Pro NetBeans

I always browse the “recent changes” section of the NetBeans wiki. This lets me see what’s been going on in the last few days or weeks if I haven’t stayed up to date. Recently I saw this page, JavaEE6 Integration, appear in the Wiki as recently modified. Looks like the next version of NetBeans will start to provide Java EE 6 support. Maybe this has been blogged to death already, but it’s the first I’ve seen of it. (maybe I’ve been under a rock). Very cool. I’m especially looking forward to Servlet 3.0 support.

During the opening keynote session Tuesday morning of JavaOne 2009, the first presenter showed a nifty Java app developed in JavaFX connected to a massive chat engine. The intent is to encourage people to network and collaborate during the conference. However it had some nifty effects baked in. During the session, they announced that by the end everyone will receive a link to download it. I’ll post some screenshots once I get it installed.

Update : It took a little longer than “by the end of the general session”, but eventually Sun sent out custom links for each attendee to use DarkChat. See images below.

(sorry I blurred some names here so this looks a little dodgy)

The chat app is exclusive to attendees at JavaOne, but demos JavaFX nicely. I believe they also stated during the general session that this is backed by the DarkStar web/gaming engine.

Today at JavaOne, Sun announces the Java Store, an online community where developers can publish and download Java applications for world wide access. Currently in Beta, it will be available later this year.

James Gosling was onstage to announce it with a nifty T-shirt “Turning Labors of Love into Day Jobs”.

The store features several initial applications, where you can drag and drop applications out of the store to install them. A new store front with advanced features is planned to roll out soon as well.

The general concept is that developers with good ideas should be able to deploy applications to a world-wide audience without having to form companies, buy hardware, and incur large costs.

During the opening keynote, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz brought onstage Lowell McAdam, the CEO of Verizon Wireless. Together they announced a partnership. Verizon will be making available to developers on July 27th. They will be opening up their network elements, allowing developers to access data like friends presence (online, available, etc.), their location, buddy lists, etc. all through Verizon open APIs.

Developers can find out more at Verizon’s developer web site. Mor einfo TBD.

I’ll be interested to see if there’s any tie-in to development IDEs like NetBeans and if the Verizon APIs will be workable in the Mobility tools in NetBeans.

CommunityOne (West) 2009 ended with a bang. The event drew to a close with an evening party that had a bit of a carnival atmosphere. There was tons of free food, beer, and entertainment, that once again proves a statement I made at JavaOne last year… ‘the entertainment gets weirder every year’. This year proved no exception.

Upon entering the venue, I saw carnival booths where guests could try a ring toss or bean bag throw to win prizes.

There was also the usual Segway riding available… which proved to be quite popular since the line held quite long most of the evening.

There was also a blow-up ring for dodge ball. The teams faced off to win T-shirts (always a draw).

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I’m currently sitting in the Project Kenai session at CommunityOne 2009, titled ‘Your Code, Your Community… Your Cloud, Project Kenai’. Sun employees John Brock and Sharat Chander presented the session.

John Brock

They covered a nice introduction to Kenai, its community focus, how to sign up for it, and what you can do with it.

Sharat Chander

Kenai is Sun’s version of SourceForge, though it has some nice benefits. One of the benefits is a tight integration with a development IDE, NetBeans. NetBeans has Kenai-related several features which allow you to interact directly with Kenai, it’s source code repositories, forums, bug trackers, etc. This session was more of an overview, though I’m looking forward to one or two sessions later this week at JavaOne that cover Kenai.

John and Sharat (running ahead of schedule shockingly) then did a Q&A taking questions from the audience. They discussed some of their design decisions creating Kenai, why they chose JRuby as their core implementation language, and their experiences with it.

About half-way through, Sharat hinted at a “big” Kenai-related announcement we’ll hear tomorrow (Tuesday). Assuming it is a feature or interesting tool. I’ll have to follow up and blog about it later. However, during the Q&A there was a “shhhhh” hint about continuous integration support inside Kenai (I’m assuming and hoping for Hudson support).

Luckily, I’m attending the CommunityOne West 2009 event (pre-cursor to JavaOne). CommunityOne is a nice free event where developers and users of technologies from all over the “open source” spectrum can come together and dialogue and learn. There are sessions on OpenSolaris, Cloud Computing, Groovy, Glassfish, NetBeans, RIAs, JavaFX, Eclipse, NetBeans, Virtualization, databases, mobile development, and more.

The morning general session started out with David Douglas, Sun’s VP for Cloud Computing and Developer Platforms giving some welcoming remarks, welcoming some student campus ambassadors,and doing some neat Sun Cloud Demos.

Sun Campus Ambassadors with David Douglas

Several of the guests and demos performed onstage related to Sun’s Cloud capabilities. The drag and drop demo for deploying a live datacenter was pretty cool, though I’d seen it on YouTube before. Some of the partners discussed using the Cloud for things like backing up your files (disaster recovery) and creating test environments for load testing applications.

So far CommunityOne has been interesting, but I’ll admit I miss the days when the Monday before JavaOne was mostly reserved for “NetBeans Day”. Ahh, the good old days.

The NetBeans team has announced the release of NetBeans IDE 6.7 Beta. It contains a variety of new and updated features.

Review the release notes here : http://www.netbeans.org/community/releases/67/

Download NetBeans IDE 6.7 Beta here : http://download.netbeans.org/netbeans/6.7/beta/

The NetBeans team has just released 6.7 Milestone 3. You can download the build here : http://bits.netbeans.org/download/6.7/m3/

Details on the new and noteworthy are here : http://wiki.netbeans.org/NewAndNoteworthyMilestone3NB67

Based on this article, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29752352/, it seems IBM has entered talks to buy Sun. These deals fall through all the time, but IF the deal goes through I wonder what the fate would be for NetBeans since IBM was the original creator of Eclipse. I doubt they would want to promote a product that competes heavily with their original platform investment (Eclipse). Hopefully this deal tanks.