Roumen's Weblog

NetBeans has come a long way - it's been quite a ride for me as a NetBeans evangelist. When I joined Sun in 2004 I remember NetBeans having a community with estimated size of approx. 50.000 connected users. Now in mid of 2008 we're at over 500.000 (see the map of NetBeans users - this includes only those who are connected and are not behind restrictive firewalls). If you do the math, this is about 10x growth in less than 4 years - NetBeans became one of the best development environments worldwide for all kinds of programming languages. It's been great to be a part of the success - I have to admit I became quite emotionally connected to NetBeans and had a wonderful time with NetBeans community. Due to all this, it is quite difficult for me to announce that...

I am moving on to the next challenge. My new role at Sun is the role of an OpenSolaris evangelist. I am moving together with my colleagues Brian Leonard, Gregg Sporar and my manager Judith Lilienfeld. I will keep this blog and write from time to time about NetBeans (which has just become my hobby :) - at any case if you want to follow what me and my team are up to, you can subscribe to our new group blog "The Observatory" which is all about OpenSolaris for end users and developers.

P.S. Thanks to all the great people in NetBeans community both outside of Sun and at Sun for all the fun I had with NetBeans - keep rocking!

The Groovy/Grails support has been added to the standard distribution of NetBeans. You can test it in the nightly build. Yes, that means that NetBeans 6.5 will ship including Groovy support! :)

Jazoon conference will happen in the week of June 23rd - I've been there last year and it was quite nice. We are doing a FREE NetBeans day event on Monday, here's the agenda. Note that I am going to discuss web development during the first presentation in case you'd miss this topic. Although the NetBeans event is free you need to register. Maybe you're undecided and you are not sure if the event is worth attending, in that case you can read a review of this week's NetBeans day in Ankara from an Eclipse user - the event is not only for NetBeans community but also for people who use other IDEs because we discuss many technology-oriented topics such as profiling, JPA, different desktop frameworks, Java ME,  JavaFX, etc. :)

If you ever wondered where the NetBeans users are located, here's your chance to find it: NetBeans active user map. This map is not live, but it is quite up-to-date. Great to see users at Mauritius, Hawai and other islands. Time to organize a NetBeans day on one of these islands? With 222 users on Mauritius, there's some potential :) Btw, the map doesn't show total number of NetBeans users because there are many developers in poor countries that are not pernamently connected to the internet and thus we don't count them.

Anyway, nice to see over half a million of connected users of NetBeans on one map. When I started working on NetBeans the number was about 50.000. 10x growth in less than 4 years, not bad!

NetBeans podcast is back:

NetBeans Podcast Episode #43 (45 min, size: 46.5 MB)

• 0:00 Why has it been so long since the last podcast?!? And an introduction of Geertjan and Lloyd
• 4:22 NetBeans IDE 6.1 was released! The multilanguage bits are available, as is the first set of patches.
• 15:50 NetBeans Day and JavaOne round-up: new and cool stuff, including the Pulse pen from Livescribe and the new browser plugin that is part of Java 6 update 10.
• 22:14 NetBeans IDE is now in the Ubuntu Universe
• 23:37 Enhancements to the NetBeans Plugin portal are now live
• 28:00 Upcoming events: Sun Tech Days Manila/NetBeans Deep Dive and NetBeans Day at Jazoon
• 30:00 NetBeans Innovator Grants project list
• 37:20 NetBeans Governance board elections - vote by June 9, 2008
• 38:09 Plugin of the podcast: JIRA plugin
• 38:53 RCP of the podcast: Prolog IDE
• 42:01 NetBeans Puzzler: If you think you know the answer to the new NetBeans Puzzler, send an email to nbpodcast at netbeans dot org. Put "NetBeans Puzzler" in the subject line. We will announce the prize winner on the next podcast - so send in an entry! Disclaimer: The deadline for this podcast's puzzler entries is Sunday, June 29, 2008 at 11:59 PM Greenwich Mean Time. If more than one correct entry is received then Geertjan will draw one winner at random. Sun employees are not eligible, void where prohibited by law, and we cannot send mail to restricted places. And remember, the questions might be getting harder, but the prizes are getting better. So send in an entry! You might win a prize like Roger Westerlund, shown below with his copy of Rich Client Programming.
• 46:53 Varun Nischal and Angad Singh are now working on improved XML Schema support

Greetings from Tel Aviv! Congrats to the local Sun team for organizing second round of the Java Tech Day, I delivered two presentations about NetBeans at the event - it's great to see so much interest in Java and NetBeans here. Even though Israel is not a large country by population (I believe the population is about 7 million), the room for keynotes was completely full - it happened in a place which is usually used for big weddings :). The Java ME development seems to be really active here - I noticed more interest in Java ME than in some other parts of the world.

