Wednesday December 05, 2007
Wednesday December 05, 2007
YouTubifying NetBeans IDE
I'm learning about NetBeans mobility functionality via YouTube movies, which I am watching inside the IDE while developing a mobile application. Below, you see the head of the Mobility team, Martin Ryzl, introducing a presentation, where he goes through lots of slides and demos about mobile development in the IDE (the movie was loaded when I clicked in the list shown in the top right of the screenshot below, which is a list of YouTube movies that match the search string 'NetBeans' that I typed into the text field to the left of the list):
The only real stumbling block (or 'challenge') standing between us and having this YouTube integration is... lack of native browser support in the IDE. Once we have that, the above will be possible, assuming we can bundle the YouTube Data Library (which works under the hood to let the user send queries to YouTube) with the IDE. I read somewhere that JDK 7 will fix the heavyweight/lightweight component conflict, which would simplify native browser integration. In the end, I envision situations like this—I would be designing a mobile application layout while looking at the slide (and listening to the presenter) that tells me how to do so:
I have an image in my head of Roumen, in the YouTubePlayer window, literally pointing with his finger at different parts of the IDE (kind of like Clippy, basically), or turning his head and saying things like: "Above me, you see the Projects window. It shows the logical views of your projects. Now, click Ctrl-2..." And so on... (Of course, the window could be moved around and then such instructions would be meaningless. However, if we give clear instructions about the optimal position of the window, i.e., in the Navigator view, in my opinion, I think we'd be okay.)
At that stage, many of our tutorials could be movies made available via YouTube, rerouted to NetBeans IDE via the above functionality. Similarly, if we put http://www.netbeans.tv/ movies on YouTube, we could route them into the IDE as well. I imagine that one would be able to load movies into the IDE after setting filters in the Options window and specifying whether notifications should be received when new movies belonging to specified categories are uploaded to YouTube. We would then be using YouTube as a delivery mechanism for the NetBeans IDE learning environment. It would also let NetBeans IDE integrate even more closely with the broader NetBeans community, many of whom have NetBeans-oriented movies on YouTube already. (It would be a cool way of sharing tips and tricks, for example.) Looked at from another angle—we would be opening up NetBeans IDE to YouTube. To me, this seems like a Win/Win scenario for Sun and for Google.
Dec 05 2007, 04:59:23 AM PST Permalink
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