NetBeans Adventures, Java and more

Book Review - NetBeans IDE 7 Cookbook

2011-09-29T21:48:00.000-07:00

It took a long time, but finally here it is. I was asked to review "NetBeans IDE 7 Cookbook" by Rhawi Dantas from Packt Publishing and it took me more time than expected to finish, due to too many other tasks at hand (JavaOne anyone?). First things first - having read through the book I actually think the title is a bit unfortunate, since it suggests content you may not find in there. Reading "Cookbook" in the title I assumed to see "recipes" how to solve problems that the everyday user encounters. But in fact I think it somehow feels more like a tutorial - not that this is a bad thing - I was just thinking about consumers expectations. So, with this book being more of a tutorial, what is the target audience? Well thinking about the stuff I read in there I would suggest it to be a good pick for new or not advanced users. An intermediate user is someone who only knows about parts of the IDE, e.g. SE stuff not EE. If you are using NetBeans in your day job for more than 2 years I would assume you will not find so many new things in there.

So is this book for you? If you are new to NetBeans and want a thorough introduction without reading multiple tutorials, which are available from the NetBeans project homepage, this book may be for you. The tutorials may be more detailed, but I think I like the all-in-one experience of the book. So probably start with "recipes" in the book and if you like what you see dig in deeper using the tutorials from the NetBeans homepage.

You are expecting a rating? Well for new NetBeans users I think it is well above average, for advanced and experienced users it is probably a bit below (depends on your IDE usage patterns I think).

So, what is covered in this book? It is a broad range starting with a quick intro, moving on to the core features of the IDE. One chapter explicitly looks into Matisse, the NetBeans UI design tool. The obligaotry JEE things are in there, as well as a nice primer for how to use JDBC inside NetBeans. The chapter about JavaFX is already outdated, an introduction to mobile development is available. I really like the chapter about refactoring Java code (stay tuned NetBeans users - Jackpot will be back...). What I did not expect after the first few chapters is to have information about extending the IDE (simple but good) and about profiling (although there is more to it than written in the book). Finally there is a good intro into the usage of version control systems with NetBeans (reminder GIT is now available as well).

Anymore to say about the book? ... No, I think this is good - so get the book, if you want to learn NetBeans!

Upcoming Book Review - NetBeans IDE 7.0 Cookbook

2011-07-27T13:41:00.000-07:00

I am currently reviewing

Looks good so far - more details to come - stay tuned.

Presenting Cool and Fun Sessions at JavaOne 2011

2011-07-27T13:40:00.000-07:00

With no sessions selected for JavaOne 2010, I thought I would try a new approach:

Build proposals around things I would attend at Javaone.

Well, to say the least - it worked out, probably too good. So here is the official list

Session 23923 - JVM Language Mashup Using NetBeans RCP

Session 24027 - Setting Sail: Opening New Horizons in RCP Development

Session 24034 - Next-Generation UI: JavaFX 2.0 and Scala?!

Session 24822 - The Final Frontier: Rich Client Platform with JavaFX 2.0

Session 25026 - The Enterprise RCP: NetBeans RCP with JavaFX 2.0 Controls

Anything in there that attracts your attention?
Anything you would like to see in there?

See you at J1- or stay tuned for further details on the sessions....

Reviving my Blog

2011-07-27T12:09:00.000-07:00

After a real long time with no activity on this blog, I think it is time to get busy again. New things coming up, new technologies to evaluate...

So if you are interested in

there may some interesting blog posts in my queue.

Welcome back and stay tuned...

Bruno Souza joins NetBeans DreamTeam

2009-12-23T12:15:00.000-08:00

The loss for Sun is the advantage for the DreamTeam. Now that Bruno is no longer a Sun employee he was immediately invited to join the NetBeans DreamTeam - and he accepted.

Welcome back on board, Bruno!

Bruno Souza leaves SUN

2009-11-25T16:08:00.000-08:00

I know you have expected to read about days 4 and 5 of Devoxx 2009 here, but there are more important things to blog about.

Bruno Souza, founder of SouJava, known as "Brazil's JavaMan" has left SUN. But I suppose this is nothing to keep him from being an (even more) outstanding member of the Java community.

In case you are wondering - Bruno is the guy on the left,

Stephan Janssen on the right and Juggy in the middle!

Bruno, lets meet again at Milliways, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (always near in space)!

Oh, and bring Juggy along, rrrright?

Braziiiiiiiiiiiillll!!!!

Devoxx 2009 - Day 3

2009-11-18T22:06:00.000-08:00

Day 3 is the first real conference day. It started with a keynote

from Oracle which really gave no real new insights, since nobody is allowed to say anything at all. But just in case - a subset of the slides is available here. Did you recognize the tie on that "Orange Guy"?

Next was a presentation of Adobe on their new Catalyst tool (Fc) - Chat Haase did a real nice stand up again.

The main breaking news of the day came from Mark Reinhold in his update for JDK 7. Not only will it take longer to get JDK 7 out (due to the obvious reasons) but it even may contain closures. So once again it seems closures is the new pink.

After lunch James Gosling had his un-keynote. He demoed the new version of the JavaStore promising that it will be available worldwide ASAP, but no sooner.

During James talk some novelity happened at Devoxx - the first time in 8 years the audiosystem broke. So James had to wait for them fixing the problem, but the Devoxx-Magicians got it up and running again in no time (=few minutes).

Next up was a JavaFX session with Rich Bair, Jasper Potts and special guest Tor Norbye. They showed the planned features for JavaFX 1.3- regions with css styling support, new enterprise ready ui components and some smaller enhancements for threading. The eyecatcher was the demo from Tor. He showed the JavaFX Visual DesignTool, written completely (100%?) in JavaFX. I have to figure out how to build such a large application without a platform like NetBeans RCP (have to ask Tor). It was a real slick UI with lot of effects and , as it seemed to me, with ease of use.

For the afternoon the sessions were ScalaTest and Project Coin. Bill Venners talk showed how easy it can be to write easy understandable test with Scala - but I agree with James Gosling - you have to hear it 5(?) times to get it all right. the Project Coin session did not reveal many new details but showed how the process worked, made clear that not only because it looks simple to do a change it is that simple (the JLS complexity indicator from Alex Buckley). One new piece of information was that they may be considering further small changes, e.g. multicatch, due to the slip of OpenJDK 7 release.

Only two BOF's for day 3 - the JUG BOF with James Gosling (a must have) and the JDK 7 BOF with Alex Buckley, Brian Goetz, Joseph Darcy and Mark Reinhold.

The main things I took with me? Well Java was invented to trick C/C++ programmers into thinking Smalltalk was cool thing and no Java is not the new COBOL.

For the evening we had a meetup (hosted by the NetBeans DreamTeam) at the Axxes - and guess who was there - Juggy!

Was real good to meet you all again!

Devoxx 2009 - Day 2

2009-11-17T22:06:00.000-08:00

So just a short resumé for day 2. First up was the Java EE 6 session, with AlexisMP and Antonio Goncalves. They did an impressive show for all the Java EE 6 technologies by example starting with JPA and ending with nice ajax based frontend.

