This is going to be a busy week for Sun in Second Life, so if you
couldn't make it to the conference you can attend talks with various
Sun speakers to hear some of what they are sharing at the conference. While covering various sessions here at the 2008 JavaOne Conference for the Java Today paper, I'm also keeping an eye on the coverage that we're doing in Second Life. Today when I dropped in, Heidi Dailey had Roman Strobl in the seat talking about the NetBeans IDE.
Roman talked about the many features of the NetBeans IDE, such as code completion for various languages, language support like PHP and Ruby, and UML support. Then the audience was able to ask questions about special features.
It seems NetBeans does just about everything these days, including writing most of the code. So, for new Java developers, he recommends that you learn about design patterns. He says there are many books out there on the topic that you can read. In spite of the fact that NetBeans will write so much code, you can still potentially put together a sloppy application or one that does not scale well. He also recommends looking at the best practices for building web applications by studying tutorials on on the Java EE platform.
Some of the areas in web applications development that you need to understand if you're using Java technologies for web application development is JavaServer Pages. The web application is created in two ways in NetBeans and that is the visual and the code. You can use JavaServer Faces technology through drag and drop to create the user interface, but you can also get to CSS code for further modifications. This provides several tools to web site designers.
One of the questions directed at Roman also concerned UML support. The NetBeans IDE has great UML support that allows you to design applications using a standard modeling language. You then can generate source code from the UML model and update the model from changes made in their source code. With NetBeans UML Modeling, you can create eight UML diagrams: Activity diagram, Class diagram, Collaboration diagram, Component diagram, Deployment diagram, Sequence diagram, State diagram, and Use Case diagram. You can align diagrams visually in the Diagram Editor.
Additionally, Roman talked about upcoming features that we can look forward to, such as additional jMaki widgets. Currently, there are many handy jMaki, Yahoo, and Dojo widgets, and now we can look forward to additional widgets in future releases. These widgets make pulling in services as easy as drag and drop.
I'm looking forward to some of the upcoming talks in Second Life this week. Be sure to check the schedule.
All inworld events will be held at the JavaOne Theater at Sun's SIMs in Second Life.
Dana Nourie (aka, Dana Oceanlane), Sun Microsystems, staff writer java.sun.com
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