Btw, If you're wondering where is the next episode of NetBeans podcast - both me and Gregg have been travelling a lot in past few weeks so we couldn't sync up (I confess it's my fault, not Gregg's). I decided to take a vacation in Israel, I'll visit Jerusalem and do some sightseeing, so we'll record it once I get back - during next week. So stay tuned! :)

Quick note: I just did a presentation with Arseniy Kuznetsov (NetBeans director) about NetBeans at FOSS camp. It was kind of cool to demo Matisse in front of people like Mark Shuttleworth :) I think the demos were well received and we also had a discussion about getting NetBeans into Main Ubuntu repository (it is now available in Ubuntu Universe). There seems to be a potential for NetBeans to become a really popular IDE among Linux developers - we support many languages they use. The main missing language seems to be Python - and as you probably know Sun hired two Python/Jython developers to work on that - so the future of Python support in NetBeans is very bright.

FOSS Camp was an unconference, actually we were the only presenters who were using a projector (sorry about that but it would be hard to draw features of the IDE on a flipchart :). I wonder how many of the Ubuntu guys noticed I delivered my presentation on OpenSolaris (Gnome looks almost identical on Linux and OpenSolaris). It was nice for a change to visit an unconference, it definitely has a more "human" atmosphere with more 2-way communication than we see at typical conferences. Maybe it's time for NetBeans to organize some unconference as well? Just an idea.

Chtěl bych vás všechny pozvat na následující akci, kterou organizujeme spolu s ČVUT v Praze. Vstup je volný pro všechny a bez registrace.

I would like to invite all of you for the following event, that we are organizing with CTU in Prague. The entrance is free for everyone, no registration is neccessary.

Many thanks to Caoyuan for all his great work. His Scala plug-in is starting to look impressive. Caoyuan, I wonder if you have the lastest NetBeans t-shirt and NetBeans USB stick... if not send me an e-mail and I'll ship them to you :)

If you want to give the Scala plug-in a try follow the instructions from NetBeans wiki.

Someone from the Czech Java community asked me recently if we could create a bundle of NetBeans + Glassfish + MySQL. Why? Because if we provide a pre-configured IDE with an application server and a great database we can make it even easier to get started for web / enterprise developers. And that is a Good Thing^TM. So I'm happy to announce that you can get such bundle from netbeans.org.

Greetings from San Francisco! I've been in California for more than a week now, some of my colleagues laughed at me because I managed to get a sun burn here (pun intended ;) I've spent a week south of San Francisco in the bay as well as visited Santa Cruz to join the OpenSolaris summit. I finally got all of the applications I need installed on OpenSolaris and switch to OpenSolaris for my work completely and I also do presentations from OpenSolaris now. I got rid of Windows completely from my laptop, so I share a multi-boot with OpenSolaris and Ubuntu now, it feels good to get rid of all the Microsoft c... I mean software.  I'll write a follow up blog entry which will explain how to get the projector to work with Nvidia cards really reliably - it works like charm for me now, but you need to have the right xorg.conf file.

Today was the BIG day - another NetBeans day here in San Francisco. It was a bit smaller than last year because there were many other events going on in parallel. We had a celebrity appearance from Jonathan Schwartz, our dearest CEO. Also the demos looked pretty cool, I especially enjoyed Brian Leonard's demo of the Jasper Reports plug-in (which is currently the number one plug-in on the plug-in portal). I myself demoed the new PHP support which is shaping up nicely - preview is available from netbeans.org. I also wrote recently an article about NetBeans 6.1 so go check it out if you want to know what's new in NetBeans 6.1. We had lots of content, so I hope attendees enjoyed the day!

I am getting sleep deprived - way too much stuff going on right now and it's amazing how many familiar faces I meet all the time in the Moscone center. So many JUG leaders, Java Champions, Sun colleagues, friends and other known people are here - Java One is a good place to meet many people from the community (even though I prefer community-driven conferences as an attendee).

