Roumen's Weblog

NetBeans Quick Tip #4 - Extending the Build Process

In today's tip I will show you how to extend the NetBeans build process on a simple example.

Some background first - NetBeans utilizes Ant as it's primary project engine. So when you build any project the IDE executes Ant. Other Java IDEs use as primary project systems different engines, developed specially for these IDEs. That was the case with NetBeans 3.x as well but with NetBeans 4.0 it was changed to Ant which is de facto a standard for building Java applications.

Ant is used similarly to GNU make to automate the build process. It can also handle build dependencies but unlike make it is completely plaftorm and shell independent (it's java-based), it's configuration is XML-based and can be extended easily. You can read more about Ant in it's user manual.

Back to the tip - let's say I want to copy the jar file which is built with my project to a network share - for instance to publish it as a bleeding edge development build of the application. I want to create a backup copy of it's sources as well. Such tasks can be automated with NetBeans and Ant very easily.

To do this I need to override the build.xml file which is stored in the main directory of my project. The build.xml file by default just includes a file called build-impl.xml, located in nbproject subdirectory. Build-impl should not be touched (it is generated automatically), instead the targets in build.xml need to be overriden.

So I override the "-post-compile" target to create an archive with my sources using tar and gzip tasks. I want Ant to create a subdirectory called by current date and name the archive according to the date as well. To do that I at first initialize the DSTAMP variable using a task called <tstamp/>. I also override the "-post-jar" target to copy the jar which is created automatically in the dist directory:

   <target name="-post-compile">
        <tstamp/>
        <tar tarfile="${dist.dir}/sources.tar" basedir="${src.dir}"/>
        <gzip zipfile="${dist.dir}/sources.tar.gz" src="${dist.dir}/sources.tar"/>
        <copy file="${dist.dir}/sources.tar.gz"            
                 tofile="h:\shared\myapplication\${DSTAMP}\myapplication-sources-${DSTAMP}.tar.gz"/>
        <delete file="${dist.dir}/sources.tar"/>     
        <delete file="${dist.dir}/sources.tar.gz"/>
    </target>
    <target name="-post-jar">
        <copy file="${dist.jar}/" tofile="h:\shared\myapplication\${DSTAMP}\myapplication-${DSTAMP}.jar"/>
    </target>

Once I build the main project I get the following output:


From now on everytime I build the project a copy of the jar and an archive with soures are created in a directory with current date on a network share. To achieve that I only needed to add few lines into the build.xml file (yeah, I know, you need to know which lines to add... ;-) If you didn't play with Ant yet, I suggest to try it, because it can help you automate a lot of tasks you may be doing manually. It's sometimes funny how much time we can give away to avoid doing a manual task - but with Ant this mostly pays off. Really.

Crazy Weather in Prague

We had here in Prague temperatures around 32 Celsius degrees (90 Fahrenheit) for several days and no clouds. The temperature record from year 1931 was broken. Today a hailstorm came:


Tomorrow it is supposed to be very cold. I don't want to sound paranoid, but isn't this caused by global warming? I should probably read again the book with the calming title "Don't panic"...

Recent Antialiasing Changes in Editor

We've made several changes in the code handling font antialiasing inside editor. I've tested these changes on most widely used platforms with JDK 5 and it seems that everything works fine. This fix can improve performance on some platforms where antialiasing was previously slow. I've seen quite visible performance improvements on Solaris.

Please let me know through the blog comments or via nbusers@netbeans.org in case you will encounter any issue with antialiasing. I also encourage people who previously had issues with antialiasing (mainly ATI cards on Linux and Solaris) and disabled it to try to turn it on and let us know if the peformance got better, remained the same or got worse (should not happen). The best way is to test it is to compare 4.1 final and current daily build. Thanks!

Update: As pointed out by Vincent, there were also changes in antialiasing outside editor on WinXP platform. To try them you need to set ClearType in WinXP (Display Properties | Appearance | Effects | Smooth Edges -> ClearType, Apply). Then if you restart the recent daily build of NetBeans menu and dialog fonts become antialiased. This was set experimentally to get feedback from users, so if you like it or dislike it, please express your opinion through comments or at nbusers@netbeans.org.

