Roumen's Weblog

San Francisco Celebrates Matisse, the New GUI Builder

San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art seems to be also happy about our new GUI Builder :-)


Java One is over so I'll switch to normal blogging mode - about NetBeans features and usual stuff. I'm trying to write my first NetBeans plug-in now so if I'm successfull I'll share my experiences.

Drag & Drop in Editor

Try one of the latest daily builds, you can drag & drop text by mouse. I've found this one by coincidence, I thought it was a bug first. Go, editor, go!

I Wrote My First Plugin for NetBeans

When I saw the newest tutorial from Geertjan I decided it's time for me to write my first NetBeans plug-in. I am a software quality engineer (fancy title for a tester), so I do not know much about development of NetBeans plug-ins. Anyway, after several hours of experimenting my first plug-in is alive :-) This is how it looks like:



Not very beautiful, I know, but that was not the goal. I wanted to experiment with writing plug-ins to find out how easy or hard it is. The development is a lot simplified by a wizard which helps you create the backbone of the plug-in. The rest needs a bit of investigation on the platform website and NetBeans APIs.

If you are really interested, the sources are here. Open the project in latest development build of NetBeans, you also need to get Open APIs support from Update Center, otherwise you won't be able to open it. This plug-in is extremely simple so you can use study it to see how to write NetBeans plug-ins. I don't guarantee that this is the best way how to do it, but it works for me. A lot of things could be improved, but I wanted to keep it as simple as possible if others would like to take a look at it.

If you still wonder what is the purpose of the plug-in, see this.

Update: This e-mail is what you need if you want to add external libraries into your nbm. If you want to try my extremely useful module, download it here (works only in dev builds).

Day Eight - Bye, Bye, Java One

Java One 2005 is over. All that remains are memories of many sessions, geeky parties, smiling faces, few boring presenters, lots of coffee and everybody talking about Java. If you've missed Java One, the keynotes are available here:

http://wcdata.sun.com/webcast/archives/VIP-1981

Don't miss Thursday's keynote with Petr Suchomel from NetBeans demoing the NetBeans mobile pack!

Today I went to a session about the Harmony project, an attempt to create an open source implementation of J2SE. The speaker was from IBM and the goals of the project are very interesting, they want to create an implementation of J2SE which will pass the TCK. The speaker emphasized that they do not want to fork Java. Well, there was a good question - supposing this project won't fork Java what will prevent other companies from creating the fork, once the implementation is available under OSS licence?

There was a discussion around it - this topic seems to be very controversial. I am not persuaded that project Harmony is as good for Java as they present it. One of the main strengths of Java is that me as a developer can develop for a single platform, adopted by millions of users. While being a fan of open source, I can also see it's dark side. Being able to fork anything means having many slightly different platforms and environments, so again I am not sure that Java under OSS license is something the world really needs.

There was also an interesting session about Eclipse's RCP (Rich Client Platform). There are many similarities with what NetBeans platform offers, so deciding for which platform to write may at the end be a Swing vs. SWT choice. Especially now that we have in daily builds of NetBeans wizards which help with plug-in development, tutorials are being written and people start to blog about it. The platform has been there with NetBeans since the very beginning and it will be probably more important as Java rich client applications are getting into fashion.

The last session I saw today was about scripting support in Java. The stuff the Sun geeky guy spoke about is just great. We are preparing a general scripting language support into Java with reference implementations of JavaScript and PHP. Support of any scripting language can be in future added by basicly anyone. This means you will be able to script Java, for instance by having a word processor written in Java with JavaScript macros. The scripting language has access to all objects and libraries, so it suddenly becomes very powerfull.

There are some amazing opportunities emerging due to the possibility of mixing various scripting languages with Java, no matter if it's for web applications, desktop apps or for instance for automated tests. You can change how your Java app behaves by changing the scrips - without recompiling Java. Or you can let the hardcore developers write the bussiness part of the webapp and leave creating the front-end to Joe average developers who know how to bastle PHP scripts. This stuff is very exciting and I am looking forward to the frameworks which will be created around it in future. My big hope is that NetBeans will support scripting languages which will be integratable with Java one day.

As usual, here are few photos from today...