Friday February 09, 2007
Friday February 09, 2007
Interview: "Why I want to move to the NetBeans Platform"
I corresponded with Usman, who is a software architect at a telecom company in London, today. Usman had written to one of the NetBeans mailing lists asking about the NetBeans Platform. I asked him a few questions and, after receiving his permission, decided to post the resulting correspondence as a blog entry:
- Me: Am I correct in understanding that you want to move an existing Swing application to the NetBeans Platform? Can you say something about the background of what you are planning to do?
Usman: Let me tell you a bit about the company and of course about the application (in fact it's an application suite) that we will be porting to NetBeans.
We provide products to manage and monitor telecom traffic. The suite comprises products that deal with traffic monitoring, analysis, provisioning, rating & billing and planning.
The existing Swing client allows us to dynamically and remotely manage users and their access to various parts of the systems. The backend is made of a CDR (Call Data Record) processing engine that receives the input feed from telecom switches, the rating engine to put the price on each phone call, summarizer to generate summarized information.
The data is mainly stored in MySQL (or ORACLE) database. Entity and Session beans sitting inside JBoss provide the DB connection. We use SOAP for transporting the information from backend to the front client.
- Me: So what are you expecting the NetBeans Platform to do for you?
Usman: I believe NetBeans can revolutionize our product suite. Currently there are products that are in prototype stage and we are working hard to get them out. We actually have clients lined-up for them. The big problem that we are facing with our current framework is extensibility. It is extremely difficult to introduce the new applications without refactoring the majority of the system. The current system is simply incapable of catering to our new needs. The result is, the prototypes are still waiting to get completed.
Likewise, I can list all sorts of issues with our proprietary framework. Majority of these issues will be addressed with NetBeans on board.
Another very big advantage is this will set us free from having to train new developers about our existing framework (not to mention having to maintain all the study material and documentation for current framework). Of course, they will then have to learn NetBeans. Most of the time they already are using the IDE and so are aware of the ground rules. And of course it is much better to learn from a worldwide community constantly improving the platform than learning about an old framework (and most of the time our documentation is out of date).
This is something we have learned over the years. The look of your front-end is important. While looking at the products, clients look at the front-end and they think that is what they are paying for. It goes without saying that porting to NetBeans means getting a rich GUI for free.
- Me: Yes, the NetBeans Platform is exactly what you want, it can cater to all of these needs. But, why the NetBeans Platform? There are other platforms for applications, you know! Why don't you try the Eclipse RCP, for example?
Usman: Since we made the decision to port the systems to NetBeans, I have been reading articles about comparisons between the Eclipse RCP and NetBeans Platform. Here are the arguments:
- Application portability is everything for us. Ability to look at traffic stats from anywhere in the world is one of our selling points. Hence comes the classic case of Swing vs AWT (in the case of Eclipse, SWT). I personally think Swing is ahead in this race. And honestly, having worked with Swing all these years, we would like to stick to it.
- The wizards supplied with NetBeans to help develop the application makes it surprisingly easy to set anyone well ahead. These little automations are excellent for companies like us who are trying to deliver products as soon as possible.
- The bundled GUI builder Matisse has captivated a few of our developers (even the backend guys are ready to try some frontend stuff using Matisse). If we select Eclipse that will go away :(
Wow, cool answers, thanks Usman! Looking forward to seeing how this porting adventure develops. Hopefully we'll find out in the coming period.
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Feb 09 2007, 08:19:43 AM PST Permalink
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