Another Mountain Bike Trip

I've just returned from another weekend biking trip. This time I went with a group of guys from NetBeans and their friends. Some statistics for Saturday:

• length of the trip: 80 km (50 miles)
• height advancement: 1340 m (approximately height difference of Prague and Snezka, the heighest Czech mountain)
• terrain: rocks, trees, water, grass, sometimes asphalt and 2 crossing points with Poland
• weather: sunny, no wind, 32 Celsius degrees (90 Fahrenheit degrees)
• deaths: 0 - everybody survived, surprisingly :-)

I thought I would be clever so I've borrowed a bike from a local pension. I could have chosen from 4 bikes, where 2 were for women and 1 for children. So I chose the one which seemed to be almost usable. I think I had the worst bike of all the bikers we've met - it had only 1 disc at front and 5 discs at back (1 got broken). The breaks were almost dead, once I almost went downhill from the mountain where others steered - I just could not stop. I guess in other countries you could sue the bike lender. So the first day was very tough for me.

The next day Petr and me decided to go just for a nice small pub round trip. The rest of the guys went for a bigger trip, two of them even wanted to bike to Prague - not sure if they made it, they're probably still biking...

Here are two photos from today:

Petr Zajac (his name is translatable as Peter the Rabbit)

That's me when we came back from lunch (and beer).

I wonder how I am going to play three squash matches tomorrow and on Tuesday. There's only 2 days left till the end of league round. This is gonna hurt!

NetBeans Quick Tip #3 - Increasing Font Size

Most NetBeans users probably know how to change font size in editor. You can do it through Tools | Options | Editing | Editor Settings | Java Editor | Font Size. But:

• Did you know you can change the font size in all types of editors using multiselection?
• Did you know you can also change the font size of all menus, dialogs and other components?

If you know this, congratulations, you are a true mighty user. If not, take a look at the screenshot:


As shown on the screenshot, you can select more editors by holding the shift key and clicking on them. This way you can change all of the font sizes in various editors.

How to change the general IDE font size? There is a startup option for this: --fontsize <size> (default size is 11). You can put it into the command line when launching IDE. You can also put it into the netbeans.conf file, which is in the /etc subdirectory of NetBeans installation. Just place it as a last parameter into the netbeans_default_options parameter. And that's it for today's quick tip.

Keyboard With Blank Keys?

Das Keyboard for ubergeeks only. They claim programming on a keyboard with blank keys goes much faster than on normal keyboards. Is this a joke or does it really work? Sure, you can look like a superhero when writing on a keyboard without letters:


No matter if it works or not, it's a great idea - if it was a bit cheaper I'd buy one just for the fun. Linux is supported, too. I would use it as an external keyboard for my notebook.

A New Demo Will Be Published Soon

I've finished today work on the new GUI builder demo. I think it will create a lot of excitement among members of Java community. We'll publish the demo during this or next week on www.netbeans.org so I have to wait till it gets there with official announcement and then I'll link it. There's what to look forward ;-)

So I Saw Star Wars Epizode III, too

Yesterday I finally went to see Epizode III. My expectations were high, although I knew it won't be like when I saw the original series for first time. The new series is seems to me more for mass audience than the original Star Wars. Anyway, I could not skip it, at least due to my curiosity.


The first thing I've noticed was how extremely LOUD are all the ships in the space - we all know there's no way how sound is spread in free space, because it's almost vacuum, but nevermind. One of the disadvantages of being adult is that you doubt this kind of things and don't trust everything the filmmakers show you, which is a pity for us, because we loose part of the excitement.

I've enjoyed the movie, the beginning was a bit boring, but the story once the story started accelerate, I got absorbed by it completely. I especially liked the part when Anakin goes through the transformation from a good guy into a bad guy, although his original motives were all of good kind. Although it's not visible how he murders the small Jedis in the temple, the imagination works in this case wonderfully and seeing all the dead bodies of Jedi children was quite moving.

