Seapegasus Blog

Wednesday January 14, 2009

Thanks For Voting For Your Favorite IDE!

It is worth noting that in the past Sun has been able to dominate many categories, but it took multiple products to achieve that distinction. This year one product, NetBeans, dominated the categories by winning five out of twelve. -- Developer.com Product of the Year 2009

Yay! :-D

The five winning categories were:

• Development Tool: NetBeans Platform,
• Development Utilities: NetBeans Profiler,
• Wireless/Mobile: NetBeans IDE 5.5 Mobility Pack for CDC,
• Java Tool: NetBeans IDE,
• Open Source: NetBeans

Thanks for your votes! :)

Red is Beautiful in Russian

Thanks for your continuing efforts to translate netbeans.org pages into your native language! If you have checked the localization status page recently, don't be shocked if the column for your language is suddenly all "red". This is because we switched the table to the new 6.5 docs set. If you want to help us by updating a document, get in touch!

Monday January 05, 2009

The Cube! It's alive! (continued)

Happy new year everybody! Previously I mentioned that the NetBeans mascot, NekoBean has already been incarnated as plush toy, pendant, etc. Thiara went yet another step further: She posted instructions how to cut and paste (literally) a 3-dimensional NekoBean — as office decoration. :-D

If you don't read German, here's the translation:

1. Print the NekoBean template (PDF) on scrap paper, cut out the shape, and draw the outline on the backside of construction paper — unless your printer can handle fancier kinds of paper directly. The shape consists of the body, 4 legs, tail and 2 ears.
2. Cut slots into the body: Two on the sides for the arms, two on top of the head for the ears, and one into the backside for the tail. Insert the arms, ears, and tail, and glue or tape them on the inside of the body.
3. Draw the NekoBean's face on the frontside with a felttip pen. Here you find some faces for inspiration.
4. Glue the sides of the body together to form a cube -- when closing the cube, don't forget the legs: Make them stick out of the edge between the backside and the bottom.

End result: Meet my first makeshift Nekobean! (It was born solely of office materials... I colored the paper with a flipchart marker and glued it together with sticky tape...)

It hangs on nicely to a notebook screen, and it is equally well able to stand on flat surfaces. Thanks to Thiara for this hilarious tip!

PS: Now create your own and post photos!

Tuesday December 09, 2008

The Cube! It's alive!

Two things that came as a complete surprise to me this weekend:

Malta versus Prague

1. The island (and country) of Malta is smaller than Prague.

2. The NetBeans Cube is alive! OK, we already knew the Japanese community created NekoBean. And yes maybe a video, a wallpaper, and a logo or two. But... the plush toys and pendants were news to me! Way to go, Japanese community!

PS: Et tu, James Gosling!



Posted by seapegasus ( Dec 09 2008, 11:20:48 AM CET ) Permalink Comments [1]

Thursday December 04, 2008

JavaFX 1.0 is out now!

We just spent haaalf of our afternoon refreshing netbeans.org and javafx.com in our browers -- and lo, here it is, JavaFX 1.0. :)

If you've already got NetBeans 6.5, go to the update center (Tools > Plugins > Available Plugins) to install the plugin(s). If you don't have 6.5 yet, you can download the IDE including JavaFX support here.

I say plugins above because there's also a special Mac SDK, a debugger, and a sample project on the update center. At minimum you need JDK 6_10, the JavaFX 1.0 plugin (and the SDK if you are on Mac OS).

You can use JavaFX for webstarting apps (JNLP), desktop apps, mobile apps, and Applets ("They are baa-aack!"), just like Java. You can keep your existing Java code and use JavaFX to spice up the user interface if you like. Look at these tutorials and sample applications online. Download the sample code to get started -- That's at least what I'm doing right now. :)

Thursday November 20, 2008

NetBeans IDE 6.5 Screencasts

NetBeans IDE 6.5 is out, and to celebrate the occasion I updated the NetBeans 6.x screencasts page.

Highlights: In October and November, Geertjan recorded a great 3-part series of Groovy & Grails introductions, and also a very thorough 4-part NetBeans Platform API series. The Platform screencasts average out at 30 min per video, so you're basically getting a whole expert training for free, very cool!

