Octavian Tanase's Weblog: In the pursuit of development 2.0

NetBeans has momentum. The relentless innovation has been paying off.
While staying true to Java developers, recent innovations in NetBeans IDE broaden its support for dynamic languages including Ruby, JavaScript, and now PHP.
NetBeans is poised to be the IDE of choice for next-generation web developers.

What is on tap in this release? Lot's, here are some of the highlights:

• JavaScript
• Support makes NetBeans an even more compelling IDE for web development. Strengths include editor support, refactoring, and quick fixes/semantic checks.
•  Makes use of the powerful infrastructure implemented for Ruby support that's been so well received by the community.
• Debugger support will be available on update center as a preview.

Early adopters of NetBeans have the option to point to the development update center and get additional plugins which are under development. The overwhelming # of users should *not* bother, since some of the modules are under active development and likely unstable. However if one wants to live on the bleeding edge, here is what you can do:

From the NetBeans IDE menu: Tools | Plugins | ... Settings | ... Add | 

http://deadlock.netbeans.org/hudson/job/javadoc-nbms/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/nbbuild/nbms/updates.xml.gz
 

 

 

I remember, while growing up and going through school, having to study for quizzes. Some were scheduled, others impromptu, but no matter what was the circumstance, I recall having a knot in my stomach in anticipation of the results. Most of the quizzes that I take nowadays have to do with testing my knowledge and the stakes don't seem that high. I look at the new quiz sponsored by the NetBeans team as an opportunity to keep in touch with the language that I came to love and challenge my technical skills.

It is worth mentioning that participating in this quiz can be rewarding in more ways than just stimulating your intelligence and helping you learn. Prizes are awarded weekly and you can win more than once. My only problem is that I am not a legal resident of India and hence I am not eligible to win

To take the quiz, just download NetBeans, use its update center to download the plugin (Tools | Plugins  from the main menu and then look the "quiz" under Avaliable Plugins) and you are ready to go. To re-launch the quiz, use Help | NetBeans Quiz.
 

Blogs are all about sharing, opinion and participation in the new social media dynamic, where the news are made by random folks, and not only the journalism graduates.
The NetBeans blogging contest is just that - an attempt to get folks to evaluate the latest support for JavaScript and the Spring framework, that comes in the NetBeans 6.1 beta. If you are adventurous, try the NetBeans 6.1 nightly build, where you can get a preview of the new design for RESTful web services support and PHP. It is still work in progress, but worth while for the folks looking for the bleeding edge.

NetBeans 6 just won the Jolt award for the best Development Environment.
This is excellent news for the NetBeans community, partners and engineering team.

If you've read my previous post on charting for web applications using jMaki, here is another installment on the Ajax capabilities of NetBeans. The 6.1 beta release (due to be released tomorrow 3/6/08) improves on the previous feature set and as far as JavaScript support is concerned, it kicks butt!

So what's on tap?

 

• JavaScript support in the editor - if you make heavy use of JavaScript in your web apps, NetBeans 6.1 brings the language to life
  
• Better support for MySQL - ability to register MySQL servers
  
• Performance improvements - especially in startup and project open visual JavaServer Facess application development
• Support for PHP is still experimental (available on the update center), so I suggest for folks to wait until early April to kick the tires of the PHP support
  

Check out this wiki page for some more details on the Ajax related functionality as well the new & noteworthy wiki on NetBeans 6.1 beta.

 

You'll be surprised how easy is to build a web application that charts data using the jMaki framework and NetBeans 6. So let's assume that you want to plot the % of revenue an organization receives every month of an year. A pie chart would likely be your best bet:

So how does one build such a chart? These few steps should get you started:

• First of all you'll need to get install the jMaki plugin from the NetBeans update center (Tools | Plugins | Available Plugins | jMaki Ajax support)
  
• Next get the corresponding charting library - a java.net project and install it in NetBeans (Tools | Palette | Add jMaki Library)
  
• Create a new web project and select the jMaki framework in the project wizards dialog
  
• Drag and drop the "Google Pie"component from the palette (look for a section called - jmaki-charting-widget ...) after the <body> tag in the index.jsp default page of the project
  
• Deploy the application and customize as needed

If you are not a Java guy and want to achieve the same results in a PHP project and application use the following code snippet to build the chart.