After lunch there was a good session about JavaFX with Stephen Chin. He walked us through basic things like "How works a sequence?" and more complex things like the new layouts. This session really covered a lot of JavaFX, but my personal highlight was the a short demo from Tor Norbye (Sun Microsystems). He demoed a NetBeans IDE based JavaFX RAD tool that feels it like the famous "Matisse"-GUI-Builder for Swing based applications.

In between those two sessions there was a short private "Thank you, Aaron" ceremony, during which the Duke's Choice Award winning team from ND SatCom handed a T-Shirt with a team photo and the signatures of all the team members to Aaron Houston, who was the one who originally talked us into submitting our tool to the Duke's Choice Award.

In the late afternoon there was an interesting session about how to combine the power of OSGi and NetBeans Lookup with Toni Epple from the NetBeans DreamTeam and Geertjan Wielenga.

The evening (and a better part of the night) was spent discussing the future of Java with Aaron and some guys from french JUG's ending at our hotel getting into the traditional tuesday night party - meeting Kirk Pepperdine, Chet Haase, Romain Guy (too name just a few of those trying to drink a belgium bar out of beer).

Devoxx 2009 - Day 1

2009-11-16T22:35:00.000-08:00

The first "University Day" started with a talk about "Generics" from Prof. Steegmans. It was quite interesting, although a bit more detail might have been nice, especially about wildcards. The afternoon session about JSF2 (and beyond) had a lot of information about all the changes that went into JSF 2 in comparison with 1.x and some hints on what is yet to come. The main mantra I think was "Go facelets - die JSP and never look back".

The "Tools in Action" talk about Scimpi was quite nice showing that it is possible to generate a web UI based on Naked Objects, but perhaps it should use more of the new JEE stuff, since all the major things are/can be now POJOs in JEE. The "Next Generation Performance Tools" talk showed the actual state of what is possible in inspecting the JVM, but only some minor(?) improvements for the new version of the JRockit toolchain.

From the BOF'S the talk from Kess Jan Koster was a real highlight. It was interesting discussing about the "Java Tuning Puzzlers" and his real good presentation style made this talk fun even though it was the 21:00-22:00 timeslot. There is one more talk with him this week - so it could be probably a good idea to go there as well, although that may be a bit more about selling and advertising java-monitoring.com. Oh and I nearly forgot - the DreamTeam once again helped out - this time with a power adapter for his Mac.

Devoxx 2009 - It has begun!

2009-11-16T01:23:00.000-08:00

First session to attend is Java Generics by Prof. Steegmans. Hopefully adds some more information about the mysteries of type erasure and wildcards to pass on to fellow developers afterwards. Follow some details at Twitter!

SQE Going Real Open Source

2009-10-12T14:57:00.000-07:00

Finally we did it. Just take a look at SQE @ Kenai. Get started by cloning the source repository or just download the binary bits and try it out.

JavaOne 2009 - The Fun Part 1.0-7

2009-06-08T22:49:00.000-07:00

During JaveOne Bruno Souza talked a few community members into creating a video for the Java User Groups - that was really fun!

Thanks Bruno for the real good idea and the other community members to make it happen!

Winning Duke's Choice and James Gosling's Keynote

2009-06-08T21:14:00.000-07:00

By now, you could have read it all over the blogosphere - I have been part of James Gosling's keynote "Toy Show" at JavaOne, as a winner of the Duke's Choice Award.

The full video of the keynote is available at the JavaOne website.

The most important chapter can be found below.

Before the keynote I have been interviewed for the BlogTalkRadio - only it wasn't for the radio - it was full video. So here is the interview.

This was a really amazing week - more blog entries to follow.

Java Posse meets NetBeans DreamTeam - NetBeans DreamTeam meets Java Posse

2009-06-03T09:50:00.000-07:00

After the Meet the Java Posse BOF, there was an informal event at Kate O'Briens Irish Bar. So finally both teams met. There is a photo proof of this available at Toni's blog.

Was real fun hanging out with you guys!

JDK 6 update 14 released

2009-05-29T09:22:00.000-07:00

Big news - the update 14 has been released and it contains the new garbage first (G1) garbage collector. Try it out with your favourite application to find out if it is really better. It seems that there could be problems (go here for finding out about NetBeans) but you wont notice until you run it with your own application.

There are more improvements - just read the release notes.

Devoxx 2009 - Registration Open

2009-05-18T12:11:00.000-07:00

Even before JavaOne is starting you can already register for Devoxx 2009. I have been to JavaPolis or Devoxx the last two years and I hope I can attend again this year (I shall write a proposal....).

Hope we can organize a NetBeans DreamTeam Meeting in Antwerp.

See you at J1 or Devoxx ...

Don't Panic- The Definitive Guide to NetBeans™ Platform

2009-05-16T13:44:00.000-07:00

Finally it is out. The Definitive Guide to NetBeans™ Platform is the result of a translation effort of the NetBeans Platform community. Led by Geertjan a team of about 10 interested community members translated the original book NetBeans Platform 6. It was a real interesting experience to be a member of such a team and we owe Geertjan big for pushing us so we completed this in about 4 weeks. If you ever get a chance to participate - do it - I can guarantee you will love it.

Give me more details - you think?

Well, here you go. I took the chapters about Lookup and Real-World Application Development and although I am developing NetBeans™ Platform Applications for 8 years I still experienced some aaahh and oohhs. During translating the chapters I had to think about the correct meaning and wording and this triggered some additional thinking about the ways I used this technologies. I discovered that there is a big difference in just reading the original book and struggling with every word. The second takes your understanding to another level.

Besides all this - it was just great to be part of such an effort (it just feels so good).

Hope to see you for the next translation effort.

What are you waiting for? Come back for an in depth review....

NetBeans 7 goes 6.7

2009-02-19T12:43:00.000-08:00

So with all the changes inside Sun there is also a new roadmap available for NetBeans. Here are the details - direct from the horses mouth:

To get innovation and quality improvements out to the community faster, and to have the NetBeans IDE be better aligned with the release schedules of other technologies that it supports, we have decided to concentrate on a series of smaller releases rather than the traditional two big releases per year.

...

NetBeans 6.7 is scheduled for release in June 2009. The main features are Maven and Kenai integration, and there are many smaller features that you can read about on the New and Noteworthy page.

...

Java EE 6 support is planned for a future release. NetBeans 6.7 Milestone 2 is due out next week. We encourage you to download the release when it becomes available and to give us your feedback.

So - what are YOU waiting for? Download your dailies right now!

Devoxx 2009 is coming - early!

2009-01-28T12:48:00.000-08:00

So Stephan did it - he moved the conference to November (16-20). So this will give us more time to prepare for christmas - the downside is we are going to miss the christmas market!

You don't believe it? Well go to Devoxx and see for yourself!

Winner 2009: NetBeans

2009-01-14T14:34:00.000-08:00

This is the short form - just for the protocol here is the full announcement. Developer.com announced the winners in the Product of the Year 2009 competition -and guess what? NetBeans wins 5 out of 12 categories. YEEAAAAH!

What are YOU waiting for?

Start here at NetBeans.org or go directly to the downloads.

