Terence Parr, the ANTLR guy, sent out an e-mail a couple of days ago, starting with these words: "After 25 years, I think I've finally got the parser generator I've been looking for! Sam Harwell, ANTLR co-author, and I are very pleased to announce the release of ANTLR v4."
He continues: "Sam has built a really nice development environment based upon NetBeans, ANTLRWorks v2." And here's what it looks like:
It's cool, very powerful, and absolutely free. More info about the above is here:
http://tunnelvisionlabs.com/products/demo/antlrworks
"This IDE is a sophisticated editor for ANTLR v3/v4 grammars as well as StringTemplate templates. It can run the ANTLR tool to generate recognizers and can run the TestRig (grun on command line) to test grammars."
Note that a NetBeans plugin for NetBeans IDE 7.3 Beta 2 is also available, as described in the above link.
The usage of the NetBeans Platform as the basis of the new ANTLR development environment should not come as a surprise to anyone who reads this blog entry by Terence Parr in 2011:
http://www.antlr.org/wiki/display/~admin/2011/10/09/Report+of+GUI%27s+death+greatly+exaggerated
Congratulations to the ANTLR Team for this great step forward!