Janice Campbell's Weblog: Localization & Netbeans

I am pleased and proud to announce that the Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese versions of NetBeans 6.1 are now available for download. A special thanks to the Sun Globalization team but especially to the TranslatedFiles community contributors for their support, collaboration and contributions.

View the story and download the bits.

Did you know that people are blogging about NetBeans in 13 (yes, THIRTEEN) languages on Planet NetBeans? More bloggers showed up as a result of the blogging contest.

You will find the names of the winners there, and as I mentioned previously, 50% are non-English blogs. It's a big win for non-native English speakers. I know you all like to work with English UI for the most part, but it's nice to know you can have technical discussions with your linguistic peers in a language that suits you.

I would like to thank the many judges who were not mentioned but who took time out of their busy schedules to honestly evaluate the blogs and help us consider the winners. Let me tell you something about a few of them (they gave me permission to brag about them).

Let's start with Portuguese because I'm sure all the Brazilian NetBeans bloggers and community know them: Vinicius Senger, Mauricio Leal and Felipe Gaúcho.

Vinicius is a long time Java developer who owns a training and certification company in Brazil. Additionally, he is a NetBeans DreamTeam member, JUG lead and Java Champion and frequent contributor to NetBeans and Java projects, to recognize just a few of his many accomplishments.

Mauricio is also a JUG lead and who recently got hired by Sun Learning Services. This Developer Community Maven was part of the NetBeans Latin America Tour part 1 (Brazil, Argentina, Chile...) with Bruno Souza, Tim Boudreau and a few others. If you saw the video on netbeans.tv, it looks like they did not get a lot of sleep on that tour!

And lastly, there is Felipe Vieira Silva (most know him as Gaúcho) who is Brazilian but lives in Switzerland. He is a JUG lead and Java Champion and you can read all about him on his own blog http://weblogs.java.net/blog/felipegaucho/.

Next blog: Meet the Spanish judges.

CONGRATULATIONS to all the NetBeans blog contest winners. The exciting news is that submissions were allowed in seven languages in addition to English (Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, French and Polish). In fact, there were even submissions in languages not approved in the contest rules, so it's a good sign that people like discussing NetBeans and technical topics in their own language.

Among the grand prize winners were submissions in Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese and Polish. That means, of the winners, 50% were NOT IN ENGLISH. So, blog on in your language; you have an audience.

Congratulations to Ding Liang, Diego Silva, Wagner Roberto dos Santos, Junji Takakura, Jacek Laskowski.

DAY ONE: COMMUNITYONE
I'm a few days behind in writing a blog or two about my experience at CommunityOne and JavaOne this year. Due to a dentist appointment, I missed the C1 opening session, and due to a concall, I missed the J1 opening! Thank goodness for webcasts. Oh, I forgot my camera too, so now I have to rely on others to send me the pictures we all posed for. I can't wait to see myself getting cozy with Juggy.

I spent most of the C1 day hanging out in the NetBeans sessions so I could meet colleagues, DreamTeamers, evangelists, and community people. All the what's new and cool stuff I had seen recently at the St. Petersburg Tech Days but it's fun to see the audience's positive reaction.

The Java Posse came by while some of us were at lunch. Love those cool hats! CEO Jonathan Schwartz wandered in and out of sessions and talked to the NetBeans crowd about the importance of community contributions, feedback, requirements and engagement.

In the afternoon, I attended the JUG leads session. They talked about growing their groups and keeping them alive and interesting. How to keep people joining and attending was a major issue for many of them. I spent my time trying to meet and greet the non-English speaking Java champions and leads. I finally got to meet Fabrizio from the NetBeans DreamTeam as well as others from Bulgaria, Brazil, Netherlands, Germany, the Philippines.

I also got to beef up my rusty Spanish by spending time with the "Chilean guys", former Sun Campus Ambassador Rodrigo Andueza and Sun Learning Services Juan Carlos Herrera. Hey! They brought me some fab Chilean wine and lapis lazuli gifts so I had to give them a plug!

Ruth Kusterer from the web team wrote a good article with some photos. Check them out. See if you can find me on this page: http://www.netbeans.org/community/articles/javaone/2008/netbeans-day-report.html.

DAY TWO: JAVAONE
I tried my best to get into any of the JavaFX sessions but they were filled to the gills. Sun employees cannot reserve places, so we had to stand in line for a long while, only to be rejected. I guess JFX was the hot topic this year. As I may be localizing it at some point, I wanted to get in on the scoop.

So, the rest of the day I hung out with the Java Champions and JUG guys at the java.net area. Daniel deOliveira informed me that the DF Brazil JUG had over 28 thousand members! I had NO idea. And, I found out about the project JEDI from the Philippine JUG members Rommel Feria and JP Petines, which creates free courseware for Philippine universities. Manfred Riem of the Utah JUG (and formerly of the NL JUG before relocating to the US) chatted with me again about our favorite topic: how to make the process for community contributed translations a piece of cake. I'll let you know if and when this problem is finally solved.

The C1 beerfest started after 6 pm and lasted until 8. Those of us who stayed behind instead of going to the JUG and Java Champion get-together were rewarded with a bottle of OpenSolaris "reserve champagne".