Enjoy!

P.S. To get more awards next year it seems we have to add .NET support to NetBeans ;-)

NetBeans 7.0 dev running on Windows 7 beta in VirtualBox

2009-01-11T14:58:00.000-08:00

I just had to try this out. The installation went smooth and Windows 7 started. After figuring out some small problems trying to install the guest additions (seems there some versioning issues here with the installer not detecting the Windows version). So here is how it looks in full screen mode - you have to imagine the Aero things since those are not available inside VirtualBox.

Wow - that looks nice - testing a new OS in VirtualBox... So what is the result? I am not sure, but everything worked out of the box, but this should not be a big surprise, since it is "Vista" inside Windows 7...

BTW, I got USB, seamless mode and networking working as well with VirtualBox.

SQE - New Year's Eve and 2009

2008-12-31T09:54:00.000-08:00

Again - after a long quiet period here some news from SQE - the last one for 2008.

Still, the actual main goal of SQE is to provide a stable release for NetBeans 6.5 .

Here is a list what we have already achieved and what will be part of the next binary drop. It will take a few more days before we can upload it - to allow us to ensure everything is working as expected after the major rewrite we did during Devoxx 2008.

Bug fixes:

Fixes for numerous NPE, CCE
use NetBeans 6.5 features where possible (Option Panel...)

New features

codedefect history is now working
further UI enhancements
- windowgroup for codedefect results
- move codedefect history to control center
select checkstyle.xml to use
even better sorting capability for PMD and Checkstyle results

Updates

Update FindBugs to 1.3.6
Update PMD to 4.2.4

Upcoming (new things or things already planned)

Support for configuration of FindBugs and PMD based on Maven pom's
Refresh on save/compile (especially useful for tasklist)
NetBeans 7.0?
PMD 5.0

Any other ideas, comments, wishes? Just leave your comment here or send an e-mail to the user list at sqe.dev.java.net.

... and don't forget we will be going full OpenSource at http://sqe.kenai.com in 2009 (promised) using Maven as build tool. This possibly allows us to provide different binary drops (e.g. PMD 4.x / PMD 5.x series) and many other exciting things.

Happy New Year 2009 to all of you - and see you in 2009!

New Book about NetBeans and Java EE 5

2008-12-19T06:49:00.000-08:00

You know Java and you are looking for a simple introduction how to start with Java EE - try Java EE 5 - Development with NetBeans 6 from David R. Heffelfinger.

What I find most intriguing about the book is the coupling between something known to be complex and heavyweight (not really anymore if you believe Adam Bien) and something quite simple to use. The book shows the ease of doing Java EE development with NetBeans IDE - and I have to admit (as a long time NetBeans user) it really is easy to use. To give a short overview I would just say that all the buzzwords are covered (JSF, JSTL, JPA, WS, ...). But do not expect a reference book for Java EE 5 - it really is a hands-on one getting you to do something so you will be comfortable with the more complex Java EE things.

You want to know more details - listen to the NetBeans Podcast which has an interview with David up on its current episode.

Give it a try!

Devoxx 2008 - Day 5 / finalize()

2008-12-13T01:32:00.000-08:00

The last day of Devoxx 2008 - just as we got accustomed to long nights with only a few hours sleep. But well next year the show will continue. So today 3 real cool sessions were up. First we attended a session with Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo presenting on JRuby. Besides showing cool NetBeans integration with awsome code completion and giving an overview on how JRuby works they pointed out that JRuby in fact is Ruby running on a JVM. That is all - just take your Ruby application and let it run on the JVM to get the speed up offered by the JVM for your applicatoin for free. For the future they seem to consider moving the source of JRuby (or JRuby itself) over to Kenai - a new Open Source hosting solution - once they get the issuetracker integrated they need.

Next Brian Leonhart from SUN Microsystems talking about "Development beyond Localhost". It focused on "WOTE - Write Once Test Everywhere" using OpenSolaris and VirtualBox. Quite interesting approach and a real cool software. It is free - so give it a try.

Last talk of Devoxx 2008 was fellow NetBeans Dream Team member Adam Bien. who came to Antwerp only for delivering his talk - thanks Adam. He talked about EJB3.x and why he thinks that this is the real lightweight solution, although he is not in favor of calling something "lightweight". He did some real cool live coding using NetBeans 6.5 and the new "Deploy on Save" feature - it worked awesome. Should have convinced the audience that Glassfish and NetBeans is the way to go for Java EE.

So much for now - off for visiting Antwerp, getting some "Mussels with fries" a local specialty and a good Belgium beer.

BTW: I took photos from the whiteboards just friday morning - have a look at them here and figure out what is going on in the Java community.

Devoxx 2008 - Day 4 / Java 7 and JavaPosse

2008-12-11T22:36:00.000-08:00

So again there were two big keynotes today - the first from Josh Bloch about "Effective Java 2nd Edition" an update to his famous book "Effective Java" considering things like Enum and Generics. Well you may say this is not a keynote - and you are correct - it was a "Josh Talk". But nevertheless it was fun.

Next was Mark Reinhold giving an update about Java 7 - with a focus on Project Jigsaw. This is the codename for a modularized Java - not only with respect to the libraries, but also down to the VM level. It seems to be a large, complex and very ambitious thing but I think it is the way to go. BTW none of the existing module frameworks won, there will be one especially tuned for this problem field. Pictures taken from slides shown are here. You are thinking this will take a long time? Well, Mark said the delivery of Java 7 will be in early 2010, that is quite soon (measured in Java dimensions).

The first technical session was Brain Goetz and Alex Buckley talking about the way towards a dynamic VM, so that other languages can make themselves more at home on top of the JVM. It seems the changes to be done are not so big, they invented some real clever concepts for letting the language decide about method resolution - and it will be part of Java 7. So that will give a major boost for your favourite language besides Java - Scala, Jython, JRuby... Next was a seesion about the new NIO API's in Java 7. They should really simplify the way to use NIO and reduce the need to write your own layer on top of NIO.

Now for the fun part - JavaPosse Live Recording. The Posse guys were as much fun as always discussing JavaFX, Java 7 and all the other things around Devoxx. Tor and Joe were live via video - just listen to the podcast to imagine the fun we had.

Devoxx 2008 - Day 3 / All the remaining things

2008-12-10T16:58:00.000-08:00

Ok - since there are already to posts available for today I will just try to summarize the remaining events. In the afternoon we went to Bill Venners talk "The Feel of Scala" - one of the few highlights.
He showed Scala vs. Ruby, how ducktyping works and a lot of further features. Seems OSGI is getting into the market.

Here are some pictures I took during the talk:

Aftwards there was the reception for all the developers.

Devoxx 2008 - Day 3 / How NetBeans Saved the Day

2008-12-10T16:26:00.000-08:00

... at least for a real unlucky - or perhaps a real lucky guy - read on and fond out for yourself.