Other new 6.5 tutorials show off the new PHP support (there will be more coming!), JavaScript, Rails and web applications running on the GlassFish v3 Prelude app server, and RESTful web services. Have fun, and leave comments!

Tuesday September 30, 2008

NetBeans Innovator Grant Winners Announced

You may have already seen it on netbeans.org, the winners of the NetBeans Innovators Grant have been announced. 13 open source innovators completed their projects and won prizes between $2000 and $11000! In the latest NetBeans podcast, Jiri Kovalsky mentions how impressed he was by the overall professionalism of the submissions. Although it always happens that project owners have to step back for various reasons (the program started out with 20 candidates), it was obvious that the teams took their projects very seriously.

Here are the projects that I liked best, you can get the full project list on the grants page.

• MONOH (named after the exclamation "[look] MOmmy, NO Hands!") lets you control Netbeans with spoken commands! :-D From experience I know that speech recognition thingies never really work for me (and I can't use it in an office environment anyway), but it's definitely the coolest idea.
• The Darkstar plugin adds support for massively multi-player online game development with the Darkstar server in NetBeans, and also some kind of Java ME support, but I didn't understand what exactly (anybody know?).
• The Sun SPOT plugin adds Sun SPOT project support to NetBeans (SPOTs are small Java-programmable devices with sensors).
• Cube°n was inspired by Eclipse's Mylin plugin and integrates task and bug tracking into the NetBeans IDE. (Screenshot)
• IvyBeans brings Apache Ivy project dependency management to your NetBeans projects. (Demo)

The sun.com news item contains more background info and two more quotes by winners.

I'm gonna try MONOH at home, and tell you more about it later this week. I'd have a nice idea what to do with two Sun SPOTs (think: Wii remote control), but before I shell out 600 Euros I need to think it through. Setting up my own Darkstar game server sounds tempting too. ;-) Well, if you have tried any of these new plugins and applications, please share your opinion with us! And if you want to join one of the projects and contribute to it, write the project owner.

Monday August 18, 2008

JDK 6 and JavaFX on 32-bit Macs

Dearest Apple. Words cannot express my feelings towards you. Therefor allow me to use punctuation and special characters: @#$%^&*!!? :-p Yours Truly.

*SIGH* If you have one of the 2006 Intel Macs with 32-bit processors, you guessed what I'm talking about: In spring '08, Apple finally released the Apple JDK 6 (or as they call it, "Java for Mac OS 10.5"), but for 64-bit processors only. And there is no sign this will change soon: On Mac hardware, Mac OS X 10.5.2 and an Intel Core 2 processor are the minimum requirements for the JDK 6 -- and also for JavaFX.

Apart from switching to Windows or Linux, or buying new hardware, the only alternative for developers who don't meet those requirements is the Soy Latte JDK 6. Using this JDK solves a few problems but also raises some others. You have to decide whether the pros out-weigh the cons in your work situation:

Pro

• You can use the JavaFX SDK on top of the SoyLatte JDK
• IDEs like NetBeans work with SoyLatte (you're not stuck on the command line)
• No need to buy new hardware for JDK 6 / JavaFX development

Con

• Must use X11 whose user-interface needs getting used too (shortcuts, menus).
• Installation is less straight-forward than installing the Apple JDK
• No support for Java Web Start (javaws) yet

I tried it out at home over the weekend, and kept notes, so if you too want to set up the SoyLatte JDK and JavaFX on a 32-bit Mac, have a look at this tech tip and leave a comment what you think.

Monday June 30, 2008

Brave NetBeans World

When you look at all the great video tutorials, podcasts, and tips and tricks that Roumen did for NetBeans, what could we give Roumen in return for his work to thank him?

Today I thought: What about this link to James Wallis' Brave N00b World? I bet he'd enjoy that. :-D

In case you wonder what kind of job opening Roumen would need to smuggle into the company database to get to make a living studying the world of the World of Warcraft: It's metaverse evangelist, apparently!

