Wednesday March 12, 2008
Wednesday March 12, 2008
Sun Tech Days, Day 1, Johannesburg, 2008
Several highlights today—presenting VisualVM during Jeff Jackson's keynote speech; participating in the "demo showcase" shootout with Sun evangelists (during which time I showed off the Swing Application Framework tooling that creates a database-accessing Swing application, ending with the always-funny crowd-pleasing Napkin look and feel); the many (very many) interactions with users; the questions; the answers; the new things I learned about NetBeans IDE. (By the way, about the "demo showcase" and the demo during Jeff Jackson's keynote—you would be surprised how much planning and stress and planning and stress goes into those. But in the end, everything went really very smoothly.)
"What," you ask. "What new things did you learn about NetBeans IDE?" Well, firstly I learned that if you want to change the font size of EVERYTHING (not just the editor font or the font of the Output window), you need to not only set "--fontsize 24" (or some other number), on Linux and Solaris, but you ALSO need to set the look and feel to something different (or only to) the MetalLookAndFeel. On Windows this is not necessary. On the other OS's, you need to set (in addition to the font size) something like "--laf javax.swing.plaf.MetalLookAndFeel". I discovered this together with one of the speakers for tomorrow. We ended up Googling for the answer (him on OpenSolaris and me on Ubuntu), because he wanted all his UI to be larger, not just fonts. And by setting the look and feel to Metal, his problem was solved, and it also worked on my Ubuntu operating system.
The second thing I learned (directly from a user) is that you can press F2 over a node or some Swing component in the editor to change its name (or, in the case of the Swing component, its "text" property). Very small tip but very useful. Just press F2 (meaning that you don't need to leave the keyboard) over something you want to rename and then you can immediately rename it.
I had so many discussions with NetBeans users (and also non-NetBeans users) that I can't remember exactly what was said anymore. One of the first conversations I had was with someone who told me that, despite his being an ardent NetBeans fan, his company had chosen IntelliJ. Why? For three reasons, of which I can only remember two. The first was that IntelliJ has better XML support. Hard to argue with that. There's great code completion and hyperlinking there. I happen to know for a fact that it wouldn't be hard to create hyperlinks in our own XML files, if we were to choose to prioritize that. I noticed in my recent sojourns into IntelliJ that you can hyperlink from a tag to its DTD or schema definition, as well as to any class declared in the XML tags. That wouldn't be hard to achieve in NetBeans IDE at all. Basically, whenever you would want to be able to link somewhere, NetBeans IDE should let you do so. The second reason they chose IntelliJ was because of TestNG support. We have at least one plugin for that, but its level of maturity seems a bit uncertain to me.
I gave out a few of our small ration of "Rich Client Programming" books. I also arranged to meet with a potential customer on Friday, after Sun Tech Days is over. I spent a lot of time at the NetBeans booth and did many small demos, a surprising numer in the NetBeans Platform area. I heavily advertized the NetBeans Platform Certified Training Course, telling people to write to users@edu.netbeans.org if they want to have a free NetBeans training course. I said that if 20 to 30 (at least) of people from this part of the world were to write asking for the course, a few of us would come from Prague (or arrange for others) to deliver the course.
So, it was a pretty good day. Tomorrow I'll be joining one of Sang Shin's hands on labs. I'll show VisualVM again and explain how (and why) to create plugins to extend VisualVM. That should be fun. I started creating an apisupport wizard that will create the stubs for a new VisualVM plugin. Not sure if I can finish it on time, but that could be pretty useful in pulling people over the threshold to developing plugins for VisualVM.
Mar 12 2008, 11:55:41 AM PDT Permalink
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