Emil Ong from Caucho was up for a talk about PHP on Java showing how to use Java's abilities (and the performance of the underlying JVM) to make PHP integratable/coexisitng with existing Java WebApps on one application Server. This approach is based on Quercus, which is Caucho’s 100% pure Java implementation of PHP.
At the start of the session he already had difficulties getting his laptop to work, but finally got it up and running showing his presentation. Then suddenly somwhere right in the middle of the session his system got stuck switching to the next slide. Rebooting did not really help - so he asked the audience if anybody would lend him/hers laptop. The first try failed (seemed to be some problem with the USB-Drive) so he went for another one.
This is where the story gets interesting. Toni Epple from the NetBeans Dream Team had already met Emil last night on the Devoxx dinner and they had set up Resin/Quercus/NetBeans to work together during a break at the Cauch booth, so that PHP can be deployed with NetBeans to Quercus/Resin (read Toni's blog for more details). So he lend Emil his "trusty new and shiny MacBook" and having figured out the difficulties with the language of the operating system and one display-cable-adapter later the presentation could continue. At the end of this real interesting talk (come on PHP developers - give it a try) he was sorry to announce that the prepared demo could not be shown, since his laptop did not work. So Toni took the opportunity and proposed to show their setup with NetBeans/Quercus and Resin. So Toni just showed the PHP project he had created for Wordpress in NetBeans and just clicked "Run" and that's it - Wordpress was running on Quercus and Resin. What a cool Demo. So that is how NetBeans saved the day - and I think Emil is a lucky guy - he learned about NetBeans and the always helpful Dream Team.

You do not believe this? See for yourself

Devoxx 2008 - Day 3 / JavaFX Keynote

2008-12-10T03:25:00.000-08:00

The theatre was packed for the keynote this morning.

Wow - those guys from Sun really showed the community how to sell the technology. Only few slides and many real cool demos and even a world premiere - the "Fox Box", which was so mindboggling cool that I just missed taking a picture. So here is one of another application shown - with a mobile version

The key note was done by Danny Coward

with help of the JavaFX-Team guys (Joshua Marinacchi, Richard Bair, Jasper Potts and Martin Brehovsky)

... and they used NetBeans

The only thing more cool than this was the "Beatboxer".

The second highlight this morning was Brian Goetz giving a talk about "From Concurrent to Parallel".

He discussed in some detail how the JSR 166y works behind the scenes and how easy it is to use (and how better it might be with "Closures") - Josh may disagree ;-) .

Devoxx 2008 - Day 2

2008-12-09T01:12:00.000-08:00

Being early as everyday Florian and myself got interviewed for the Parleys magazine. It was a surprise seeing that those guys still remembered us from last year. So it still seems to be a small conference - even with 3200 Java enthusiasts.

The second University Day started with the session Java Performance" by Kirk Pepperdine and Holly Cummins. A quite interesting presentation showing a lot of new and old aspects for performance analysis (remember everything you learned is wrong). One new tool that may be of interest is The IBM^® Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java™ - Health Center™ in Early Access. It provides the possibility to get monitoring directly from the VM without using bytecode injection. To use this you will need the latest IBM JDK as well. So give it a try.

For the afternoon session we picked "Advanced OSGI", but actually there was not so much new in the talk. During his presentation Peter Kriens talked about the classloading issues you could have and visualized it with a photo

So the highlight of the afternoon was meeting with Aaron Houston from Sun. We took a photo of the dreamteam members and did a small podcast recording.

For the BOS's we selected Meet JSR Spec. Leads, Effective code reviews in agile teams and The magic of JXLayer component .

All in all a lot of interesting stuff to try out and evalute.

Quotes of the Day:

"You do not have performance requirements? So you have no further goal in life!", Kirk Pepperdine
"A mouse move has been detected. Do you want to keep it? Please reboot!"

Small Language Changes for Java 7

2008-12-09T00:31:00.001-08:00

Did you still believe language changes for Java 7 would be coming? Well here is the announcement from Joseph D. Darcy and some in length discussion what may be in there from Stephen Colebourne.

So any ideas? Just help Joseph and Stephen and put them on the whiteboard.

Devoxx 2008 - Day 1

2008-12-08T03:29:00.000-08:00

First thing after breakfast today was an extensive presentation on JavaFX done by Richard Bair, Jasper Potts and Martin Brehovsky - "JavaFX in Practice". It was an amazing thing to see and to try it out in parallel. There are lots of interesting features in JavaFX already and more to come. The downside is that deployment is not finally solved (how to get it to a customer, who uses a closed network) so no easy way to get around the actual deployment limitation.

The afternoon session was "Groovy and Grails in A ction" with Guillaume Laforge - presenting all this small niceties Groovy has to offer in comparison with Java. But I have to admit - I did not find the flexibility very appealing; e.g. that it is possible to overwrite the operator "+" so that it always returns 1 (reminded me of my good old C/C++ days).

For the "Tool in Action" series we went to "VisualVM - new extensible monitoring platform" done by Kirk Pepperdine and "Building Java Projects With Gradle" by Hans Dockter. VisualVM is a must have troubleshooting tool ranging from Heap-Analysis to CPU-Monitoring. If you need anything else, just create your own plugin and extend the existing functionality, e.g. like TDA. The best is you now get it with your favorite JDK (and it brought the NetBeans Platform into the JDK). Gradle seems to be a quite flexible tool for creating a build environment, but somehow I missed a bit the declarative nature, as it can be found in Maven. So check it out and give it a try.

Afterwards we attended another session for JavaFX (from Martin Brehovsky) showing a bit more about the integrated workflow between developer and designer. Next up was "Tune It!" a performance related session with Kirk Pepperdine. For the finishing session at Day One we had a session about SwingLabs. The expectations were quite high I think after all those long e-mail discussions about Sun stopping funding for SwingX.

So what's the Story about JavaFX and Swing? Well I'd say that nothing special will happen - so there is still Swing and for more advanced fancy UI code there is now JavaFX coming up. Will there be a possibility for a mesh-up? Yes. The NetBeans plugin is already quite usable, but it still seems to lack some of the features a typical Java developer will try to use (e.g. in place rename, comment out, code completion) - hope there will be updates quite soon (next year)

So what may be on the roadmap for Java7 from a Java Desktop User's view?

Integration of Scenegraph API and other tools and laguages should be scheduled
JWebPane is still in the works
Full Java/JavaFX Meshups still to be done
JavaApplicationFramewrk
Beans Binding
JAM (???)
....

My personal subjective impression - there is a cool technology coming up - so please stop whining - if you need something be part of the community and contribute.

Devoxx - Registration

2008-12-07T15:31:00.000-08:00

To avoid long queues for registration, we decided to already pick up our bags on Sunday evening. Everything went smooth - so now we are prepared for Devoxx 2008.

We have already met some cool people - had a small chat with Stephan Janssen (make sure to visit his talk/BOF about Parley TNG), met Aaron Houston from Sun, Kirk Pepperdine (Master of Java Performance Tuning), Bill Venners (Artima Software) and just got a short glimpse at Josh Bloch.

Seems this years conference is again packed with a lot of real interesting people. So if you are already registered - cu at Devoxx from tomorrow on (or better today already past midnight here in Europe).

Last Day in Brussels - Atomium

2008-12-07T15:23:00.000-08:00

After the rainy evening yesterday - today the sky cleared and it was sunny. Since we had some more time to spend before starting for Antwerp - we decided to visit the Atomium.