PS: Don't worry, despite the Roumen-shaped hole on NetBeans.org, Geertjan and Lloyd will continue to provide you with NetBeans podcasts and video tutorials etc as Roumen already mentioned. Stay tuned! :-)

Friday June 20, 2008

Happy Viking!

After our update to the NetBeans community homepage last month, we now also updated the NetBeans Wiki homepage, have a look.

Since we want to keep the wiki fast and clear, we didn't add tons of spiffy graphics or whatever. The plan was rather to remove less often used links from the frontpage to reduce clutter, and restructure some topics. So do you find what you are looking for? Which links on the wiki front page did you use least and most often? And how do you like my supa-dupa crooked three column layout hack? :-D

Remember, you can (and should) add links from and to pages that you often use together -- I say that because it does happen that people create a very helpful page but then forget to link it to anything. It's best to start from the front page, and drill down one or two links that relate to your topic, and then create a new page by adding a link. When you click the new link, an empty page will be created and it's already findable.

A lot of people already do that on a daily basis: The idea of course is to use the wiki for sharing dynamic content that is modified often and by a wide range of people. For example the localization teams keep track of the translation status; then there are FAQs and community docs - whether you have a short answer or an elaborate tutorials, it's supposed to be quick and easy to share and update; the third big user group are the engineers who plan features and schedule releases on the wiki.

This is in contrast to the more permanent content on www.netbeans.org, like downloads and plugins, release notes and feature descriptions, licenses and governance board, news and interviews, offical tutorials and quickstarts, etc - you get the picture. :D

Happy wikiing! (Spellchecker says: "No, silly. It's Happy Viking!" *Sigh*)

Monday June 09, 2008

Tip: Create Your Own Project Template

If you work on a series of projects that all share a common set-up (properties, build-script, base classes, resources, etc) you will probably do a lot of copying and pasting and refactoring to clone the base project. Did you know you can create your own custom project template for that purpose? I just found that out recently (from the help menu).

Basically you point the IDE to an existing NetBeans project and tell it to use that as a template. You use a module project as a wrapper: This will allow you to turn the template project into an NBM file ("NetBeans Module") that can be installed into the IDE like a plugin. After installing the custom plugin, the template project will appear in the "New Project" wizard. This is how you do it:

1. Take a NetBeans project that you want to be the template project, and open it in the IDE. Let's call it FooApp.
2. Create an empty NetBeans Module project. Name it something recognizable (such as FooAppTemplate or whatever).
3. In the Projects window, right-click the empty module project. Create a new file by choosing New > Other > Module Development > Project Template from the context menu.
4. Use the Template Wizard to configure the template. Point it to the template project FooApp and choose a category (Java SE, Java EE, Java ME, Ruby, etc).
5. Here comes the important part - you save the template as an NBM file. Right-click the module project in the Projects window, and select Create NBM. Look into the Output window to see where the file was saved (for instance FooAppTemplate/build/myorg-fooapptemplate.nbm).
6. To install the template into the IDE, go to Tools > Plugins > Downloaded. Click Add Plugin, browse to your NBM file and install it. If you give the NBM file to other developers, that's how they install the template.
7. (Alternatively, right-click the module project in the Project window and select "Install in Development IDE". This is another way to install it for somebody who has the module project still open.)

Go to File > New Project and open the category you picked before, and ta-daa, there is your custom project template. :)

Monday June 02, 2008

Thanks for the Community. What Do I With it?

Pssst... We started updating the NetBeans Community Homepage... :-) Have a look and tell us what you think. Does it answer your questions, what kind of people make up the community, what do we all do, and how you join us? Do you find what you are looking for? :)

Wednesday May 28, 2008

Developing Java ME on Mac

As Karel already mentioned a few weeks ago, the Mobility pack can also be used on MacOS. (The mobility pack is written in Java and does run on Mac OS, but there is no current official WTK and no emulators for Mac OS, so netbeans.org never offered this download option.) Since people asked about it, I tried to install the third-party SDK and emulator and ran a sample app, and ta-daa, it worked. :) Here are a few "Doh!"s I came across, I'll write them down in case somebody else has the same questions.

