NetBeans started as a student project in 1998 and was later acquired by Sun Microsystems. It is a free integrated development environment that can be used for Java, PHP, C/C++ and other languages. It provides support for databases, servers, and web frameworks like JavaServer Faces, Struts, Spring, and Grails. The NetBeans team is located around the world and works to make NetBeans a productive environment for web development through features like debugging, profiling, and support for multiple frameworks.