An absolutely free migration program has been announced by Sun Microsystems for applications built from JBuilder to the NetBeans IDE. Porting guides and documentation are also being offered by the company which would make it easier for customers to migrate from JBuilder to NetBeans. For companies making the transition, Sun is offering a special workshop "NetBeans Migration Workshop for JBuilder Users" which could be delivered to teams of developers and it is also offering sixty days of free programming advice from the Sun developer Expert Assistance program as part of its initiative.

Given below are the four reasons offered by the company to developers to migrate to NetBeans:

1. Choice - The NetBeans IDE supports both Java and C++ development projects, for everything from mobile devices to enterprise level applications. There is also a growing community of third-party vendors and open-source developers who continue to build plug-ins that enhance the NetBeans IDE.

2. Standards - The NetBeans IDE supports development of applications built on industry standards such as Swing, Servlets, JSPs, EJBs, JUnit, Ant, the Struts Framework, and more.

3. Rich Support for JavaServer Faces - The NetBeans IDE can be used in conjunction with Java Studio Creator, which includes support for visual data binding, direct web services or Enterprise JavaBeans data binding, application model support, and a visual component style editor.

4. Investment Protection - NetBeans continues to evolve to support the needs and demands of its developer community, Sun says. As an open-source project, it is guaranteed that the community will drive the direction for the tools. Sun offers training and enterprise level support for those developers and companies who choose to build their applications and their businesses on NetBeans.