We also did an event in Second Life today which was very unusual - people could IM their NetBeans-related questions and I would answer them using an audio feed, without getting audio feedback from the audience. Quite a bizzare way of presenting but also quite fun. In the evening me, Gregg and David did a 3-hour presentation about NetBeans at Java University. The A-V guys told us we've been the most entertaining instructors during the day. I feel very proud to be a part of our evangelism team, we're having way too much fun (and we work hard: we helped to grow the NetBeans community by 900% in size in last 3.5 years - what a progress!).

Anyway time to go to sleep... tune in to tomorrow's keynotes from Java One, they should be broadcasted online, to get some feel for the Java vibe from Java One. Good night.

NetBeans IDE 6.1 contains a completely new JavaScript editor which provides many advanced editing capabilities such as intelligent code completion, mark occurences, rename refactoring, on-fly analysis of JavaScript libraries, support for many Ajax frameworks and more. Watch this screencast to discover the new and exciting JavaScript-related features. Length of the demo: ~6 minutes.

Click on the image to play the screencast

Hurray! You can get NetBeans 6.1 from netbeans.org. Also notice that there is a new PHP NetBeans IDE available (only as early access).

The final release of NetBeans 6.1 will provide about 50 stable and well tested plug-ins on the stable and beta update centers (depending on which version of NetBeans you install, it can be more or less). However I noticed that some important plug-ins are missing. For example if you want to get the Groovy / Grails plug-ins, you won't find them in default installation. So if you want to have access to more plug-ins in your 6.1 release (or in other releases, betas, etc.), you can add a development update center to your IDE. Note that these plug-ins do not go through the same QA process as the plug-ins on the stable and beta update centers, so use this at your own risk. However the Groovy / Grails plug-ins are probably worth a little risk :)

To install the development update center to your NetBeans installation go to Tools | Plug-ins | Settings | Add update center and specify this URL:

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

That's it, from now on you get access to 140+ plug-ins. You can disable the daily update center easily using the checkbox if you make sure you install only tested plug-ins. In case you want to get even more plug-ins, you can also install the plug-in portal update center:

http://plugins.netbeans.org/PluginPortal/faces/PluginDetailPage.jsp?pluginid=1616

Installation experience of NetBeans on OpenSolaris over network is similar to the experience on Ubuntu. The nice thing is that OpenSolaris repository contains the full version of the IDE, not just the stripped-down Java version. I tried installing NetBeans:

roman@opensolaris:~# pkg install netbeans

pkg: no package matching 'netbeans' could be found in current catalog
     suggest relaxing pattern, refreshing and/or examining catalogs
pkg: install failed: Unable to assemble image plan

The problem is that the repository has just been updated (NetBeans has been added very recently) so I need to refresh the repository first:

roman@opensolaris:~# pkg refresh

Then I could run:

pkgroman@opensolaris:~# pkg install netbeans
DOWNLOAD                                    PKGS       FILES     XFER (MB)
Completed                                  17/17   5420/5420 339.92/339.92

PHASE                                        ACTIONS
Install Phase                              6393/6393 

To verify the installation you can run:

roman@opensolaris:~# pkg list netbeans
NAME (AUTHORITY)                              VERSION         STATE      UFIX
netbeans                                      6.0.1-0.86      installed  ----

To find out where NetBeans got installed I ran:

roman@opensolaris:~# pkg search netbeans
INDEX      ACTION    VALUE                     PACKAGE
basename   dir       usr/netbeans/ide8/docs/org/netbeans pkg:/SUNWlibnb-ide8@6.0.1-0.86
basename   dir       usr/netbeans/enterprise4/ant/sources/org/netbeans pkg:/SUNWlibnb-enterprise4@6.0.1-0.86
basename   file      usr/netbeans/bin/netbeans pkg:/SUNWnetbeans-ide@6.0.1-0.86
basename   dir       usr/netbeans/java1/sources/org/netbeans pkg:/SUNWlibnb-java1@6.0.1-0.86

So now I could run NetBeans by calling:

roman@opensolaris:~# /usr/netbeans/bin/netbeans

My next wish is that we would fix the UI of NetBeans on Solaris. The toolbars look really broken and default editor font should really be monospace :(

There is a small delay with releasing 6.1 - expect it coming very soon (today or on Monday). As usual, quality is more important than meeting the exact release date ;)

I am currently using the RC version of OpenSolaris (the new Ubuntu-like distribution of Solaris) on my laptop at work. It still needs some work to match usability of Ubuntu but the progress the Solaris guys have made is staggering. A year ago I couldn't install Solaris at all on my machine and today it runs quite well, although it was quite a challenge to get the network driver to run properly. The performance is pretty good, much better than e.g. Windows Vista and in some cases better than Linux. 