Looking at the photos you should remind yourself that the Atomium has been built for the EXPO 1958.

Photos documenting the trip can be seen at the usal location (once I got to uploading them).

Brussels Day 2

2008-12-07T15:11:00.000-08:00

So what to do in Brussels on a Saturday? First breakfast then go shopping - try to find Manneken Pis and afterwards meet with Toni ;-) .

The live performance on the "Grote Markt" was an astonishing event - music, light and performance met rain. So it was a bit wet, but nevertheless something you have to experience yourself to get a real feeling for it.

Some photos are available at the Devoxx-Album or in the sidebar as a preview - I apologize for the quality - it was quite dark and rainy.

First night in Brussels - approaching Devoxx

2008-12-06T00:43:00.000-08:00

Last night was our first night here in Brussels. We enjoyed the christmas market - as planned - and tasted good belgium beers and "Gluwhein".

Especially cool are the "The Electrabel Nights ..."- a fantastic mindboggling lightshow taking place in the "Grote Markt" - come and see for yourself. Tonight there is a live performance scheduled for 19:00.

See photos from this journey in the sidebar or visit the Picasa-Web-Album directly.

So still 48h hours to go before Devoxx opens.

Devoxx 2008 - The Adventure Begins

2008-12-04T23:05:00.000-08:00

It has started. Just a few minutes ago the "Katamaran" has left Friedrichshafen towards Konstanz - the first leg of a multi-part journey to Antwerp.

... and it's only the beginning ....

So first stop is Brussels - enjoying the chrismas market and preparing SQE for Devoxx.

SQE and Devoxx 2008

2008-12-01T13:15:00.000-08:00

Interested in exchanging ideas how to make SQE better?
Want to share your preferred workflow with the SQE developers?

Meet the SQE Team at Devoxx - just leave a comment and your e-mail - so we can get together over a Belgium beer or just have a chat over breakfast / lunch or a coffee break.

BTW expect some news on SQE for Devoxx - following our tradition we are actually working full steam for a new stable version of SQE compatible and best to use with NetBeans 6.5 Release. More news to follow ...

Devoxx Sold Out

2008-11-29T15:00:00.000-08:00

Wow! Devoxx ist sold out again:

3200 Java enthusiasts in Antwerp

and the movie shown is

The Day the Earth Stood Still

cu in Antwerp

Preparing for Devoxx

2008-11-29T14:07:00.000-08:00

So just one week to go - time to think about preparation for Devoxx!

So what to pack?

Notebook
spare rechargeable battery pack
Digicam
spare rechargeable battery pack
...
...
and something for the hangover after all the long nights..

Anything to add?

;-)

Cube'n Releases Trac Connector

2008-11-24T13:26:00.000-08:00

It's out now - Cube'n (Task integration for NetBeans IDE) release 1.0.3.0.

The Cube'n team is happy to announce the 1.0.3.0 release of Task integration for NetBeans (Cube'n). This release is primarily focused on Trac Repository Connector,Usability (D'n'D), bug fixes, improving stability and performance.

http://code.google.com/p/cubeon/wiki/release1_0_3_0

Download at http://cubeon.googlecode.com/files/cubeon-1.0.3.0.zip

Whats New

Trac Repository Connector
- Supports to connect Trac 0.11 repository.
- Create/Modify Task offline/online and merge task with remote repository.
- Rich Task Editor with attributes editing, workflow actions and comments.
- Trac Repository Query Support.
- Customized Trac Repositories including custom workflows.
- Tracking of Locally Modified tasks and revert modifications.
Drag n Drop Task Management.
- Task explorer task management
- Query result view to task explorer
Installation prerequisites
- You will need a special version of the Trac-XMLRPC Plugin.
- The original available plugin has some problems with Trac 0.11 and the custom workflow.
- These are fixed and the version of the XMLRPC is incremented to 1.5.
- You can get this enhanced version via
  - downloading the patch and appling it to the latest available version from the official SVN or
  - downloading the Trac-XMLRPC PythonEgg for Python 2.5
- Add the PythonEgg to the plugin directory of your Trac repository
- Further details can be found on the original distribution site

If you never tried it before - go for it - it may change your daily coding ;-)

SQE Issuetracking at netbeans.org

2008-11-23T12:58:00.000-08:00

There is now a special NetBeans Issuezilla subcomponent "sqe tools" in "3rd-party" component. With this it is now possible to use the default error reporting and exception reporting inside NetBeans for tracking SQE issues (and nobody has to reenter them somewhere else).

There are already a few issues submitted - is this number a hint for a wide adoption or just for the quality of the SQE code ;-) ? I will look after those, hopefully a lot of them are already fixed with the latest binary bits. For the actual list of open issues click here.

Thanks go Lukas Hasik for taking care of creation of the subcomponent and the work of starting reassigning issues.

Development Simplified - NetBeans 6.5 Released

2008-11-19T13:33:00.000-08:00

It's out!

NetBeans IDE 6.5 is the latest release of Sun's award-winning open-source IDE that enables developers to rapidly create web, enterprise, desktop, and mobile applications with Java, C/C++ , JavaScript?, Ruby, Groovy, and PHP. Supported by a vibrant developer community and offering a diverse selection of third-party plugins, the NetBeans IDE is a must-download for developers.

Some highlights for Java developer:

The award-winning NetBeans IDE for Java keeps getting better. New to 6.5: support for Groovy and Grails, built-in support for Hibernate, Eclipse project import, Compile/Deploy on Save, and much more.
Value Proposition: We continue to build on our award-winning IDE for Java by adding popular new features and improvements. Find out why NetBeans IDE for Java is the right IDE for you- with rich support for ME/SE/EE development and new feature highlights including Groovy and Grails support, built-in support for Hibernate, Eclipse project import/synchronization, Compile/Deploy on Save, and Ajax-enabled JSF CRUD generator.

In addtion to this there is also an Early Access preview of the IDE for Python.

Simplify your Python development with the NetBeans IDE for Python- Early Access. This community driven project combines the practical development expertise of Python developers with the experience of IDE development by the NetBeans community.
Developers can enjoy great editor features such as code completion, semantic highlighting, instant rename, smart indentation, pair matching, and more. The EA release also includes a community developed Python debugger as well as the ability to choose between the Python and Jython runtimes.

NetBeans Demo Camp, Munich - 18th November

2008-11-08T10:47:00.000-08:00

Come to Munich and join us for the 1st NetBeans Demo Camp in Germany.
Here is the preliminary program:

"New Features in NetBeans Platform 6.5"
Geertjan Wielenga, NetBeans Guru, Sun Microsystems Inc., Prag.
"Demosession: ChipInspector - NetBeans APIs im Einsatz"
Tanja Drüke, Genomatix Software GmbH, Munich, Germany.
"RCP Entwicklung in der Praxis: Third-party libraries und ClassLoader"
Anton Epple, NetBeans Dream Team Member, Eppleton, Munich, Germany.
"Portierung von Swing Applikationen auf die NetBeans Platform"
Aljoscha Rittner, CEO, Sepix GmbH, Hann. Münden, Germany.
"Grosseinsatz - NetBeans RCP im Grossprojekt"
Sven Reimers, NetBeans Dream Team Member, ND SatCom Defence GmbH, Immenstaad, Germany.

