release of the Apache NetBeans (incubating), focusing in adding support for JDK 11, JUnit 5, PHP, JavaScript and Groovy, while solving many issues.

In March, 2019, Apache NetBeans (Incubating) 11 was announced as the third release of Apache NetBeans, sporting a renewed Gradle Support, a Maven First project wizard, Java EE and JDK 12 support, as well as initial versions of NetBeans Maven Plugins the Apache NetBeans Tutorials.