Passengers of American Airlinesare expected toface more travel troubleson Friday as the company announced it would cancel another 570 flights to continue to inspect wiring on some of its jets for a fourth straight day. OnThursday, theairline cancelled 933 flights,on top of the almost 1,100 cancelled Wednesday, and more than 700 earlier in the week. Passengers wait in line at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago on Wednesday. (Paul Beaty/Associated Press) The cancellations stem...

Sun Microsystems is hoping to win over converts to its new NetBeans 6.0 IDE , which came out today.

Since its inception, NetBeans has been about Java. But this time, it’s different. NetBeans 6.0 is extending Sun’s IDE to other languages,including C/C++ , JavaScript and Ruby .

There’s more, too. Gregg Sporar, NetBeans Technology Evangelist, said NetBeans 6.0 will support the .

Sun’s support for Ruby is an expansion of its support via the JRuby effort, which is porting Ruby to Java.

“With JRuby there is a really great runtime available for Ruby and Ruby on Rails developers to use for deployment,” Sporar told InternetNews.com. “It allows them to get all the optimizations of the JVM for free. So we have a natural bridge in JRuby between the Ruby and Java worlds - we want to provide tools on that bridge as well.”

NetBeans 6.0 also includes a number of improvements in the Swing GUI Builder which was formerly known as Project Matisse. The GUI builder which debuted in «www.internetnews.com» is a drag and drop IDE GUI that simplifies layout with automatic layout suggestions for spacing and alignment. For NetBeans 6 Sporar noted that developers will notice the support Sun added for the new Swing Framework and for Beans Binding.

“Those frameworks, along with the enhancements to the NetBeans Swing GUI Builder, dramatically cut the time needed to get a basic Swing application up and running,” Sporar said.

Code completion has been improved in NetBeans 6 with what Sun refers to as ’smarter code completion’. Sporar explained that there are many enhancements that make NetBeans 6 ’smarter’.

“The main one being that the editor is smarter about the context when it displays the suggested code completions,” Sporar commented.

As an example, if a developer has this code:

List al = new

If you press Ctrl-Space at this point, it will offer you only the classes in the system which implements the given interface. And more importantly, it will automatically supply the generic variables.

With the NetBeans 6 release Sun is also hoping to sway users of other IDE’s including its arch-nemesis Eclipse. Sun has gone so far as to setup a testimonial site (http://www.netbeans.org/switch/realstories.html) where developers write their own reasons why they’ve switched.

Overall Sporar is confident that NetBeans 6 is a superior solution to the Eclipse IDE. Eclipse officials on the other regularly mention the fact that they believe «www.internetnews.com».

Plans are already underway for the next iteration of NetBeans which will be called NetBeans 6.1. The plan is to expand support for even more languages. ” We want to extend our support for other languages yet again, so PHP support will be a key deliverable for the 6.1 release,” Sporar said.

While we may never know what it looks like inside a black hole, astronomers recently obtained one of the closest views yet. The sighting allowed scientists to confirm theories about how these giant cosmic sinkholes spew out jets of particles travelling at nearly the speed of light. Ever since the first observations of these powerful jets, which are among the brightest objects seen in the universe, astronomers have wondered what causes the particles to accelerate to such great speeds. A leading...