NetBeans Day Special Report 2005

JavaOne 2005 – Day 0
This year’s JavaOne got off to a bang with the 2nd annual NetBeans Day at the Argent Hotel in San Francisco. After arriving bright and early at 9am and quickly getting our bearings, we were amazed to soon after see people lining up at the stairs to get in (the first 350 people got a shirt and a book). Attendance appeared to be shaping up nicely for the event, with around 850 people, and more still showing up today to register at the door. There was a lot of excitement in the air and it was great to see all the guys from Prague eagerly waiting to show off the tools they have been working so hard on for the past several months. NetBeans Day was a great success and the team that put it together should be proud. I was amazed at how many people drove into San Francisco just for the event and looks like everyone had a great time!

Incredible Growth in the Last Six Months
After the opening keynotes, I had a chance to catch up with NetBeans director, Tim Cramer. Tim and I had a great discussion about the competition that NetBeans has with Eclipse and about the work that NetBeans has ahead of it. According to Tim, their task is split into two parts: build a core that is strong and bring developers back to it, then get the community involved with extending the core. The first piece of their task is just about done now, with developers starting to return to NetBeans at a blistering rate. According to the NetBeans.org statistics, there were over 135,000 active users in May (people who actually use NetBeans and connect to the auto-update site), three times the number of users of just eight months ago. In addition, 25% of all downloads since NetBeans was open sourced have happened in the last 7 months. No matter what way you slice it, NetBeans is back and people are definitely trying it out.

Bright Future for NetBeans
The theme of the day was what NetBeans Next was going to look like. The presentations that were bookended by the keynotes were designed around showing you the latest and greatest features of NetBeans 4.1 and beyond and the tools that build on what NetBeans has to offer (such as Creator). One great example of NetBeans really pushing the envelope was the Mobility Pack (available for download now!) During the session talking about the new features in the 4.1 Mobility Pack, the NetBeans team demonstrated how to build a MIDP application using the new flow builder and form builder and the wireless connection wizard (bind your web services to form components). I was very impressed with the whole process and it seemed to bring J2ME development down to a level where even the casual developer can finally try it out. I’m looking forward to digging around for a Treo emulator and building my first J2ME application.

Next generation layout builder blows the crowd away
The long day ended with a keynote by the “father of Java”, James Gosling. Gosling started by discussing the great strides the community was making on helping to improve both Java and NetBeans. He quickly led into a demo by Romain Guy (who has some excellent demos at JRoller) showing the new Matisse GUI builder. On stage, Romain was able to build a complete MP3 player feeding off an iTunes XML file and using some of the new components from the community such as JDNC and SwingX. I have to say that the demo was very, very impressive and the GUI builder made quick work of the normally difficult alignment. If you ever felt that Java wasn’t up to snuff for cool UIs, then you’ve never seen the new stuff being released from the community. The software that was built during the demo will even be released at Java.net in the coming days.

Finally, Gosling gave out a few awards to people who had been active in the NetBeans community recently. Each winner received a framed certificate, a framed poster, and a new AMD powered workstation. Certainly a nice set of gifts for helping out with the community. I wish I had one of those sweet looking machines!

Catch you at JavaOne,
Matthew Schmidt
matt@javalobby.org
Yahoo IM: mattschmidtjl

Samples from the NetBeans Day Photo Gallery

View these photos and many more from JavaOne 2005 at Javalobby's photo gallery...

NetBeans Day started bright and early for us on the Javalobby team.

The first keynote of the day was a demo of Looking Glass by Hideya Kawahara and Paul Block. They are using NetBeans as their development environment, and are excited about the possibility of source visualization tools with Netbeans and Looking Glass. Looking Glass is primarily an experimentation framework for developing 3D user interfaces, and the interfaces seen during the demos are only one possibility. It is possible to develop your own 3D interfaces on top of Looking Glass. The Looking Glass Project is interested in the possibility of a Netbeans module specifically for Looking Glass development, and put out a request for anyone who would be interpreted in developing one. If that “anyone” would be you, get in touch with the Looking Glass project.

Jonathan Schwartz gave a keynote address (after an entertaining talk by our own Rick Ross) and was joined by his colleague Todd Fast who assisted him in introducing a cool new collaboration module for NetBeans that allows you to do IM style chat directly from within NetBeans as well as VOIP. It also allows you to share source code with other users you are connected with. Big deal you say? What can this do for you that you can’t already do with IM? Well, the biggest feature is you can share the source file such that the other user can make changes to it on your system, and even recompile it on your system. Both collaborators can work on the source code at the same time.

I spoke with Jaroslav Tulach, one of the founders of NetBeans, and one of the things he was excited about is using Netbeans as a platform for developing rich client applications. Although this is a feature Eclipse often touts as one of it’s big “selling points”, NetBeans has been a platform capable of developing rich client applications for much longer than Eclipse. Tulach will be giving a presentation on this at JavaOne on Wednesday at 4:00 PM.

As a desktop developer, my favorite upcoming Netbeans 4.2 feature is the new Matisse layout manager that was discussed a few weeks ago on Javalobby. Matisse allows you to create complex layouts using simple drag and drop, almost like absolute positioning. This all requires a new layout manager called GroupLayout, which even with hand coding, is supposed to be easier to use than GridBag layout. Two days ago, the GroupLayout manager was released. We won’t have to wait until Mustang to use these. They will work in Tiger, and will also be back ported to 1.4.

NetBeans day this year was an overwhelming success. As I talked to Jaroslav Tulach, he remarked that last year only about 100 people showed up for NetBeans day. This year, there were over 600. If the wildly successful NetBeans day is an indication, this year’s JavaOne is looking to be one of the most successful and exciting JavaOne conferences to date.

Kind Regards,
Mike Urban
murban@javalobby.org