Do not miss it - this will be a lot of interesting stuff and it will be even better with YOUR questions. So do not hesitate and register here

http://netbeansdemocamp.eventbrite.com/

Oh and do not miss the "pubs" section - sounds promising.

Thanks Toni for organizing this event!

NetBeans 10th Birthday

2008-10-19T12:38:00.000-07:00

Starting today there is a one week celebration for NetBeans 10th Birthday.

Chime in and celebrate the NetBeans spirit with the NetBeans Decathlon!

For more details about the Decathlon go here!

From the official statement:

Since 1998, NetBeans has grown from a student project into an award winning Open Source project, IDE and application platform. With millions of downloads a year worldwide, the NetBeans community boasts an active and diverse following of software developers, students, instructors and partner companies.
For our 10th birthday bash we plan to highlight some of the key initiatives and individuals whose contributions and dedication have kept the NetBeans momentum going strong. There will be unique content—video greetings, community profiles and more—available during the week-long retrospective.
We've also come up with a fun way for the community to celebrate with us—the NetBeans Decathlon! Ten interactive activities that let NetBeans users show and share what the NetBeans project means to them.
Participants will be entered to win a cool limited edition NetBeans T-shirt. Stay tuned for details of the Decathlon and the official birthday kickoff!

So you are still not part of the community? Do not wait - you won't get a better start! Join the NetBeans community at netbeans.org!

Meeting Geertjan or from Lookup to Obama

2008-10-05T11:40:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday I met Geertjan after he delivered a NetBeans Training Course.

What would you expect from such a meeting? Let me start with the obvious:

Some good food and a real good beer ;-)

What else? Well I'll try to list everything discussed and maybe I will pick up some of those and dive deeper into those topics.

Modules, Modules, Modules ....
Lookup
Deprecating old API's
API Design
TreeTable vs. new OutlineView
Visual Library
NetBeans RTC
NetBeans RCP
NetBeans RCP LifeCycle (esp. the explicit entanglement with DataObject)
Upgrading to NetBeans 6.5 RCP (impacts of changed mode definitions)
NetBeans Dream Team
NetBeans RCP Training (differences between University and Company)
JavaPolis - Javoxx - Devoxx
NbPython
Groovy
Closures
GSF vs. Schliemann
...

SQE, Maven and NetBeans 6.5

2008-10-01T12:43:00.000-07:00

After a long quiet period here some news from SQE. The actual main goal of SQE is to provide a stable release for NetBeans 6.5 .

The first milestone towards this is support for Maven based projects. This is now available as a binary preview. Just download the zip-File unpack it and install the nbm's. Since not all the version numbers are actually increased, the binary snapshot requires that you uninstall all previously installed parts of SQE. I hope to find a simple method to fix this problem for one of the next binary previews.

Bug fixes:

Checkstyle now working under Unix
A lot of small changes for better project recognition

New features

Maven support

Updates

Checkstyle 5.0 beta 01

Upcoming (new things or things already planned)

Update FindBugs to 1.3.5
Update PMD to 4.2.3
Refresh on save/compile (especially useful for tasklist)
further UI enhancements
- windowgroup for codedefect results
- move codedefect history (still not working) to control center
select checkstyle.xml to use

Any other ideas, comments, wishes? Just leave your comment here or send an e-mail to the user list at sqe.dev.java.net.

NetBeans DreamTeam

2008-07-14T16:04:00.001-07:00

I have been invited to join the NetBeans DreamTeam. That's some kind of reward for working on SQE. Not just having fun working on such a complex project - but really feeling the appreciation of the community. I hope I can live up to the expections.

So any ideas - how to make NetBeans even better?

SQE - Jazoon 2008 / NetBeans 6.x compatible - Version

2008-06-22T14:46:00.000-07:00

Following the tradition to release at least for the big events a new updated version of SQE is available for Jazoon 2008. Unfortunately nobody from SQE team is available at Jazoon or the NetBeans Day in Zurich, but we still work on making SQE better. So here is the summary since last update notification

Bug fixes:

Problem with configuring (disabling) FindBugs detectors
Fix NPE in RuleViolationRenderer in case of missing classname
Enhance pmd annotation message with rule name
Fixes NPE in SortAction and issues with displaying new results (update problem of resultui)
Fix issue with display and jump to RuleViolation in case of default package

New features

Configuration (disabling) of PMD rules (per project/ global)
Disabling rules/detectors is available via context menu in result view tree for PMD and FindBugs

Updates

PMD 4.2.2
FindBugs 1.3.4

Upcoming

Refresh on save/compile (especially useful for tasklist)
further UI enhancements
- windowgroup for codedefect results
- move codedefect history (still not working) to control center
configurable checkstyle.xml (at least)
use native PMD file format for storing configuration
use native FindBugs format for storing configuration
quick-fix for disabling detectors (still under evaluation)
enable filtering for defects (available but not functional)
RefactorIt integration (still far future)

Get the latest version as always via updatecenter or download the module containing the updatecenter description from here.

Since I still have problems with kit versioning vs. module versioning you may have to delete your sqe1 cluster from your installation, since the IDE does not seem to pick up the changes in the modules not shown in the plugin manager. I hope I will find out how to use this correctly for the next update...

SQE - BugFix

2008-05-06T15:13:00.000-07:00

The latest published version contained two minor issues

Java Classes with default package resulted in NPE during trying to annotate (#41)
Wrong thread usage for Retouche

An update is available.

SQE - JavaOne 2008 / NetBeans 6.1 - Version

2008-05-04T13:52:00.000-07:00

There is a new version of SQE uploaded to the SQE-UpdateCenter.

Consider this still an alpha version. New in this snapshot:

SQE Control Center (modeled after Profiler UI)
pre-configure codedefect tools that will be run on a project (per project basis)
JumpToSource should now work for most use cases
new editor buttons for switching annotations on/off (per project basis)
better tasklist integration for FindBugs Result
Experimental support for dependency analysis
Experimental information topcomponent for projects (should help verifying the project setup)

Additionally a lot of issues have been fixed:

problems running under unix
problems with accessing sqe.properties
problems with changes in 6.1 filesystem access
.... (see issue list at sqe.dev.java.net)

Upcoming

Refresh on save/compile (especially useful for tasklist)
further UI enhancements (windowgroup for codedefect results)
configurable checkstyle.xml (at least)
fix pmd configuration problems
fix findbugs configuration problems
quick-fix for disabling detectors (still under evaluation)
RefactorIt integration (still far future)

So check it out and give your feedback.

Since not all spec versions may have been increased you may better delete your old sqe1 cluster and start with a fresh installation following the described procedure. The source is still not available but we are really trying to get it out (promised).

JavaPolis reloaded

2008-05-03T06:59:00.000-07:00

The JavaPolis conference has been renamed:

Javoxx

See for yourself at www.javoxx.com.

... cu 8th-12th December in Antwerp!

