Recently, Netbeans 6.8 GA was released. Great news … but unfortunately, SOA and UML support has disappeared from the release.

The SOA plugins are no longer available and at the moment there are no plans to bring back this feature set. NetBeans 6.1 and 6.5 were the last releases with full support for SOA functionality.

“Official” reaction from the Netbeans forum:

I know, it’s unfortunate that we don’t have the resources to support every feature we want to.. SOA, UML and Visual Web development are no longer supported, but Java EE 6, PHP support, and many other improvements have been made and more are on the way for next release.

There is a pragmatic solution to bring back SOA (including BPEL) support to Netbeans 6.8. Just follow these steps to enable the SOA plugin:

1. Download Netbeans 6.8 here: http://netbeans.org/downloads/index.html
2. Install Netbeans, the usual way
3. Start Netbeans and goto Tools -> Plugins
4. Select Settings and press the Add button to create a new Update Center (see figure below)



URL: http://updates.netbeans.org/netbeans/updates/6.8/uc/m1/dev/catalog.xml

5. Press OK and Netbeans will update the Available Plugins tab
6. Select Available Plugins and search for “SOA” (see figure below)
   
7. Select both plugins and press Install
8. That’s it! Happy BPEL-ing ;)

Notice that the UML plugin is available as well (and a whole lot more). The disclaimer here is that these plugins are certified for Netbeans 6.8 M1 and not the final release. But, hey, they seem to work. So, why not use them.