The effects were really wonderfull, I also liked how the scenes switched fast, it made the movie very dramatic. Epizode III is definitely a must-see in a cinema, the experience is boosted by Really Big Screen^TM with Genuine Sound System^TM. I guess if I saw the movie just on DVD I would not enjoy it so much. I also liked the animal Obi-Wan drove, Lucas Arts came in every epizode with great and original flora and fauna.

Btw, do you know Star Park? It's a parody on both Star Wars and South Park :-) An amazing idea. Check out the Star Park gallery or the Star Park musical here:

May the force be with you!

NetBeans Quick Tip #2 - Generating Getters and Setters

Somebody has asked recently on of the mailling lists how to generate getters and setters in NetBeans. I've mentioned that some people even thought NetBeans doesn't have that functionality! So yes, it exists, only it's disguised as "Encapsulate Fields".

You can invoke the action either from the context menu in editor or from the main menu. In both cases use Refactor | Encapsulate Fields. The following dialog pops up and it lets you create getters and setters for all fields in the class:



The good news is that generating getters and setters will be available through the code completion in next release, which will make this feature much more discoverable:

Alternative Blog Scene

Similarly as music or films, blogging also has it's alternative scene. See:

Papercasting (the author looks very dedicated):

http://homepage.mac.com/packetrat/plog.html

Cartoon blogging (about bugs!):

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/kazem

Audio blogs (this guy is from Star Trek!):

http://wwdnaudblog.blogspot.com

Photo blogs (very nice photos):

http://www.chromasia.com/iblog

Video blogs (ugh, not very nice):

http://stevegarfield.blogs.com/videoblog

Maybe there are even more types, but these are what you can normally find on the internet. Where are the borders? Will we also get taste, smell and touch blogs? :-)

Which Software Team Scares You More?

Ales Novak wrote in his blog about the NetBeans team 7 years ago and he included this amazing photo of the original team. Ales, sorry for placing a copy of your photo to my blog, but it would be a pity if today's NetBeans people would miss it:



The guy on the left side behind the pillar looks very scary :-) I would certainly think twice before using a product made by these people!

For some reason, this photo reminded me the famous Microsoft photo:


Original NetBeans team looks still quite normal compared to Microsoft's, doesn't it?

New Java & NetBeans T-Shirts

A nice thing about Sun is that you get regularly new T-shirts. This is much appreciated by a person like me who is not really a fan of shopping (something tells me I'm not the only one in the building). On the release party we got this time 2 new T-shirts:



The first one is for the 10 years of Java anniversary. The funny thing about this T-shirt is that it's absolutely unreadable from larger distance due to the font. So while travelling through the city people stare at you trying to figure out the meaning of the picture. It's provocative, because there's some action, but from their faces you can recognize they mostly don't get it (I wonder if this was the intention of the T-Shirt designers ;-).


The second T-shirt is two-sided, the front side is on the left. Stand out from the crowd... hmm do they want to say NetBeans is for people who want to be better or different? Or both? Who knows. Anyway, I was at first disappointed about the second side, I thought it was boring and the picture had no special idea. So they told me to take a closer look - and suddenly it stopped to be boring. What's the message of this? Should we not be superficial and go after the deeper truth? They should provide a manual with these T-Shirts!

I've got one idea for people who provide us with these great T-shirts. Why not to go further? I would be so grateful if the next time I would also get new shoes, a sweather, a jacket, jeans and maybe even some nice Sun boxers with the "Stand out from the crowd!" text :-)

NetBeans Quick Tip #1 - Setting Target JDK

I would like to start by this post a series of tips for NetBeans 4.1. My goal is to provide a quick solution for questions of the following kind: "I want the IDE to do something but how the heck do I tell it?". I apologize upfront to people who will read the tips and will think that they are just obvious. Hey, NetBeans user base has trippled during past year, so there's a lot of newbies for who it may not be so clear. I'd also like to give more information than you can find in docs, help or FAQ - to give you some background how things work together (or don't). Enough of introduction, here's the first tip.

Setting target JDK

You'll use this tip if you want the IDE to produce compiled .class files in a version that is lower than the JDK you're running. That can be useful for instance if the customer you're writing code for is using an older version of Java. You can still use JDK 5 as your development platform, but by setting the source level you specify the Java version for compiler.

