Thursday May 17, 2007
Thursday May 17, 2007
DocBeans
When we wrote "Rich Client Programming: Plugging into the NetBeans Platform" (the 600 page must-read that is taking the New York bestseller list by storm), we wrote it in DocBook XML, using our own lightweight home-brewed tooling solution. I've blogged about this before and about how useful we found it. Tim (Boudreau) and Jesse (Glick) had created two NetBeans modules some time back and we simply installed them in some early build of 6.0 and hacked away at our chapters, then committed them to CVS, just like any other source file. There were some very powerful features to these modules, in particular the ability to generate HTML from an individual DocBook XML document or from the entire book, via one click of a menu item.
Now that the book is done, and the use of the DocBook modules has proven so effective, a few people within Sun are considering using them within other contexts. In these contexts, one can't really talk about "the DocBook modules" anymore, since that term is only meaningful to NetBeans developers. It makes more sense to talk about the whole product, which is a scaled-down version of NetBeans IDE plus the two DocBook modules, as a product in itself. In that sense, the fact that it provides support for local history is just as relevant as its DocBook-HTML generation facility, because the end user sees the product as one whole, not as a collection of modules. Currently, this is how the end product, tentatively called "DocBeans", looks:
There's also the possibility of us open sourcing this product, possibly on java.net, so that the community at large can benefit from it and so that the product can be supported via that route. Because, after all, that's the main downside to choosing an internal solution over an external vendor... you need to provide support (e.g., bug fixes and feature enhancement requests) yourself! But, aside from this concern, DocBeans seems like an interesting avenue to explore.
In other news. Thanks for all the tips and tricks for setting up TwinView on Ubuntu 7.04! I can't announce the winner yet, because I first need to try the solutions, which means hooking my laptop up to a secondary display, which requires such a display, which means booking a room where all that equipment is found. So it may take some time, but in due course the rightful winner will be proclaimed and rewarded with the promised postcard!
May 17 2007, 10:59:52 AM PDT Permalink
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