Wednesday June 18, 2008
Wednesday June 18, 2008
Sun Tech Days, Day 1, Manila, 2008
It was a funny day where many things happened, i.e., day 1 of Sun Tech Days 2008 in Manila, Philippines. Most of the day I was at the NetBeans booth in this sumptious hotel where we're all staying and where the conference is being held. The cool thing about that was that I was able to prepare my presentation for 17.30 this afternoon, named "Using NetBeans for Your Existing Projects", while sitting at the booth. (I also did quite a bit of work for Javalobby while there.) The problem statement is that it's easy for NetBeans enthusiasts to say "just download NetBeans and start it up, then you'll be able to use it right away". However, in the real world, you have existing projects, rather than new ones. How can you bring those existing projects into NetBeans (or use them from within NetBeans)? That's what my presentation was about and here it is:
using-netbeans-for-existing.pdf
About 500 attended (the photo would have been almost the same as yesterday's, so I didn't make one) and I gave away several of Ruth's "100 NetBeans IDE Tips & Tricks" books (which were in great demand), as well as some t-shirts, to those who answered my obscure questions correctly. Two t-shirts were given away to people who got the anagram in the Anagram Game correct (one of the answers was "unabstentious", which is a bizarre word in every sense). I showed how the NetBeans Ant-based project system works, how to work with JUnit sources in Eclipse and NetBeans, via the Eclipse importer, how to work with Spring (or any web application) in Eclipse and NetBeans, how to import an application (JEdit) that already has a build.xml file, as well as how to work with a Maven project in Eclipse and NetBeans. The argument wasn't so much that "you should move from Eclipse to NetBeans", but "both Eclipse and NetBeans are great tools, and this is how you can benefit from the best of both of them".
Wen Huang, from the Sun marketing area, was also at the booth. He told Tim and I about the fact that Eclipse's latest release comes with "breadcrumbs" for opened documents. That I remembered seeing (and liking) in IntelliJ:
Tim immediately set about creating the same functionality for NetBeans IDE. His version consists of JLabels, but I've been playing with JCheckBoxes instead:
And here's the two of us in a mock pose, i.e., the pose that one typically finds in brochures that include computers:
We met lots of nice people, some of whom wanted to be in a photo with us or get our autographs, which was always fun:
I talked to Chuk Munn Lee for the first time in forever. He's one of my favorite Sun speakers. I attended part of his Groovy/Grails session (the only session other than my own that I attended today). He said he knew about the new NetBeans support for Groovy/Grails but that he hasn't had the time to play with it yet. I'm hoping that his next Groovy/Grails session will include NetBeans tooling. By the way, Chuk doesn't think that Holland has much of a chance in the Eurocup. Seems like he thinks the first two MASSIVE victories were flukes or something. He does fancy Portugal, though. His prediction is Portugal-Holland in the final, after I spent some minutes persuading him of Holland's newly found brilliance. I mean, come on, 3-0 against Italy followed by 4-1 against France. How can you argue about that?
The evening ended with Tim and me at the hotel bar, listening to a skimpily dressed trio of girls (backed by three guys on drums and guitar) singing selected items from the genre that includes "smooth operator" and "as soon as forever is through, I'll be over you". I made a picture but it ended up looking a bit dubious so I decided not to post it here. :-)
Jun 18 2008, 08:05:12 AM PDT Permalink
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