How to do it? You can specify the target JDK by right-clicking the Libraries node in Projects View and choosing Properties. Then, go to Sources section and the Source Level combobox is what you are looking for. You can choose source level 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 or 1.5 if your platform is JDK 5. Here is a screenshot:


If you set for instance the source level to 1.4, the compiler won't accept all the new JDK 5 features like varargs, generics, autoboxing, enhanced for loop, etc. These are all marked as errors. When you compile your project, all classes are created with the source level you specify in here.

Side note: You have probably mentioned that JDK 1.5 is now called JDK 5. There won't be any 1.6 but we'll have JDK 6. If you want to understand why, take a look at this page. The world would be boring, if things would be simple and predictable all the time, wouldn't it? That's one of the advantages of IT industry, there's always something new ;-)

GoogleFight

This is so funny... check out the top fights:

http://www.googlefight.com

A small hint - it works great for names, try your name and the name of your boss. I have won over my manager by 2.600 results :-)

Task Management in NetBeans

I have discovered a module created by Tim Lebedkov called User Tasks. So far I've been using successfully a paper notebook to write all my tasks down. I still claim there's nothing as good as an old school notebook - when you write things down on paper, it's not so easy to delete them! You can also take your book on meetings and it's hard to loose your data in case of a data loss (still it can happen and the appropriate word for real-world data loss is called fire). The important point is that you need to use a hard-cover notebook where you cannot remove any of the papers.

If anyone's interested I could speak for an hour or so about the importance of keeping your tasks inside of a hard-cover notebook, I was persuaded by a 60-year old IT tutor who tutored majority of Czech IT companies including Czech Microsoft. No, M$ doesn't pay me for mentioning their name, it's just a way for me how to get more hits.

Anyway I'm getting away from the point which is Tim's module. Let's start with a screenshot:

Click to see if I'm actually doing something useful

You can write down your tasks using this module and have them available inside of an IDE, which is practical, because you need less apps opened. I like that I can click "start task" and the timer starts and I can see how much time was spent on a task. I would really like to have that feature in my old-school notebook, sigh, but it seems that nobody's gonna implement it. Paper notebook manufacturers, consider this - people will pay lots of money if you implement it!

You can do the usual task-related stuff like creating subtasks, defining necessary time, finish tasks (yeah!), define priorities, set task categories, etc. See the following page for more info about new features:

http://tasklist.netbeans.org/usertasks/whatsnewnb41/whatsnewnb41.html

My only single nit-picking comment is that the user tasks icon differs from the usual NB icons, please fix this. For the rest I am thinking about trying to use the module for a while.

I will still probably stick to my paper notebook - for many historical reasons. On the other hand I can imagine a lot of developers would appreciate using this module. I know managers who are extremely keen on keeping the update of current tasks and this tool can help look in their eyes very cool. It can also help to make them think you as a developer have things under control (while ignoring that almost every development is more or less a creative chaotic process).

How to install the module? You can get it from here:

http://tasklist.netbeans.org/servlets/ProjectDocumentList

It's enough to get the two stable modules, the rest of files is quite obsolete. To install, run NetBeans (this time NB starts faster thanks to my previous post) and go to Tools | Update Center. Choose to install local nbm and find the two nbm files. Go through the usual "Yes, I really want it, what did you think?" procedure and once installed you'll get an icon in the toolbar. Enjoy your task management and let me know if somebody implements the "Run the task timer in a paper notebook" feature!

Update: I forgot to mention this version of user tasks should be installed in NetBeans 4.1 final release. Don't you also like the version numbers (1.26.61543 and 1.11.615431)? They look so mighty ;-)

Nice Numbers

The NetBeans 4.1 presentation at javalobby.org was viewed and listened online by more than 2700 people during first 48 hours, wow. I wonder what the number will be like after a week or month.

Do you want to help NetBeans? We need to spread the word about 4.1, it's not your mother's NB 3.x, we've really moved forward. Let your friends know about the presentation. Yes, there are people who might say "I don't need J2EE or webservices, I use other frameworks" or "my favourite editor feature is missing". I've got only four words for them: Wait for next release!