RefactorIt open sourced

2008-04-07T12:49:00.000-07:00

Behind the scenes a couple of people were already talking about RefactorIt going open source, after already providing it for free. This enables the community to port RefactorIt to NetBeans 6 (this was not available up to now). Additionally all the nice metric and audit algorithm and functions can now be integrated in your favourite IDE. So any volunteers out there?

For a start head over to http://sourceforge.net/projects/refactorit/ and get the source! It seems this is not a very NetBeans friendly source layout - but this should prove no difficulty for real NetBeans developers. So, whish you happy hacking and expect new features based on the RefactorIt code to be integrated in SQE.

German NetBeans RCP Book

2008-04-06T14:46:00.000-07:00

Some weeks ago I received my copy of NetBeans Platform 6. Finally I got around to let you know that it may actually be the best book out there regarding RCP development for NetBeans. It covers a lot API's, gives code code examples and offers complex solutions based on the NetBeans RCP Platform, e.g. using JPA.

So what is stopping you? Get your copy and learn German!

JavaPolis - Conclusion

2007-12-14T14:11:00.000-08:00

So what shall I say - it was an amazing experience being here in Antwerp @ the JavaPolis 2007. There were tons of interesting new technologies to discover and best of all meet other Java enthusiasts. I especially appreciated the open and friendly and personal discussions with (no special order) Neal Gafter, Joshua Bloch, Mark Reinhold, Chet Haase, Koshuke Kawaguchi, Brian Leonard, Stephen Coleburn, Guy Nirpaz and a lot more nice guys.

Special thanks go to Stephan Janssen - marvellous awesome work - hope to come back next year!

JavaPolis 2007 - Day 5

2007-12-14T13:32:00.000-08:00

Already a bit worn out the last day @ JavaPolis 2007 began. Since the exhibition area was already closed down yesterday evening the crowd got together in even less space for breakfast, but that was ok.

First talk today was given by David Anderson about a kanban approach to software development. It is indeed a quite interesting approach but does not seem to work for all projects. Nevertheless you should check out his website and look for more informations about this.

Following this was a presentation about Java2D and 3D in high performance systems. Frank Suyken gave showed a couple of very amazing demonstrations based on JOGL and Java2D and gave away a couple of tricks how to make your own applications faster, ranging from GC to OpenGL.

After lunch there was a talk called "OSGi - The future of Java" given by Peter Kriens. He made some interesting points about actual problems concerning classloader and hiding implementations inside Java. On the other hand he seemed to insist that OSGi is the only true solution to this problem (ok he may be a bit biased). Nevertheless it was really interesting and will be stuff for a lot of discussions.

The last final presentation I attended was about "Unitils" from Flip Neven. Some quite innovative ideas how to make testing with databases more lightweight, but I will have to find out if this approach scales for large projects as well. But a few of the ideas are definitely worth considering.

It is a bit sad that JavaPolis 2007 is already over - would be nice if there could have been some gathering this late afternoon before anyone went of to catch their flights, trains or whatever.

JavaPolis 2007 - Day 4

2007-12-13T04:54:00.000-08:00

So on with day 4 of the JavaPolis. First thing is that you are starting to feel worn out. But this is ok - there is a price to pay for all this fun we are having. So even being maybe a bit tired we managed to get up early enough to get to the Metropolis in time for a good breakfast (seems I am starting to repeat myself, but it is quite astonishing even on day 4) and got into the keynote session - no need using the overflow room. Before the keynotes started the traditional JavaPolis Family Photo was taken - with all in the JavaPolis T-Shirt - but we have to wait for the result.

So the first keynote was about Flex. It was presented by Bruce Eckel with a lot of help from his friends from Adobe. It contained some definitive pretty slick UIs, but nothing that couldn't be done in java as well. The availability of the AMF remote protocol was announced, but there is nothing quite special about a binary remote protocol - I think we all have used one before. But you have to give them credit - the overall experience was quite amazing. Fitting in with this Stephan Janssen demoed the new parlays.com version 2 - awesome UI (written in Flex), nice features and the best is you can use it offline and download all the Java talks to your local harddisk and play them from there. But describing the UI is not very useful - register for beta testing and see for yourself, if you are interested. The last keynote was done by Tim Cramer (VP Java FX Development at SUN) and was mainly focused on the Java FX product family and espceially the JavaFX Mobile Application Stack. It is a really interesting way to approach the cross device size problem - see for yourself by trying the different things out (all open).

The Java SE Update by Danny Coward had all the details on what is actually on the list of possible changes for Java SE 7 (and what is not - maybe). For details you can also visit his blog. Some interesting things seem to be coming and some language changes are also to expected (backwards compatible) but there is no decision what precise will be chosen. This directly takes me to the next talk from Josh Bloch - The Closures Controversy. Originally he planned to speak about Effective Java Reloaded - but he promised that he will directly start the work on the book when he gets home and will have it available printed and bound for Java One 2008. Instead of presenting about his new upcoming book he instead had a brand new talk with him about the benefits and risks of closures as actually proposed in BGGA specification (see yesterdays post).His main objections are that a adding closures and function types would add a new dimension of complexity to the Java language that are completely against the Feel of Java (as originally proposed by James Gosling in 1997). Indeed it is a quite scary syntax with a lot of fine tuning necessary how it should in deed work. Additionally there is additional overhead put to the developer until he can use this feature in a correct and concise way. So what is the point of introducing closures in such way? Just google it, go to Neal's blog and find out for yourself. So no conclusion on this - time will tell.

After this brain twisting presentation a quite fun event was up: The JavaPosse - Live Recording from the JavaPolis with Dick Wall, Carl Quinn

and Joe Nuxoll and Tor Norbye - the latter two were just available on-line ;-)

A lot of interesting things were discussed and at the end Neal Gafter and Josh Bloch were asked to join in for some questions and answers - that was real one of the entertainment hightlights of the conference - but find out for yourself at http://javaposse.com/ once it is out.

Next on the schedule was Stephen Coleburn presenting the JSR 310 - Date and Time API. Finally we are getting somewhere with the Date and Calendar problem - the API's look already real useful and quite compatible with JODA-Time, but you will have to change your code a bit.

So back to the big two rockstars Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter. They did a nice presentation of the JavaPuzzlers - quite astonishing how many people missed often the correct solution, nevertheless real entertaining stuff. Get the book - I can only recommend it!

Then there was the prize draw at the SUN booth - but besides one Duke caught I did end up zip. Too sad - no UltraSparc as a continous buildserver for SQE. But hey that's life. So say good bye to our nice hosts atr the SUN booth (since it was the last day of the exhibition) and off the last BOFS of JavaPolis 2007.

First was the OpenJDK BOF presented by Mark Reinhold and Dalibor Topic. There were a couple of interesting things discussed from "How will all this with Mercurial work out" to Governenace, projects. It sounds like a real fun to be part there - sso stay tuned.

So getting already late in the evening the last BOF began: New Languages Features with - who would have expected this - Neal Gafter and Josh Bloch. They gave an overview about the possible additions to the Java Language and took a vote for each of the features presented. They hope that not everything they came up with, will necessary end up in the Java Language. Since the list was long it took quite some time to go through all those details. So it got really, really (45 min overtime) really late.