<?php
  addWidget( array(
                         "name" =>"jmaki.charting.plotkit.pie",
                         "args"=>"{colorScheme:2}",
                         "value"=>"{
                   xAxis : {
                   title : 'Months',
                   labels : [{ label : 'January'},
                             { label : 'February'},
                             { label : 'March'},
                             { label : 'April'},
                             { label : 'May'},
                             { label : 'June'},
                             { label : 'July'},
                             { label : 'August'},
                             { label : 'September'},
                             { label : 'October'},
                             { label : 'November'},
                             { label : 'December'}
                             ]
                             },
                             data : [
                  {label : 'Set 1', values : [25, 45, 25, 45, 50, 25, 35, 25, 25, 20, 35, 45] },



                  ]
              }");
?>

The NetBeans team just released support for one of the most  popular version control systems (VCS) in the  enterprise - ClearCase. At this point the ClearCase plugin is only available in the current development version of NetBeans: 6.1. Since the support is still experimental, the plugin is available on the update center. In order to try this out, one would have to get a NetBeans dev build.

The details regarding the support for ClearCase can be found here. Rouman blog has even more details.

In my case, I gave NetBeans 6.1 a try for a completely different reason. It is the improved support  for JavaScript. In the previous versions of NetBeans, JavaScript was minimally supported.  Starting last week, I've noticed dramatic improvement. I'll keep a close watch on that and report back.

Who would have thought that NetBeans will be building tooling for the Eclipse developer community? Runtime tooling that is. I'll explain shortly. The two communities have been engaged in a healthy competition for the hearts and minds of developers at large, however the focus has been the "design time". One could consider one of the new NetBeans projects as a play for a much broader audience, including developers that are still using Vi/Emacs for their development and are not currently using an IDE.
 

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In a previous blog I mentioned that I installed VMWare Fusion 1.1 and Linux (Ubuntu 7.10 - Gutsy). Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE) was the next OS that I looking to install (as I was looking to compare the respective SAMP and LAMP stacks). If all this worked out OK, I would get rid of my Parallels installation and stick with VMWare. This is not the first time I've experimented with SXDE, and was curious if the Solaris folks have made more progress.

The answer is yes, however there is more to be done, especially since Ubuntu sets the bar so high. Here are the details

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I gave VMWare Fusion a try. Smooth install, didn't have to consult the documentation. I also took the opportunity to get Ubuntu Gutsy. As always, the Ubuntu installation is sweet - it just works. I had Vista license, however someone decided to make it theirs and I don't have the media any more.

Once Gutsy was installed, I started looking for development tools and add on packages. apt-get does the trick, but you need to know what's available. The easiest way is to use "Applications | Add/Remove" menu, however many packages are not in Universe and you'll have to look on the website for a list packages.

To my disappointment, NetBeans 6 is still not available for Gutsy and I had to settle for NetBeans 5.5. I'll have to see if this version will be good enough for what I am trying to do - look into database migration issues. I know that the NetBeans folks were shooting for Hardy. I'll have to double check with Honza.
 

Sun's recent announcement to acquire MySQL, reminded me that I actually have a copy of MySQL installed on my Mac. I've done that a long time ago, when I was experimenting with Wordpress (the blogging software) and to easily deal with the compatibility issues of MySQL & PHP, I installed the MAMP software.

I knew that NetBeans bundles the Connector/J JDBC driver, so I wanted to find out how easy would it be to point NetBeans to the MySQL database used when I originally setup Wordpress.

In a nutshell, it was an easy process. I used the "New Connection" wizard on the "Services" (Database node) tab in the IDE and just used the custom port (8889) used by Wordpress, rather than the default one used by MySQL (3306). As it is always the case, a screen shot tells the story better.

I recently experimented with Ruby on Rails, using NetBeans 6. My previous attempt with RoR was about 9 month ago and I remember having to do a lot of curls and makes to get everything configured. Getting started with NetBeans has been very easy, since there is a distribution (19 MB download) for Ruby developers and the IDE also included the runtime.

Given that I know Tor, the main architect and implementor of Ruby/JRuby tooling in NetBeans and I recently googled his name and Ruby. I found this excellent video that got me up to speed in no time. It turns out that the video has been extremely successful - as of 1/28/08 it had more that 100K downloads. Very impressive.

 

As a developer using NetBeans you can get a variety of help in using the IDE or learning how to extend and build on the platform. Historically most of the users have been using the mailing list as a resource to get their questions answered. Developers involved in key projects that need enterprise level support and services  should be able to purchase professional support from Sun. Most recently, the support team has been publishing a blog where the NetBeans community members could go for tips on how to effectively use NetBeans and become more productive.