NetBeans Startup Performance Tips

Daniel re-opened the IDE startup speed topic. This has been a pet peeve of mine for some time when I used to have a slow computer - now I have fast one so I'm not really busy with it anymore. Anyway, I was thinking what a NetBeans user can do to improve it. I believe the performance guys are doing a good job by keeping an eye on performance and coding practices in general - it's sometimes interesting to observe the battles with developers who are writing low-performing code.

Daniel reported a very slow startup - for measurement he uses a so called pancake test. If he can make a pancake during IDE startup, there's something wrong.

We've exchanged some ideas how to improve the startup speed:

• Check if the antivirus is not insanely checking all the IDE's classes (some of them may be so clever to unpack jars and run heuristic analysis on them).
• Try to put the IDE on a faster hardrive if you have two.
• Don't run NetBeans from the network (might be obvious, but you know...).
• Try to turn off unnecessary modules - this actually really helps, I write more about it below.
• Upgrade graphics card drivers, might work for somebody.

The result is that the pancake test passes now for Daniel (I hope he won't starve due to me ;-). Eclipse has a fast startup - might be a point for someone, but we should not forget that Eclipse by default doesn't contain all the J2EE, web services and other modules which are available in NetBeans out of box.

Improving startup speed by disabling unecessary modules (it works!)

All the new J2EE and web services modules added into NetBeans offer great functionality, but they also have some influence on the startup time. I can imagine there's a lot of developers who are using NetBeans just for J2SE, so they don't need all the J2EE, web applications, web services and databases support. Let's suppose they don't use versioning (not a very good practice, but it happens). I've tried to turn off these modules in Tools | Options | IDE Configuration | System | Modules:

• Everything from J2EE - can be disabled as a whole category
• Everything from Database - can be disabled as a whole category
• Everything from Web except Web Browser Ant Task (required by J2SE) - modules need to be disabled individually
• Everything from XML except XML Entity Catalog (required by J2SE) - modules need to be disabled individually
• Everything from Version Control
• All other dependend modules which the IDE asked me to disable

Please note that the IDE with various modules disabled cannot be tested (there are too many combinations), so do it with caution.

I have a much lighter version of NetBeans now and I got the following improvements on startup:

First startup - all modules: 45 s
First startup - NetBeans lite: 34 s

Consecutive startup - all modules: 11 s
Consecutive startup - NetBeans lite: 9 s

The difference is visible mainly during first startup - I've measured it right after reboot to avoid influences of the OS. It was measured on my home Athlon which runs at 1.16 Ghz (I wonder why it's called 2800+), 512 MB RAM, Windows XP and a relatively slow harddrive. I didn't have any project open, I've measured just the startup. Except for the module tweaking I used a default configuration. As I wrote in one of my comments I can get the IDE startup with all modules to 8 secs on my AMD 64bit notebook, it also seems to have a faster harddrive.

Harddrive speed seems to be very important, because the first startup reads everything - mention the huge difference between first and second startup. It's caused by reading all the files from cache during the second start.

If you have any additional ideas, please share them with us through comments.

Update: I've also tried to turn off the antivirus. What a difference:

First startup - all modules, with antivirus: 45 s
First startup - NetBeans lite, with antivirus: 34 s
First startup - all modules, without antivirus: 30 s
First startup - NetBeans lite, without antivirus: 21 s

So I was able to reduce the first startup time from original 45 seconds to 21 seconds just by disabling some of the modules and antivirus real-time scanning. The consecutive startup don't seem to be an issue at all.

Update 2: It's possible to set in many antivirus softwares filters which exclude files or directories from scanning. This can solve the issue with antivirus while remaining secure.

Update 3: If you will try to disable modules it's probably a good idea to keep two from Version Control: the CVS Support Profile and VCS Generic Command-line Support. For the rest the lite configuration (no J2EE, almost no web, no databases, almost no XML and CVS only versioning) seems to be stable. If you will try it and encounter any exceptions let me know.

