Wen's Blog: Who? Wen!

I'm in Beijing this week for Sun Tech Days and the NetBeans 6.5 launch activities so will get to the point:  NetBeans IDE 6.5 is out.  Download Now.

I'm the most excited about the new PHP support and additional web development features (improved JavaScript editing/debugging, integrated CSS/HTML editing, and revamped DB support with an emphasis on MySQL).  In short, NetBeans is not only a great Java IDE, but also now a top notch web IDE.

Since it's getting late here in Beijing, I'll leave you with the obligatory marketing blurb:

NetBeans IDE 6.5 is the latest release of Sun's award-winning open-source IDE that enables developers to rapidly create web, enterprise, desktop, and mobile applications with Java, C/C++ , JavaScript, Ruby, Groovy, and PHP. Supported by a vibrant developer community and offering a diverse selection of third-party plugins, the NetBeans IDE is a must-download for developers.

NetBeans™ IDE 6.5 introduces several new features, including a robust IDE for PHP, JavaScript debugging for Firefox and IE, and support for Groovy and Grails. This release also includes a number of enhancements for Java™, Ruby and Rails, and C/C++ development. Java™ feature highlights include: built-in support for Hibernate, Eclipse project import, and compile on save.

Combining excellent out of the box experience, compelling features, and a great plugin ecosystem, NetBeans™ IDE 6.5 is a must-download for developers.

The NetBeans 10th Anniversary Celebration is officially underway: http://www.netbeans.org/birthday/

You should expect a week of fun new content and retrospectives in honor of this great ocassion. Today- an interview with James Gosling and recognition for the NB Dream Team.

Also, don't forget to participate in the NB Decathlon!  This is your opportunity to tell the world what you think about NetBeans (and possibly get a limited edition shirt): http://www.netbeans.org/birthday/decathlon.html

Finally, NB 6.5 RC1 is ready and should be live shortly.

Yup, great week for NetBeans!

♪ They say it's your birthday / We're gonna have a good time ♪

We're celebrating NetBeans turning 10 all next week with a number of activities and retrospectives!  You can get a preview of the festivities over at http://netbeans.org/birthday/. 

Also, get ready for our community oriented NB Decathlon- a set of 10 events (for 10 years) where you can blog, post, video and tell the world about how NetBeans has helped you, what you think the future of NetBeans should be, and possibly receive a limited edition NB 10th shirt.  So break out your party hats, download the latest build, and help us wish NetBeans a happy 10th!

Nominations for the 2009 Developer.com Awards are due by Monday, Oct 13th.  Since nominations are free individual submissions (from various users) are encouraged.  Do you have a favorite technology(ies) that you feel is deserving of an award?  If so, nominate now and spread the word to the various communities as well.

Here's the list of last year's winners.

Below are my picks for favorite technologies, still have to narrow down in a few categories

Categories:
         o Technology of the Year: Cloud Computing
         o Framework of the Year: Java technology with JavaFX
         o Development Tool: NetBeans IDE
         o Development Utility: VisualVM, NetBeans Profiler, Sun Studio Analyzer, OpenSolaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace)
         o Database Tool or Add-in: MySQL
         o Wireless/Mobile Development Tool: NetBeans IDE (Mobility features)
         o Web Service or Web2 Product of the Year: Project Kenai
         o Java Tool or Java Add-in of the Year: NetBeans IDE, Visual VM
         o .NET Tool: Glassfish Metro
         o Open Source Tool: NetBeans IDE, GlassFish, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK, etc..

Deadline is Oct 13th- so hurry and nominate now!

If you haven't been following the progress of the NetBeans Innovators Grant Contest, now would be a great to time to visit the contest results page and check out the winners.  There were a number of very interesting projects and I for one am interested in playing with a few in depth:

• NB Project - get your Gantt on with a project management tool based on the NB platform.
  
• Scala Support - pretty self explanatory.  One the most popular requested features for NB.
  
• Cube°n  - now there's no excuse not to keep up with your tasks.
  

Again a big round of congratulations to all participants! http://www.netbeans.org/grant/

This is an interesting post by Larry Augustin on his observations of the differences in perception of Open Source in Europe vs US:  http://lmaugustin.typepad.com/lma/2008/09/commercial-open-source-in-europe-verses-the-us.html

Slashdot has this post tagged as 'flamebait' since Augustin concludes that the Europeans (and pretty much the rest of the world) is ahead of the US when it comes to adoption of commercial Open Source.  Not having ventured enough internationally (from a professional standpoint), I can't really agree or disagree, but given what I've seen on my travels, I wouldn't really be surprised.  Anyone care to weigh in?

Related News Update:

Two open source companies (Novell UK and Sirius) were granted access to UK's educational software sales pipeline.  In a traditionally pro-Microsoft country, this is certainly an interesting precedent: Read More.

