Seapegasus Blog

Tuesday December 04, 2007

NetBeans Day Frankfurt (1)

Reporting somewhat live from the NetBeans day in Frankfurt, Germany!

Which was yesterday. But I jotted down a lot of incoherent notes that I will post here so it will almost feel as if I was posting them live. Just one day later. :)

Presently it's very gray and stormy in Frankfurt, a city famous in Germany for its technology and business tradeshows, its traditional Christmas market, and the exceptionally high number of skyscrapers (I counted ten). To get in the mood, Martin Balin and Roman Strobl tried to steal each other's show by speaking a few lines of German in the welcome session, and the 150-200 developers present appreciated it, since most of the other speakers spoke English only.

Interest in NetBeans is clearly rising within Germany: A quick poll shows that the majority of the audience knows and has used NetBeans before (and only half of them also used Eclipse); three German books using NetBeans have been published this year (I will write more about them later this week); there are two German developers in the NetBeans DreamTeam; NB5.5.1 was localized into German by community members (and work on NB6 has started); As a "reward", the release of NetBeans IDE 6.0 (and the homepage redesign) are announced first at the NetBeans Day in Frankfurt. :)

Roman's next poll revealed that about 10% of the attendees have visited the community video page netbeans.tv. For the rest who don't know it yet, Roman quickly shows one of the crazy "help we need to deliver NetBeans CD to palestina" road movies. By the way -- from now on, we will send out DVDs (instead of CDs), and they do not only include installers and the JDK, but also tutorials.

After this introduction to the community, Roman demos an example of the NetBeans Platform, and then finally, the freshly released IDE:

If you're an Eclipse user, feel free to try it and tell us whether you think the editor is now on par with the Eclipse editor -- e.g. concerning code generation, smart code completion, inline rename, mark occurences, annotations, javadoc, syntax highlighting, and a local history to easily revert small changes, hints, fix imports. Also try to run, stop, and rerun an application, using the play/pause buttons.

One question from the audience was, whether the keyboard shortcut card is dynamic or static. The PDF card in the help menu is indeed static. I couldn't catch the guy who asked after the talk, but if you are reading this: You can find out how to generate your custom keyboard shortcut card here.

Roman also demoed the updated GUI builder: Matisse now assists you even when you create a Java desktop application that you want to use to display and manage content from a database (CRUD = create/read/update/delete). Roman's real estate manager app includes a map viewer to visualize actual locations, and uses beans binding to connect the GUI to the database. While he whips up a whole database-aware desktop app in minutes, we learn that we can copy&paste whole sets of components in the GUI builder, that we can add e.g. the swingx image renderer into a GUI app (drop non-visual components next to form to access them), and that we can set the application's cmdline arguments and look&feel in its properties. A dialog also allows you to add your own type converters or validator classes to the GUI.

Apart from cool new Java frameworks, version 6 also supports other projects types and languages such as Ruby,/a>, C and C++, and there will be plugins for PHP, JavaFX and groovie. As an example for the half dozen Ruby developers in the audience, Roman creates a Ruby on Rails weblog in a few minutes.

PS: I took a fantastic photo series of somebody opening one of our new cube shirts! Or shirt cubes? If you got one of these mysterious cubes: It is not a stress ball! It's really a shirt! You will see when I post the pictures... (Will post them on Thursday -- I took lots of pics but of course brought no cable to connect my cam to the mac...)