Celebrating 4.1 Release

We've celebrated 4.1 yesterday on a bob-sledding party. Great idea and thanks to some other teams from Sun who sponsored this party! Just one picture, speaking for all - NetBeans 4.1 is a great release. Yeah!

Me and Tim, the NetBeans director

More pictures are provided by Lukas - see Bob Brewin, Tim Cramer, John Treacy and other celebrities on a bob sleigh :-)

Geertjan, way to go!

Did you see Geertjan's blog recently? I'm amazed about the amounts of high quality stuff he's writing about NetBeans. I'm repeating myself, but there are many NetBeans areas not covered - Prague NB people, join us, it's benefitial for both us and the community! Look what other companies are doing.

NetBeans 4.1 Presentation at www.javalobby.org

I've created a presentation of new features in NetBeans 4.1 and it got just published on www.javalobby.org. The presentation's length is 30 minutes, so it doesn't go too much into details, but I think it's very good to get an overview on what's new in NetBeans 4.1. Enjoy my speech and demos here:

Choose "NetBeans 4.1: What's New & Improved" from Spotlight Features

The following demos are included:

• J2EE support
• Web services development
• Project system improvements
• Navigator introduction
• Editor improvements
• New J2ME features (thanks to Lukas Hasik who helped!)

I've written before that I would also create a demo of the new and experimental GUI builder, but unfortunately it didn't work out, because the recording tool didn't record the drag&drop operations properly (many operations were not visible), the demo I've created didn't look too good. I'll work on solving this issue and we'll create a demo with the developers, it is agreed to be announced at www.netbeans.org - please be patient.

I am looking forward to your feedback. If you're a native speaker I will gladly welcome all comments to my pronounciation or other mistakes I might be doing during the speech. I hope to get rid of all of my "czechisms" in my English one day.

NetBeans-related Blogs at blogs.sun.com

Here is a tip how to get all recent NetBeans-related blogs from blogs.sun.com:

http://planetsun.org/filter/netbeans

It can be quite handy to find out what people from Sun write about NetBeans - although there are some bloggers who just appear more often.

Czechs Won the World Hockey Championship

Isn't it amazing that this damned small country with the biggest beer consumption per person won the world hockey championship again?

You Wanted More Refactorings?

... here they come! The refactoring team is working on many experimental refactorings at the moment. You can download them from the development update center of 4.2. You can try these features out and file bugs, send recommendations, etc. They're not for production use yet - no quality is guaranteed at them moment (it's the bleeding edge development).

The new refactorings are:

• Pull up - pulls the selected method to the parent class of current class.
• Push down - pushes down the selected method to the class subclassing current class.
• Extract method - creates a method from selected lines of code and calls the method.
• Introduce variable - introduces a new local variable to simplify a complex expression.
• Copy class - creates a copy of current class.
• Convert anonymous class to inner - converts selected anonymous class to inner class.

More refactorings are being prepared, for details take a look the following page:

http://refactoring.netbeans.org/refactorings/specifications.html

Issues for these experimental modules should be filed against refactoring module with status whiteboard "experimental".

External contributers wanted! Do you want to learn more about NetBeans and take the challenge to develop a refactoring feature? Contact refactoring team at dev-AT-refactoring-DOT-netbeans-DOT-org. They'll guide you through the development and you will be able to show off that you created your own refactoring in NetBeans.

Flash demo of new refactoring features (incl. speech)

NetBeans on Go-carts

Petr Pisl from the NetBeans J2EE team organised a great trip - we went far away from Prague for go-cart racing. A group of almost 30 NetBeans guys including developers, quality engineers, 1 site director, 1 child and few wives/partners/lovers decided to spend their Friday evening by racing in an old factory with 4 floors, rebuild into one big race. Lots of gas everywhere, we were dirty like if we were crawling through chimneys, but it was real fun. The carts drove up to 60 km/h (which is... 37.3 mph) - quite a nice speed inside of a building full of curves and narrow tunnels.

Here is one videoclip and few chosen photos:

Short racing videoclip	On start
I'll getcha	No way, the curve is close

Everybody has hopefully survived, although the owner of the race told us a freaking story about a guy who crashed into one of the pillars and had to be taken to the hospital - the track was indeed dangerous. Sometimes there was almost no space left between the cart and the walls - and there were some crashes behind sharp corners, so we came home with few bruises.