Booth duty isn't always the most glamorous job as half the time you're sitting/standing wondering why the expo hall is open when all of the conference attendees are actually attending and learning in sessions.  Then lunch happens.  Suddenly, every booth, including the tucked-away booth staffed by the lone recruiter gets swarmed with developers looking for shwag or wondering why XYZ company is at a PHP-related conference.  Mostly it's about the shwag.

Then I remember why I like attending developer-centric conferences: most developers are willing to listen to your  spiel *and* aren't afraid to give their opinions.  So far, of the booth tours that I've done this year, ZendCon has certainly been my favorite.  Maybe it was the smaller size (~750 attendees) or the stronger community feel, or both, the developers that came to the Sun booth, lured by the possibility of a free SDN water bottle, often stayed to hear what we had to say about our technologies.  They were also just as fun to talk to as a few of them worked for large/traditional companies that I wouldn't have guessed had adopted an all open-source (and even cloud) solution.

Since I am a NetBeans guy, I spent most of the time talking about the new PHP features in 6.5.  In between demo'ing NB, I also got to show off OpenSolaris + Web Stack running on VirtualBox, and was glad to learn that over half the developers I spoke with were aware of OpenSolaris and VirtualBox.  Quite a few were even using VB (and liked it).

Of course, I've been at enough conferences to have faked interest in a demo just to get shwag, but since they'd already gotten the water bottle and had no reason to stick around, I'd like to believe that most of the developers stayed (and asked questions) because they were genuinely interested.   The best part was a few of them came back the next day to tell us they tried out NB, liked it, and even had feedback

Just in time to answer and log all the great NetBeans IDE 6.5 Beta feedback- we've got forums!

Big kudos to the NB Web Team for getting our forums up in such a short time.

NetBeans IDE 6.5 Beta (released 8/13) includes a number of new features around general database development.  Since one of the 6.5 features is the new PHP editor, it was only natural that we also focused on improving tooling for database development, and in particular, for MySQL.  The following post will highlight the new and improved database features using MySQL and the Sakila sample database.

Connecting and Exploring your Schema

Developers can access and connect to a local install of MySQL by clicking on the Services tab in the top left window.  Right-clicking on the Database icon and selecting "New Connection" will bring up a dialog box like this:

Once a connection has been established, developers can then explore a schema via the Database Explorer, examine table layouts, indexes, etc... as well as browse data in the tables.

SQL Editor and Results Window

The SQL Editor now includes a number of improvements including code completion, and the ability to sort and edit results.  Code completion provides insight into the available tables and fields for the current query, this feature also works for multi-table queries.  A new results window is now generated with each executed query, so you no longer need to worry about re-running a previous query.

Developers can bring up a SQL Command window by right clicking on an established database connection and choose "Execute Command".  From there, developers can create and test your SQL queries directly.

SQL History Browser

A new addition with 6.5 is the ability to store and recall previously entered SQL commands.  By default, the IDE will recall your last 10,000 queries (yes, that really is 10,000).

Code Generator

Lastly, for PHP developers, the IDE now includes code snipets via wizards to create a MySQL database connection as well as a quick dump of table data.  You can activate this command with the keyboard shortcut Alt + Insert (Ctrl + i for Macs):

> Download the NetBeans IDE 6.5 Beta

> Learn more about 6.5

NetBeans IDE 6.5 Beta is the latest release of Sun's award-winning open-source IDE that enables developers to rapidly create web, enterprise, desktop, and mobile applications with Java, C/C++ , JavaScript^?, Ruby, Groovy, and PHP. Supported by a vibrant developer community and offering a diverse selection of third-party plugins, the NetBeans IDE is a must-download for developers. 

NetBeans IDE 6.5 Beta is out!

In celebration of the latest release of our award-winning open-source IDE, I've listed "6.5" reasons to download and start using the Beta:

Reason 1: Support for PHP Development

As a former PHP developer, I admit to having a bit of a positive bias towards anything NetBeans and PHP.  That said, the NetBeans IDE for PHP is incredibly solid for a first version.  Feature highlights include: code completion, quick fixes and semantic checks, FTP support, Debugging via Xdebug, code generation, and a nice drag and drop wizard to generate code for popular Web Services (mmm Twitter/Amazon mashup).

Reason 2: JavaScript Editing enhancements

We made improvements to the already amazing JavaScript editor (released in 6.1).  My favorite addition is the ability to debug in Firefox and IE (for free!).  Other highlights include HTTP client monitoring and bundled popular JavaScript libraries.

Reason 3: Groovy and Grails support

Java developers now have a scripting language to call their own with Groovy.  NetBeans now has support for Groovy and the Grails framework.  Try it, love it.