1. Installing NeBeans Mobility pack for Mac
   • There is no download explicitly labeled "Mobility pack of NetBeans for Mac OS" or so on the NetBeans Installer page. Instead you download any other Java edition for Mac OS, for instance the Java SE edition. (Or use the one you already have.)
   • Then you go to the Tools>Plugins menu, and install (at least) these two plugins: "Mobility" and "Visual Mobility Designer" (you can also install other items you need).
   • In other words, don't look for a plugin explicitly called "mpowerplayer" or so. The Mac integration is part of the normal "Mobility" plugin now.
2. Installing mPowerPlayer
   • Next download the SDK for Mac OS -- click the "Get the SDK: Download..." link.
   • Then download the emulator for Mac OS -- click the "free download" button.
   • Remember the directory where you downloaded the stuff to. :-) The SDK is saved as mpp-sdk, the emulator is called mpowerplayer.app. I copied them into the "/Applications/" directory.
3. Telling NetBeans where to find the JavaME platform
   • Go to the IDE's platform manager (Tools menu) and add the mpp-sdk as a "Java MIDP Platform emulator". (If needed you can get more details how to do that on the FAQ).
   • When you now create a new Mobile project, the MPowerPlayer SDK and QVGA device will show as options.
4. Limitations?
   • You cannot use the CDC framework yet, this implementation is only meant for CLDC/MIDP.
   • You get a working emulator together with mpowerplayer, but it's only one. This is because emulators are released by phone companies, but they never released any for Mac OS. So you have to go back to a PC (e.g. on a virtual machine) to get one emulator for each type of phone if you want to do any serious crash-testing of your mobile apps.
   • Tip: Instead of using different emulators, you can test the app on actual devices that you have. Use the help menu in the IDE and search for "deploy to mobile device" to learn more, but some devices don't come with software to connect to Mac OS, so you may be out of luck.

Thursday May 22, 2008

You Wrote 150 Tutorials!

Since James is travelling, I will quickly mention an announcement from the Community Docs team.

Varun Nischal, the NetBeans community docs contribution coordinator, reports another milestone: In the less than 4 months since we reached the 100 mark on February 5th, another 50 docs were contributed by NetBeans developers!

Varun says:

All credit goes to you and your passion towards NetBeans making it possible for us to achieve such milestones.

There are still potential contributors either amongst you or in waiting, who have still not realised their potential and when they do, we would be unstoppable!

Keep up the good work!

Yes, this means you. :-) Do you have a useful tip lying around in your head, a solution you discovered and think, hey, maybe somebody else has the some question? It's very easy to contribute:

• Go to wiki.netbeans.org (you can get a login here).
• Click Community Docs in the top left, it contains all the info you need.
• Scroll down to Community Docs In Progress and add a line for what you want to write. Surround the name of your document with angular braces, like this: [How to grow esparagus]
• Save the page, and the title will turn into a link. Click the link to create a new empty page for your doc.
• The wiki syntax is very easy, and even if you just write plain text, it will be okay. The content counts. :-)

Friday May 16, 2008

Where Did My PlanetNetBeans Blog Go?!

Just mentioning it because a blogger asked: What does it mean if your blog has suddenly disappeared from planetnetbeans.org? Did you say something wrong, did we kick you out? No!

In 99.9% of the cases, your xml feed did not validate, and your blog was just temporarily excluded until the 'offending' xml has scrolled off (or until you find a way to fix the xml manually).

Usually blog feeds are auto-generated, so it's probably not your fault, ;-) but if you can fix the xml issue, please do so -- and you're automatically back on the planet in the next cycle.

If you wonder whether your blog is affected, check the PlanetNetBeans error log. Presently, there are only a handful of people on it, but it's good to know where to find this page if you wonder whether your feed validated or not:

See the long list of fellow NetBeans blogger's on the right hand side? The last item in the list says "Where's my blog?!" It'll take you to the Validating Incoming Feeds info page, from which you can always find the error log, and links to w3c approved validators. Happy blogging!