Finally! The 5.5 release is out. You can start download. It's more easy now after the site redesign. IMO, the netbeans.org is sexy again. What do you think?
I think that you will be interested in the new features of the trunk. I didn't try the new features yet. They are very well described in New and Noteworthy of Milestone 4.
New Features in M4
Mobility Deployment Manager - you can define a deployment type or every of your configuration. The management of the types should be easy and user friendly.
Flexible Build System and Project Customizer - Mobility Pack developers are nuts. They are working on flexible and customizable build system. You should be able to easilly add your build tasks to the main build process. Do you know how do they call it? LEGO.
Experimental Plugins - these are only experimental plugins to test the functionallity of the new Mobility Pack "lego build system". If you had problems with adding Blackberry emulator, MPowerPLayer emulator to MobPack or you wanted to have a library that you'd share between Java Me and Java SE projects then try the Experimentals plugins.
Code Snippets - that's feature that should save lot of work to developers. Drag'n'drop your very often used snippet of code and paste it into your source code. Look at a tutorial and the source code how to create your own snippets.
Some of the features aren't available in the build you have to build the module from Mobility Pack Sources and add it by yourself. I'd like to find a little bit of time to try it by myself...
I downloaded the Beta of "Sun Java Toolkit 1.0 for Connected Device Configuration" (CDC TK b)to test it with the new update of NetBeans Mobility Pack 5.5 for CDC Beta 2 (CdcPack). I was suprised how much it differs from the Sun Java Toolkit 1.0 for Connected Device Configuration Early Access (CDC TK EA) published before JavaOne this year.
The CDC TK EA supported Personal Profile 1.0/1.1 and AGUI. The CDC TK b supports only AGUI. That's interesting I was used to state where developerer were adding features in every new build not removing them.
Another thing that I noticed is that they removed the Editor from the CDC TK. They also changed the UI to follow something what I call "WTK style" (As user friendly as possible). The CDC TK is built on NetBeans Platform therefore its strange to not provide at least a simple editor to users. I know that I should say "Install Mobility Pack for CDC to have the Matisse, editor with code completion etc."... I know that they are focusing a different group of users. Probably some programmers used to vi. Wait! There is no vi on windows. Did I miss something?
Enough it's not my business. I cannot influence them. Only the users can. Unfortunatelly I don't know where you can report issues, enhancements. Hahaha, smart guys, no reports, no bugs, no negative feedback == only happy users.
There is an update of Mobility Pack for CDC. It is Beta2. The quality should be better than in the preview and update1 that were released a half of year ago. Please note that this Mobility Pack is meant for Connected Device Configuration.
There are significant improvements in usability of the product. The palette shows only the components that you can use on the particular platform that your project uses. Subset of Swing for AGUI. Subset of AWT for PP. No more confusions. There is bunch of propeties that you can set up for your project and application - UID, icon, certificate etc. You can deploy the application to your phone directly (works for SavaJe Jasper20 only).
It should work with following platforms:
Sun Java Toolkit 1.0 for Connected Device Configuration Beta
Sony Ericsson CDC Platform 1 Extension Package for the UIQ 3 SDK
Ricoh SDK/J
SavaJe
Nokia Series 80 Platform SDK
I tried it only on the CDC TK Beta, Nokia 80, SE, Ricoh. There are some screenshots at the end of the post.
The CDC/PP(AGUI) is more comfortable then just CLDC/MIDP. You can use the whole power of Matisse to design you application.
The bits are ready for download and testing. Last chance to report an serious issue... Only real showstoppers for the release will be fixed. NetBeans 5.5 will be here soon.
