Oracle has released the first of three NetBeans code drops to the Apache Incubator almost a year after InfoQ first reported on the plan.

This first code drop was intended to make it possible to release Apache NetBeans along with JDK 9 (on September 21). However, due to the lengthy process, Wielenga feels it probably won’t meet that schedule. He expects the first release to happen soon after JDK 9 is released.

Wielenga said in an email to the incubator-netbeans-dev mailing list that this repository contains around four million lines of code.

The 1st code donation, i.e., the NetBeans Platform + the Java SE tooling, which includes the new Jigsaw and JShell features, comprises around 45,000 files (around 4 million lines of code) to be transferred from Oracle to Apache.

You can check out the repository from Apache’s Git repository, build it (using Ant 1.8.0), and run it with the following commands:

git clone git://git.apache.org/incubator-netbeans.git netbeans cd netbeans ant ant tryme

The Apache NetBeans GitHub page has more detailed instructions on how to build the project. Next steps include changing all the license headers to Apache and repeating the process for the next code drop.

There is more code to come in a further two drops. "We've learned a lot from the process involved in the 1st code donation," Wielenga writes, "and [we] believe that the two subsequent code donations will go faster."