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 The chapter about JavaFX is already outdated, an introduction to mobile development is available.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 3

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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.

Devoxx 2009 - Registration Open

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

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!

Devoxx 2009 is coming - early!

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

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 ;-)