If you want to find out about the new release a very balanced review has been written at Phoronix:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=solaris_200805&num=1

The RC2 image can be downloaded here. Final release is coming very soon!

NetBeans 6.1 has much better performance than 6.0 or 6.0.1. A lot of work has been done to make this happen. If you meet anyone from the performance team please buy them a glass of beer (or a jug :). Here are some results of the tests:

* First startup (cold startup) is about 20% faster over 6.0 with no projects opened
* First startup (cold startup) is about 40% faster over 6.0 with several projects opened
* Post-startup work has been reduced by ~50%

The startup speed is still slower than Eclipse's but we are getting close.

What's probably even more interesting is the memory consumption improvements (with 6.0 being worse than Eclipse and 6.1 being better than Eclipse in the basic scenarios):

Other performance improvements include: 

I/O improvements
- File systems optimizations – e.g. 40% faster refresh
- Less disk touches, e.g. expanding a package on network is about 40% faster
• Visual Web
- Hunt on memory leaks
- Opening pages, adding a table component ~50% faster
• Java editor
- Incremental method parsing
- Faster queries processing for navigator
• JSP editor
- Fixed parser and caching, less disk touches

Do you share the same experience that performance of 6.1 has improved over 6.0?

I have upgraded my Ubuntu installation to 8.04 (release candidate). Previously Ubuntu has been using GCJ as the default Java, which had many problems. On 8.04 when I tried:

java -version

I got:

java version "1.6.0"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0-b09)
OpenJDK Server VM (build 1.6.0-b09, mixed mode)

Very cool. Now what about NetBeans? I tried:

netbeans

And the response was:

The program 'netbeans' is currently not installed.  You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install netbeans

So I tried:

sudo apt-get install netbeans

In previous versions of Ubuntu I would have to go install NetBeans manually but this time a little miracle happened:

[sudo] password for roman:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree      
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  ant ant-optional javahelp2 junit junit4 libappframework-java libapr1
  libaprutil1 libbeansbinding-java libcommons-beanutils-java
  libcommons-collections3-java libcommons-digester-java
  libcommons-logging-java libdb4.5-java libfreemarker-java libini4j-java
  libjsch-java libjtidy-java liblucene2-java libnb-apisupport1-java
  libnb-ide8-java libnb-java1-java libnb-javaparser-java
  libnb-platform7-devel-java libnb-platform7-java libnb-svnclientadapter-java
  libpq5 libregexp-java libservlet2.3-java libsvn1 libswing-layout-java
  libswingworker-java libxml-commons-resolver1.1-java openjdk-6-jdk subversion
Suggested packages:
  ant-doc libbsf-java liboro-java liblog4j1.2-java jython antlr libbcel-java
  libjdepend-java libgnumail-java libcommons-net-java javacc javahelp2-doc
  junit-doc libappframework-java-doc libswingworker-java-doc
  libcommons-beanutils-java-doc libcommons-collections3-java-doc
  liblogkit-java libavalon-framework-java libjtidy-java-doc
  libswing-layout-java-doc libxml-commons-resolver1.1-java-doc openjdk-6-demo
  openjdk-6-source db4.6-util patch subversion-tools
Recommended packages:
  ant-gcj ant-optional-gcj libdb4.5-java-gcj jetty
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  ant ant-optional javahelp2 junit junit4 libappframework-java libapr1
  libaprutil1 libbeansbinding-java libcommons-beanutils-java
  libcommons-collections3-java libcommons-digester-java
  libcommons-logging-java libdb4.5-java libfreemarker-java libini4j-java
  libjsch-java libjtidy-java liblucene2-java libnb-apisupport1-java
  libnb-ide8-java libnb-java1-java libnb-javaparser-java
  libnb-platform7-devel-java libnb-platform7-java libnb-svnclientadapter-java
  libpq5 libregexp-java libservlet2.3-java libsvn1 libswing-layout-java
  libswingworker-java libxml-commons-resolver1.1-java netbeans openjdk-6-jdk
  subversion
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Processing triggers for libc6 ...
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And then running:

netbeans

opened version 6.0.1 of my favorite IDE (the Java-only version of it) :)

Note that NetBeans is in the Universe which needs to be checked in the package manager. I didn't have to do this because I already got downloaded some packages from the Universe before. Also, the packages are split into pieces - there is one package for the platform, one for the beans binding, etc.