Reason 4: Built-in Support for Hibernate

We released support for Hibernate in 6.1 as an add-on via the Update Center.  In 6.5, Hibernate is now built-in to our Java EE/Web bundle.  New features in 6.5 includes support for reverse engineering , HQL query execution support, and refactoring of Hibernate mapping files.

Reason 5: Improved SQL Editor

6.5 Beta comes with a number of new and improved features around database development, starting with a redesigned "New Connection" dialog that is more accessible to non-Java developers. From there, the real fun begins... our SQL editor now comes with code completion, SQL history explorer, tabbed results pane that is both sortable and editable.

Reason 6: GlassFish v3 "Prelude"

The latest release of GlassFish is now included in the Ruby and All-in-one bundles.  This new version sports an OSGi based architecture, has a small footprint, fast startup and deployment, and improved support for scripting, especially jRuby.

Reason 6.5: And Much More...

• Compile/Deploy on Save
• Eclipse Project Import and Synchronization
• Ajax-enabled JSF CRUD Generator
• C/C++ editor enhancements and support for remote development
• Support for Ruby Tests
• Improved support for Rake build tool

>> Download NetBeans IDE 6.5 Beta

>> Learn more about the Beta.

I was speaking with a couple of college students at OSCON who were just getting into programming.  One of the student's introduction to CS was learning Visual Basic in class.  Normally, I'd expect C/C++ or Java to be the introduction language of choice for college CS courses, but to each their own.  So I ended up showing them NetBeans IDE for Java, the sample apps and our learning trails on netbeans.org.  Later, this got me thinking, what are good introductory progamming languages and why?

I started waaaay back with DOS BASIC, moved on to Pascal and Fortran, and really got into programming with Java (I avoided C/C++, too much pointer arithmetic and preprocessing for me).  Each of these languages taught me valuable concepts- basic procedural programming, data structures, and OOP respectively.   Looking back, I'd still recommend Java as a first language because syntatically it's easy to pick up, it teaches most of the important CS concepts (data typing, structures, OOP, etc...), you can graduate to much more advanced development, it's widely used in real world applications, and perhaps most importantly- OS agnostic.

 Not to start a flame war, but I would definitely love to hear which language you recommend and why.

Ok, last minute notice, but I'll be speaking at OSCON on Wed with the venerable Tim Bray.  We'll be presenting on Sun's Open Source offerings for the web: OpenSolaris + AMPstack + NetBeans and hosting on Joyent/EC2. 

For the NetBeans and PHP audience, I'll be giving a live demo of our PHP support in 6.5.  If you're at OSCON, stop on by our session "From Laptop to Cloud with AMP and OpenSolaris".

I attended the SF PHP Meetup last night where Andrei Zmievski (PHP 6 release manager and PHP core team member) gave a talk on PHP 6 and internationalization (i18n).  It was good to hear that while PHP 6 has been in development for the past 2 years, it's very likely that we'll be seeing a release in early 2009, and definitely ahead of Perl 6, as Andrei joked.

The main feature of PHP 6 will be that it will be entirely Unicode supported.  Or as one of his slides so aptly stated:

PHP 6 = PHP 5 + Unicode

It was evident that Andrei and team have given quite a bit of thought into what i18n means for the PHP world, and as a result, PHP developers everywhere will soon be enjoying a new set of tools to enable faster development of multi-lingual sites.  My favorite example was a class that had the method names all defined using different languages, including an example in Hebrew (written right to left)!  From a practical standpoint, many of the features are intelligent enough to be able to handle common cultural issues such as proper sorting and date/number formatting.

The even better news is that most of these features will also be available for the upcoming PHP 5.3 release via pecl.  The intl module will be "backwards" compatible with PHP 5.3 since the classes expect UTF-8 encodings.  How you provide those strings is up to the you.

One concern about PHP 6 is that since it will be entirely Unicode, strings will automatically double in size, meaning there will certainly be a performance hit.  So for now, I look forward to i18n with PHP 5.3 as well as the much needed namespaces.

Andrei's presentation is available on his site here.

NetBeans 6.5 M1 was released earlier today - you can go here to download.

Since my scripting love goes to PHP, I went ahead and grabbed the very tiny (15mb) PHP-only build to do a compare and contrast against the EA Build of 6.1 for PHP.  Initial impressions are of a much improved new project wizard- will post more when I have time to actually build something of substance.

My biggest joy goes to the fact that importing existing sources is no longer borked or complicated:

NetBeans was also kind enough to detect that I was running MAMP and suggested that I pull my sources from the default htdocs/.  I apparently didn't have an index file.  So fixed that with a quick test page:

<?php

phpinfo();

?>

Plus I also wanted to verify that xdebug installed correctly:

In all, this took me a few minutes to get back up and running with an existing PHP project.  Looking forward to trying out the new/improved editing and debugging features next!