Greetings everyone! I’m currently attending CommunityOne 2008 in San Francisco, California. I just wanted to provide a quick overview for folks who couldn’t make it here…

After the general session I headed into the first NetBeans as part of the NetBeans track of CommunityOne (used to be NetBeans Day).

NetBeans Day 2008 Banner 

The main NetBeans track started with an introduction and overview by Judith Lilienfeld, Director of Tools/Evangelism at Sun. She provided an dintroduction and overview of the agenda, as well as an overview of the free stuff that attendees were being providing. I especially liked it since the folks from Apress sent a flyer and discount coupon for my book, Pro NetBeans IDE 6 Rich Client Platform Edition. The flyer contains a 30% off coupon good today only at the CommunityOne bookstore. Judith was kind enough to give it a plug and show it off.

Some of the discussions that followed included:

 - JasperSoft representative discussed the JasperSoft BI Suite which allows you to do reporting, analysis, and ETL. They also briefly mentioned iReport plugin for NetBeans.

 - Brian Leonard, from Sun, performed a cool demo of the JasperSoft/iReport plugin directly in NetBeans 6.1. He showed how to easily create reports, bind them to a datasource, and easily add charts to the report. Overall, a nifty looking tool I need to check out more.

 - Tor Norbye then gave a quick overview of evolving language support as is, and in the near future in NetBeans 6.5, including PHP, Groovy, Scala, Fortress, Python, and Erlang. He also discussed the new GSF framework for language support.

 - Roman Strobl then gave a cool overview of the PHP NetBeans bundle and the support NetBeans provides for PHP, especially code completion, refactoring, templates, and more. I’m not a big PHP guy, but if I was I think I would definitely be using NetBeans to develop with it.

 - Olaf David from the USDA discussed ALM features for team collaboration.