Opening the package manager and searching for NetBeans yields to:

Getting Java and NetBeans used to be complicated on Ubuntu in the past but now both packages are really well integrated and easily accessible.

I've been getting lots of questions about the grant projects winner selection from various folks from NetBeans community. I've also heard some complaints about why does it take so long. The reason why it took so long to choose the projects was that we got much more submissions than we expected (it was close to 200). I've seen many discussions about the projects choices on the dream team alias (the Dream Team was in charge of choosing the winning projects - so non-Sun people make these choices).

So finally the winning projects have been announced at:

http://www.netbeans.org/grant

Congratulations to the winners!

• CashForward (Bill Snyder)
• Cube°n (Anuradha Gunasekara)
• JavaSpaces (Magdalena Dukielska)
• IvyBeans (Laurent Forêt)
• NB Project (Alessandro Dourado)
• NB-XUL (Aditya Kumar Sharma)
• NetBeans Spot/Sun SPOT Plugin
• NbPython (Allan Davis)
• Scala Support (Caoyuan Deng)
• Visual JavaFX (Adam Kędziora)

• CoffeeDregs (Kees Huizing)
• JSpree (ManiKanta G)
• Netbeans Update Service (Mark Ashworth)
• MONOH (Carlos Oliveira)
• Numbered Bookmarks (M.A.S. Jayasundara)
• PDFViewer (Steve Tzou)
• PL/SQL Editor (Alexandre Soumbatov)
• Project Darkstar Tools and Mobility Support (Karel Herink)
• Regular Expressions Module (Angad Singh)
• Resource Bundle Editor (Denis Stepanov)

Is NetBeans 6.1 ready for release? Vote here.

NetBeans 6.1 is coming soon - it is now available as first release candidate. So go get it. I've been using it for demos during our road trip in Poland (we have driven about 1000 km by car - I am in Wroclaw now :) and it works quite well. The only problem I noticed is that the Options window doesn't show the preview for fonts & colors changes... according to my coleague from QE this bug is known. Hmm I wonder if this will work in the final version? :)

This is just too good to be true - Roman Stanek uncovered in his blog the NetBeans Early Avant-Guard Poetry Site. Read more in Roman's blog. The original poetry page is mirrored over here.

Earlier today I was talking on the phone with my buddy Gregg Sporar. Unlike usual I was using Windows Vista (due to a podcast - I still can't get audio mixing to work well on Ubuntu - I need to record my Skype session using Audacity - if you know how to set this up please let me know, thanks). Gregg was telling me a really funny story and I was laughing out so hard that I slammed several times with both my hands on the table. Suddenly a Sony VAIO popup dialog came up:

It reminds me of the dialog I get when I get angry that my code won't work and press the Shift key five times or more and Windows thinks I have a hard time using the keyboard and I need some assistance... only this one is so much fancier :) 

I have been asked more than 100 times how to get a Java / Sun t-shirt, bag, shirt, USB or other things. So I am delighted to let you know that Sun has launched an online shop where you can buy various Sun / Java goodies including flashlights, backpacks... the choice is quite broad!

Visit: http://sunwear.sun.com/

I shouldn't be blogging about this, because we were saving the big announcement for this year's Java One, but the information has already leaked: I've seen several NetBeans developers blogging about it - so there's no point in hiding it anymore. The next major release of NetBeans which is planned for 2009 will be a complete rewrite - NetBeans is going to be provided as an online service and it's source code will be rewritten in a new programming language. But before I tell you which language it is, read the reasoning first.

Java is a great language but unfortunately it is not flexible enough for the new online web 2.0 world with widgets, mashups, RSS and semantic web - it can't handle the dynamic nature of new web 2.0 applications. Developers no longer want to download and install desktop applications - they are ALWAYS online and all their popular applications are integrated into the ONLY application they need - the web browser. Thus it makes perfect sense to provide an IDE in the web browser. To accomplish this task, there's only one language which works really well inside of the web browser - and can be used both on the server and on the client. Yes, NetBeans 7.0 will be rewritten in JavaScript! (Although we still plan to run the JavaScript engine on top of the JVM using the built-in Rhino engine).

