Seapegasus Blog

Saturday December 15, 2007

CHOCOLATE! No, sorry, NetBeans Day Frankfurt (4)

If you haven't been at the NetBeans Day in Frankfurt, you missed the cool presentations by the local developers. Toni Epple and Sven Reimers introduced us to their respective projects, which both rely on the NetBeans platform:

Toni Epple is a Java developer at Genomatix Software. Click the product icons to see video demos of his NetBeans platform-based apps: ChipInspector for instance helps experts assess the effect of drugs on genes. (No, not those kinds of drugs.) Being a java.net community leader, Toni has also initiated several open-source projects, including Jarvis (a visual Jasper report designer for NetBeans IDE), and the Peppy plugin, dedicated to porting Java performance guru Kirk Pepperdine to the NetBeans platform! :-)

Sven Reimers uses NetBeans for his SQE project. This quality enhancement plugin combines the power of tools such as Findbugs, PMD, CheckStyle, Dependency Finder into one highly configurable tool. Both developers extended the NetBeans IDE or Platform respectively to fit their needs. But where to start? Sven outlines the process:

First, read the excellent platform documentation on platform.netbeans.org. When you get hooked, read the books that are available in English and German. Also have a look at the IDE source code to see how stuff is implemented.

For starters, create a plugin that just adds a menu item. Then have it dump some text to the Output window. Wrap some useful library into your plugin and access its APIs. Learn to add a view, and customize it. Go step by step and implement one piece of functionality at a time. Toni for instance described how he ended up adding custom file types, and even custom views for his genome viewer (using the Netbeans Visual Library).

The NetBeans platform is feature-complete and only updated about once a year (together with a new NetBeans release), so it's stable and well documented. As an experienced developer you can migrate your application from platform 5 APIs to 6 in a day. Of course you dou don't have to. But every time you do, you get new usability features "for free". For example, in apps based on platform 6, you can dock and undock all windows just by using the default NetBeans APIs.

Another question was, whether a platform app could be a front-end for a Java EE app? Yes, there are even demos available that show you how to create clients and servers. Tip: NetBeans projects have a webstart setting that automatically builds a web-ready JNLP file for you.

Between the Community speakers and the next session, Roman stepped on the stage again and acknowledged the community's team effort that went into the localization of the IDE for university students. NetBeans IDE 5.5.1 is already available in German, and work on NB 6_de has started. Peter Heusch received an award as a representative of the team, as did Jake Jackson and others (in absence). Thank you all for your contributions!

Next was an interesting talk by Karol Harezlak about mobile Java applications. I like the new support for scalable vector graphics (SVG) in the Mobility pack. Hm... I still have a half-finished mobile game lying around... I'm tempted to rewrite it using SVG, but will my old phone support that? Need to investigate.

Karol also demoed a typical Java ME application that allows you to connect to a servlet from your phone to look up data in a database. He also showed the new game builder for creating these little 2D maps for mobile adventure games. Read more about the updated Mobility pack here.

The last talk, Tools for Simplifying SOA, by Sang Shin, was still very well attended, although it was already after 6pm. But Sang is an icon and you just want to see his talk. :) I won't describe it here, not only because I have no clue about the details of service-oriented architecture, but mainly because Sang has the fantastic habit to provide step-by-step scripts for his talks on javapassion.com! There are all kinds of free Java classes too (incl Java FX script soon), have a look.

Apart from walking us through his demo, Sang also explained aspect oriented programming: I cannot explain it very well, but you apply this concept when you want to add code to certain cases (e.g. make a security check every time a setter changes text), but it would be too much of a fuss to add this manually to every method. One question from the audience was: When Sang talked about reliable web services, somebody remarked that .NET interoperability and "reliability" were not even clearly defined, or, were they? Yes, they are! Sun and Microsoft really sat together once, and defined interoperable technologies, google for WSIT.

So, and now I'm gonna drink my hot chocolate. :-P