 

The NetBeans team just released another patch for NetBeans 6, to the community. The latest patch includes an update of the JavaServer Faces components library (codenamed - Woodstock). The update improves the runtime performance of the library.

If you want to nominate more bugs to be included in future patches, just take a look at the wiki page.

NetBeans sources will be moving shortly to a different version control system - Mercurial. The details of the migration are detailed here. Tonda is in charge, so send him feedback. If you are not familiar with distributed version control systems, take a look at this article. Here is how I configured my own instance of NetBeans 6 to use Mercurial and point to the new repository.

Nota bene: I am running on a Mac - Leopard + Java 1.5.0_13.

• Get Mercurial (it will require Python)
• Python 2.5.1 for Macintosh OS X
• Mercurial 0.9.5-bc475d1f74ca for OS X 10.5 (supported version is 0.9.4)
  
• Install the Mercurial plugin from the NetBeans update center (Tools | Plugins) and get familiar with the documentation.
  
• Point NetBeans (assuming that you are using NetBeans to build and develop) to the repository (Versioning | Mercurial | Clone Other ...): http://hg.netbeans.org/main
• If you are looking for instructions on how to clone a repository from the command line, I found this document to be useful
  

If you run into trouble, write to the team (nb-hg-migration@sun.com) to get support.

One way to gage success of product or technology is to look at the job trends that call for relevant skills. Honza recently pointed me to this site, that helps professionals search for jobs. I was pleasantly surprised to see the recent surge of jobs that call for NetBeans. I suspect that the industry has realized by now that NetBeans the best IDE for Ruby, Web Services and Swing application development.

 

Frankfurt, the fifth largest German city, started as a Roman settlement, about 2000 years ago. Lots has happened since. Here are some historical (and other ) highlights:

• By 794 Charlemagne presided over an imperial assembly and church synod
• From 855 the German kings and emperors were elected in Frankfurt and crowned in Aachen
• Became a Reichsstadt in 1372

• During the Napoleonic Wars Frankfurt was occupied or cannonaded several times by French troops. It nevertheless still remained a free city until the total collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in 1805/6
  

• NetBeans 6 ships in Dec '07
• Get Inspired
• Get Started
• Learn More
• Get Involved 

NetBeans started as a Java IDE, one of the first open source projects at Sun. It was long time ago ('99). Since then, it has evolved rapidly, especially in the last couple of years and became more than an IDE. It is also a platform. In addition , NetBeans has become a delivery vehicle for cool technologies from Sun and the Open Source (e.g. JRuby, GlassFish, Tomcat). Some people may argue that, lately, NetBeans has become choice IDE for Ruby developers. How about the support for C/C++ and UML? It is all there.

 

Nota Bene:

• Download NetBeans 6
• Learn more
• Community - get involved or get help via mailing lists
• Plugin portal - browse for cool plugins written by NetBeans enthusiasts

 
 

 

Web Services have become synonymous with interoperability (A "feature" demanded by the customers that need to make both .NET and Java, IT investments). There are couple of approaches to exposing functionality as a web service. The more established one is using SOAP & WSDL and the "newer" Representational State Transfer (REST) style web services. Of course tooling has not been far behind the trends and all the respectable vendors have some support for web services. JSR 311 has been coming along in describing an API developers can use to build RESTful web services.

In NetBeans 6, you'll find very useful functionality that enables you to build and test a RESTful web service. The best way is to start with with short tutorial. To learn more about the JAX-RS API, take a look at this blog.

By the way, since RESTful Web Services support in Java is still an evolving technology, the tooling resides on the NetBeans update center. Just use the Tools | Plugins menu and look for "RESTfull Web Services" in the Web & Java EE category. Once you install the plugin, you'll also get a few samples that will help you get started.

Get busy!
 

Alexei and the team have been working on a PHP plugin for NetBeans 6. I am hoping they'll be able to release it on the NetBeans 6 update center in early December. The bits will be young, beta quality at best, however I am experimenting with PHP support in NetBeans and I like what I see so far.