NetBeans has always been about innovation. We believe that by using JavaScript, NetBeans can be more dynamic than ever. Parts of the IDE will run on the server and parts in the web browser - and Sun will provide NetBeans as an online service. For the price that you are used to: FREE. Of course Sun will still provide top-notch commercial support of the online product and we'll be rolling out different service plans shortly after the 7.0 release. We are still discussing whether to continue providing the sources of NetBeans (look how well have all the Google applications been accepted in the open source community without actually providing any source code). We're looking for feedback from the community - does the community actually care about source code of NetBeans or is the FREE price tag that everyone cares about?

We are also investigating the possibilities of running ads in the online version of NetBeans. By that we could make significant money on NetBeans - we could do even more NetBeans days globally with much better finger food. What the heck, we could even transport beer directly from Czech republic so that developers could taste some real beer during NetBeans days!

I've never been more excited about the future of NetBeans - we all know that the future is online in the web browser and NetBeans is extremely well positioned to take the online IDE market by storm!

More contests, more features, more conferences... It's time for:

NetBeans Podcast Episode #42 (34 min 50 sec, size: 33.5 MB)

• 0:00 The NetBeans IDE 6.1 Beta is available! And there is a Blogging Contest. Everyone blog, blog, blog!!! :-) There have already been several blogs written that talk about the enhancements in 6.1.
• 3:03 NetBeans Day at CommunityOne. It's free - register here. Lots of fun, like in the past, and just like last year, featuring a live podcast recording by the JavaPosse.
• 5:27 The very latest on Groovy support in NetBeans, this time from Matthias Schmidt.
• 7:15 Another set of patches released on March 20 for NetBeans 6.0 and 6.0.1 .
• 12:06 New shared libraries feature in NetBeans 6.1. Blog entries on the topic from Allan Lykke Christensen and Adam Myatt.
• 14:28 Using NetBeans for HTML editing. Includes a mention of the Favorites window.
• 18:07 Conference reports: EclipseCon, Euroko, and SD West. With a divergence into how Ruby users feel about Java. :-)
• 28:39 Module of the podcast: Remove those unnecessary bindings!
• 30:18 NetBeans Puzzler. If you think you know the answer to the new NetBeans Puzzler, send an email to gregg dot sporar at sun dot com. Put "NetBeans Puzzler" in the subject line. We will announce the prize winner on the next podcast - so send in an entry! Disclaimer: The deadline for this podcast's puzzler entries is Sunday, April 20, 2008 at 11:59 PM Greenwich Mean Time. If more than one correct entry is received then Gregg will draw one winner at random. Sun employees are not eligible, void where prohibited by law, and we cannot send mail to restricted places. And remember, the questions might be getting harder, but the prizes are getting better. So send in entry! You might win a prize like Andrea Matsunaga, shown here with her NetBeans USB drive.
  

I've been quite busy with events in March - I flew to EclipseCon (we'll discuss that in the next episode of NetBeans podcast so tune in), went to Pilsen to the university to speak about NetBeans, we had CZJUG meeting, I also presented at a Ruby conference in Prague called Euruko (which featured Matz, the creator of Ruby, which I thought was really cool). We also did NetBeans platform training in Prague, I've been to India (again) and we did two IDE shootouts in Italy. I can't believe I did all these events in last 30 days :)

But as the title of the blog entry suggests, the show must go on, so I am flying on Tuesday to St. Petersburg for the Tech Days and NetBeans day and we are also doing three NetBeans days in Poland - in Krakow, Warsawa and Wroclaw. Sign up early because based on previous experience we expect quite a lot of interest so the rooms might fill in fast, we have limited seats :)
 

Getting new NetBeans t-shirts couldn't be easier. Join the new blogging contest and win one of the 100 t-shirts or 10 $500 USD certificates. The rules are simple - you need to provide feedback on 6.1 beta or later publicly using a blog and let us know about it using the submition form. We do this to encourage the feedback loop - let us know what you like and what you dislike. The deadline is April 18 so there's still some time to greatly improve your chances of getting a cool NetBeans t-shirt :)

Matthias Schmidt blogged about the progress he, Martin and other contributors have made on the NetBeans Groovy/Grails plug-in. It seems to be shaping up nicely - code completion is there and many other useful features. Check out Matthias' blog entry.