Book Review - NetBeans IDE 7 Cookbook

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 The chapter about JavaFX is already outdated, an introduction to mobile development is available.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

I am currently reviewing

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

Presenting Cool and Fun Sessions at JavaOne 2011

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

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

• NetBeans
• Scala
• JavaFX 2.0

there may some interesting blog posts in my queue.

Welcome back and stay tuned...

Bruno Souza joins NetBeans DreamTeam

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

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 2

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).

SQE Going Real Open Source

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.

Winning Duke's Choice and James Gosling's Keynote

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

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

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.

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

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

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!

Winner 2009: NetBeans

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

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

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

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 3 / How NetBeans Saved the Day

... 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 1

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 Action" 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.

SQE and Devoxx 2008

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 ...