The first thing one may do is make sure to get a runtime stack that supports the deployment of PHP applications. Given that many of these apps will have a database backend, this calls for something like MySQL. You'll also need a matching web server, and apache comes to mind . Here are few easy steps to get started:

 

1. SSH Server (for remote access): sudo apt-get install ssh
2. Database Server: sudo apt-get install mysql-server

3. Apache HTTP Server: sudo apt-get install apache2

4. PHP for Apache HTTP Server: sudo apt-get install php5

5. MYSQL for Apache HTTP Server: sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql
sudo apt-get install php5-mysql

Once you install the PHP plugin in NetBeans, use the  "Services" tab to configure the document root for Apache web server installation. On my Ubuntu installation the document root is /var/www/apache2-default. You will likely have to change the permission for the document root, since NetBeans is usually install in user mode and apache required sudo.

To test everything, just create a new PHP Project in the IDE and add the following line of code: phpInfo(); in the default file. Next deploy you page and in your browser look for something like: http://localhost/apache2-default/index.php 

One of the typical requirements for a web application developer is to build a secure, identity enabled web application. NetBeans supports this usecase either by employing the bundled JavaServer Faces components, or a combination of JSP & HTML. On the backend the user can either use container based authentication, a database or some custom authentication mechanism.

Let's explore what one would have to do to build the a login page in NetBeans. In order to speed up the development, one can choose the visual application features (File | New Project | web | ... "Next" in the first page of the wizard | check the "Visual JSF" option and voila you have a page and a palette full of useful components that you can just drag and drop them in the form (page).

Further my requirement will be to center the group of components in the page. This turned out to be a little tricky so here are some steps that one can follow to work around this NetBeans shortcoming:

1. Select the page in the designer and in the property pane switch to Flow Layout
2. Remove style attribute.
3. In the JSP view of the page, use  <center> and <br> tags to adjust layout.

This works at both design time and run time. Here is an example of the a form that uses a couple of labels, textfields and button to submit the form.

<webuijsf:form binding="#{Page1.form1}" id="form1">
                       <center>
                           <webuijsf:label binding="#{Page1.label1}" id="label1"  text="Label"/>
                           <webuijsf:textField binding="#{Page1.textField1}" id="textField1" />
                           <br/>
                           <br/>
                           <br/>
                           <webuijsf:label binding="#{Page1.label2}" id="label2"  text="Label"/>
                           <webuijsf:textField binding="#{Page1.textField2}" id="textField2" />
                           <br/>
                           <br/>
                           <br/>
                           <webuijsf:button binding="#{Page1.button1}" id="button1"  text="Button"/>
                       </center>
                       <br/>
                   </webuijsf:form>

Many thanks to Jayashri for helping me work out a solution.

Perhaps in a the next installment I'll talk more about authentication and how to deploy on an https port using the Glassfish application server.

NetBeans ships beta 2 of the upcoming 6.0 release, today (10/22/07). New NetBeans users may want to start on the docs page, while current users could just download the bits to get the latest bug fixes. If you are new to Java start here, you'll see a variety of online courses - all using NetBeans. Also, I highly recommend subscribing to the mailing lists (NetBeans has developers around the world: St Petersburg - Russia, Prague - Czech Republic, and the US, you'll likely be able to get help around the clock).

You may be thinking of the 1969 music festival, but I'd like to draw your attention to some cool technology that is currently bundled with NetBeans 6 and shares the same famous name: Woodstock, a set of JavaServer Faces, Ajax enabled components. The design time behavior of the components inside of the IDE is very rich. You'll find them in a palette, have the ability to drag and drop them on a page, easily bind them to heterogeneous data sources: databases, Web Services, EJB's, collections, etc. Building a web application with a consistent look and feel is an exercise that only takes a few minutes.

One can also experience the components (the runtime behavior) outside the NetBeans development environment, by going the java.net project page. This is very cool, since you don't have to install anything to view the components or code review the implementation of the examples listed on the website.

Are you a NetBeans user? You may have not noticed that the main www.netbeans.org page has been translated in many languages. The other day I clicked the "Choose page language" drop down at the top of the page and I was impressed: Arabic, Czech (a given, since NetBeans originates from Prague), German, Greek, Spanish, Persian, Romanian (to my pleasant surprise) are just a few of the languages in the list. The really cool part is that most of the translation have been done by folks in the developers community.

There are other goodies if English is not your language of choice:

• Localized mailing list
• The NetBeans IDE is localized in Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Brazilian Portugese
• If you are into blogs, you may want to take a look at PlanetNetBeans.org, an aggregation of NetBeans related musings from all over the Blogosphere
  

If you are looking to participate to the growing community, take a look at this page. If you have any questions just email Janice or take a look at her blog.