We got quite thirsty after all that racing and Pavel took his harmonica and guitar so we were also singing and dancing (well, or at least trying to). Let's call it a teambuilding :-)

Pavel and the band

One of those mornings...

For everyone who was there - and for other curious people, here is a photo gallery from my camera:

http://roumen.name/photos/NetBeans_on_Go-carts

If you want you can send me the other albums as well and we can publish them on one place.

Update: Stepan's photos are here:

http://roumen.name/photos/NetBeans_on_Go-carts_Stepan

*Sigh*, I should learn how to take photos.

Czechs vs. U.S. - 3:2

Sorry I could not help myself. Probably nobody thought we would win when it was 2:0 for US. It says a lot about the nature of Czech people - we don't give up easily.

NetBeans 4.1 Buzz

These are articles and posts I've found after 10 minutes of searching - I wonder how many would I find after 1 hour:

Sun updates NetBeans open source tools platform

http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/appdev/story/0,10801,101695,00.html

Netbeans 4.1 ready for download

http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=33865

Sun shines brightly on Java developers

http://www.itworldcanada.com/Pages/Docbase/ViewArticle.aspx?ID=idgml-95aff0ce-5540-4704-ac11-260e20ba8f8c

NetBeans 4.1

http://www.root.cz/zpravicky/netbeans-4-1/

NetBeans 4.1 final!!

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/ttran/archive/2005/05/netbeans_41_fin.html

NetBeans IDE 4.1 Final Release

http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t18651.html

Netbeans 4.1 Released

http://www.unordered.net/tech/java/2005/05/12/netbeans-41-released/

NetBeans IDE 4.1 can we switch soon boss?

http://glennsaqui.blogspot.com/2005/04/netbeans-ide-41-can-we-switch-soon.html

Which Are You Gonna Use? Netbeans 4.1 or Eclipse with MyEclipse Workbench?

http://www.thepostmodern.net/blog/BlogEntry.jsp?id=133

IDE Wars: Has NetBeans 4.1 Eclipsed Eclipse?

http://javaboutique.internet.com/reviews/netbeans41/index.html

NetBeans 4.1 is out

http://www.javable.com/

NetBeans IDE 4.1 and Mobility Pack 4.1 Final Releases Available

http://osdir.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=5463&newlang=&topic=23&catid=196

NetBeans IDE 4.1 Final

http://www.jsurfer.org/article.php?sid=1457

NetBeans 4.1 is here

http://indicthreads.com/news/211/netbeans41_final_release.html

Run NetBeans from Eclipse?

Interesting idea, indeed, yeah, let's run NetBeans from Eclipse: http://sourceforge.net/projects/beanclipse

NetBeans got rid of biggest performance issues so let's come up with some new. The licences look very compatible as well. Anyway, if there are many projects like this one there is no reason to trust the sourceforge language popularity graphs, like this one:

Update: you can also try the opposite - run Eclipse from NetBeans: http://sourceforge.net/projects/netclipse

New NetBeans Project - Support for JBoss, BEA and WebSphere

A new project, which aims to provide support for deployment of J2EE applications to JBoss, BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere servers, was started. Initial sources for three new server plugins were uploaded to the netbeans.org source repository. For information on how to build and try out the server plugins, see the project home page at:

http://serverplugins.netbeans.org

:-)

NetBeans 4.1 Presentation Teaser

I am almost ready with the presentation of NetBeans 4.1 for Javalobby. I will speak about the newest features in 4.1 and I will show 6 short demos as well (update: the gui builder won't be presented this time). Here is a teaser for the presentation - one of the demos:

Short demo of Web Service support in NetBeans 4.1

Make sure to turn on your speakers. As usual, feedback is welcome. More will come during next week.

Optical Camouflage

Have you seen the Ghost in the Shell movie? Optical Camouflage was used by several characters there to become invisible. Some Japanese scientists through it would be nice to make the technology real:



Visit this link to see videoclips which show how become partly invisible :-)