Because of this we once again ended up in the Hollywood Café drinking a good beer and discussing language changes with Neal and Josh. Thanks for sponsoring the event ;-) Can't wait to see any of those new spiffy neat (or whatever you might call them) features in Java. So that never again a kitten has to die because a Java Developer has to write Collections.<Man>emptySet().

Ah I forgot to mention tonight was Beowolf on for the conference participants - but hey isn't the JDK more sexy than Angeline Jolie - ok I have to think this over again ;-)

JavaPolis 2007 - Day 3

2007-12-12T02:49:00.000-08:00

That was an interesting morning today. Everything went as planned and we arrived so early we had a lot of time left for a nice breakfast, filling out a survey at the SUN booth (getting a NetBeans 6 t-shirt that way) and answering some questions for the tomorrows edition of the Parleys magazin. Besides other very interesting things there are two things that grabbed our attentation - a NetBeans installation

and the friendly staff at the SUN booth providing free NetBeans 6 T-Shirts

Afterwards we got ourself a nice place to watch the todays keynote

- highlight: James Gosling.

There were some weird guys
and princesses out there

but in the end the keynote finally started. Before James Gosling took over we first had a very nice introduction from Stephan Janssen to JavaPolis and the future (Hope to come back next year). To make a long story short - these are the central messages I took with me from James Goslings' keynote

Java is Fun
Closures are sexy
NetBeans is better than sex
..and something about when we last had an erection during presentation (maybe I got that wrong ;-) - perhaps I should replay the video)

Following this session we had a onverview about the things going on with OpenJDK - given from
Mark Reinhold. Pretty much is obviously in work - but lawyers aren't always helpful. But they are pretty sure to get all this encumbered stuff sorted out and a JDK7 project in OpenJDK has officially been started.

For lunch we had some hotdogs - so more lightweight food today.

The afternoon started with a further UI centric presentation Filthy Makeover by Chet Haase. It covered his Filthy Rich Client and Extreme GUI Makeover presentations and show some real slick things you can do with gradients and other Java2D effects. With this done a more project management session was on the agenda - Scrum in practice for non-believers. I hoped that this may turn me into a real believer - but it seems I am staying a skeptic for a bit longer since it does not seem to work for all projects. You have to have at least the right customer. The Future of Computing Panel was a fun thing to watch - the "Java Rock Stars" taking turns on picking at each other - felt quite familiar ;-)

Then there were two interesting BOFS concerning new language features for Java - Neal Gafter talking about the current state of his closure specification and implementation. It is fairly complete and can be download here. Give it a try and find out yourself if you love it or hate it. Afterwards Stephen Colebourne provided some infos on his new project which allows easy access to integrate new features into javac - for trying new things. You can find more info here. Afterwards we just called it a day and had some nice chatting over our free beer.

I forgot to tell you about the videos. All presentations are recorded and will be free available via parleys.com. So stay tuned - I think there was no time frame given.

JavaPolis 2007 - Day 2

2007-12-11T15:45:00.000-08:00

Day two was the day of RIA - if you believed the session titles.

But before the sessions started we did a quick walk around the exhibition area. This contained a short stop at the Sun booth for collecting the appropriate t-shirt "May the Source be with you". A more thorough investigation is on the todo list for the next days.

We started with the Swinging RIA presentation (after having had breakfast), which included a nice demonstration of the power of the Beans Binding Framework and the Swing Application Framework provided from Richard Bair. Jeanette Winzenburg added some information on the current state of SwingX components and the challenges getting this to work in most natural way. Finally - for the first session - Chet Haase demonstrated the brand new Project Scene Graph (aka Scenario), which is a spin off from the JavaFX implementation. The project is currently in a really early early alpha state - so be warned, but the demonstrations shown were really impressive, but sadly it seems that they are still not available for download - maybe they may appear here some time later on (maybe we can find out more from Chet Haase tomorrow - or is it already today - time is running that fast if you are having fun).

After lunch there was a session about JavaFX - it was a lot of stuff that Jim Weaver put into his presentation. He tried to cover it all - from benefits using a declarative statically typed language to differences between the compiled and interpreted language.

So this was the bigger part of the day, but there was still more to come - a presentation about Ivy and short introduction on task oriented development (as supported by Mylyn) . The latter was a bit too Eclipse oriented - but this was to be expected from an Eclipse Evangelist.

Finally there was a quite interesting BOF hosted by Trolltech about QT. They gave some quite nice insights (you wouldn't believe why the name was chosen or the reason for using the prefix Q) on the QT history and has some demos showing the new Java API for QT (actually this seems to be some kind of automatic generated access layer).

Since tomorrow will be a very packed day - James Gosling, Mark Reinhold, Chet Haase, Neil Gafter, Bruce Eckel, Ola Bini - stay tuned for more info from JavaPolis 2007.

If you are missing some nice pics from todays sessions - there will be more pictures coming.

JavaPolis 2007 - Day 1

2007-12-10T08:32:00.000-08:00

An interesting Day 1 of JavaPolis is nearing its end. So to get it all in sequence - first things first - breakfast. After having walked to the Metropolis from our flat this was a real good start into the day

After having had a real good breakfast (as you can imagine) we got to the conference rooms and I have to admit that the location is astonishing for such a conference. See for yourself

First session I attended today was The Zen of Agile Management.
This was quite an experience finding about all those things going wrong in software development and how to achieve a better process. After having lunch there was a real fun session with Brian Leonard and Oliver Nutter presenting JRuby and the Ruby on Rails integration in NetBeans 6.0, really impressive - and they were hurling t-shirts into the audience (the brand new NetBeans 6). Afterwards there was a session on code generation on a large scale using Freemarker and a presentation fomr Koshuke Kawaguchi on Hudson, a continous build integration server

For the short intervals between the session there was enough infrastructure to keep all the developers happy

The BOFs were very interesting as well. First a presentation about the OSGi approach (always a challenge for a NetBeans addict) and an astonishing presentation from the vice president of GigaSpace R&D about distributed systems, agile development and the special challenges. After a short discussion afterwards we called it day and went of for dinner, a Duvel and some more discussions about SCRUM, agility and the challenges of software development.

That was a lot for day 1 at the JavaPolis. More to come tomorrow.

JavaPolis -The trip to Antwerp

2007-12-09T14:56:00.000-08:00

Early sunday morning the trip to Antwerp started with a boat tour from Friedrichshafen with "The Katamaran"

to Konstanz

Then the train to Zürich

and via airplane to Brussels

From there once again by train to Antwerp

Finally we got to the Metropolis

There we already met some nice guys....

Stay tuned for more news from Javapolis

JavaPolis 2007

2007-12-07T13:18:00.000-08:00

JavaPolis 2007 the first adventure - follow this blog closely to find out how to get there and for news on what is going at the Metropolis in Antwerp.

The journey starts on Sunday ;-)

Hope to meet you there.

New NetBeans Blog

2007-12-07T13:14:00.001-08:00

So here we go again - a new Blog on NetBeans and Java. These are the new adventures of NetBeans 6 starship - going where no IDE has gone before.