evangelist who wrote the original book on NetBeans and has a rich history of great contributions to NetBeans and Inyoung Cho who is a Java Technology Evangelist who was part of the original JavaSoft Engineering group and today travels around the world talking to Java developers and recently doing presentations at
SunTech days). For the three of us - this was the second time we presented this topic (only with different reasons). You can catch the first talk at JavaOne 2005 here. Before our 9:45 am start on Wednesday Tim and I had breakfast at a diner near Union Square - we were sitting chatting about the very cool numbers pouring in about NetBeans adoption - then we got side-tracked with Tim writing a code abbreviation which he did in a few minutes and would later demo. Then we realized it was like, uh...9:20 am ... hey we better get going or we'll miss it. We dashed off. Why three of us, you may ask? I actually structured the original talk this way for a couple of reasons. The idea is to create a buffet of features that developers in the audience can "snack on". The change of voices bring you a change of topics and what I've noticed is that everyone pays attention and the short topics are like short
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A Picture of Success -
NetBeans Growth the Past Two Years
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subject films and people are wide awake. NetBeans has alot of very cool technologies and developers are extremely interested in knowing what's new and what's in the latest version of NetBeans - but this presentation coming after NetBeans Day - I was surprised that we got as good an attendance as we did. We also showed NetBeans growth rates and people were surprised at the huge growth. This serves to provide a reality check to some misinformation about NetBeans growth by some competitors. Some were genuinely surprised by NetBeans' high growth rates. Here are the 15 reasons we presented (note most of the links below point to tutorials) :
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Out-of-the-Box Experience. It is hard to beat all the technologies and features that NetBeans offers right out of the box - without having to search for plugins. The latest development daily builds are only running around 36 mb! If you triple that size (around 100 mb) you get Eclipse with only an editor, compiler and debugger. Mind you, it is a good editor but it is not an accident that so many Eclipse developers have moved to NetBeans - they really loved the NetBeans out-of-the-box experience. |
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NetBeans' Technology Plugin Ecosystem. The NetBeans plugin ecosystem is provides an healthy ecosystem for plugins and RCP technologies to thrive. New NetBeans Update centers are popping up around the net and bringing with them a wealth of plugins. Some examples, are the .NET2Java plugin which moves C# and VB.NET sources to Java, the new jMaki plugin that provides a wealth of AJAX support and as well the BeanNetter web start application which converts JavaBeans to NetBeans plugins which can be imported into the Matisse GUI Builder palette. Update Centers like nbextras host lots of plugins. Plugins have become amazingly simple to create. |
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Developer Collaboration. The Developer Collaboration modules allow developers in dispersed locations to use the IDE to do code walk-throughs by using code-aware instant messaging, document and file sharing, remote session sharing, a framework for collaboration and the building of collablets and the use of java.net collaboration server or your own. |
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NetBeans Enterprise Pack and Support of Java EE 5.0. The NetBeans Enterprise Pack provides comprehensive support for Java EE 5.0 including support for EJB 3.0, Java Persistence and all the other new technologies in Java EE 5.0. It also includes support for Struts, JSF, Hibernate, Spring and the Java EE 5.0 app servers like the bundled Sun Java App Server. It includes two-way UML modeling so you can reverse- engineer from source code UML diagrams, includes a BPEL engine, SOA Visual tools, XML Schema tools and ways of creating secure web services and much more. Inyoung's SOA Visual Editor demo was a surprise to some in the audience - here was an open source tool with complete support for SOA, UML modeling and Java EE 5.0. Incidentally you can find a nice demo of the Java Studio Enterprise and NetBeans Enterprise Pack feature for reverse- engineering UML form source here. It includes flash demos of how to do this. |
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Jackpot. This is an exciting next generation project for code transformation. Jackpot is refactoring++. Jackpot is a technology for safely modifying source code using transformation and rules. It offers extensions with custom rule sets, audit operators and transformation classes. |
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Mobile Development Pack. NetBeans is the best place to write mobile code. It offers two flavors. One for writing Java MIDP applications using a visual MIDlet designer that employs drag-and-drop design, MIDlet templates, testing, debugging and easy configurability of devices. In addition, you can drop in 3rd party emulators. There is also a Mobile Pack for CDC. This pack allows you to create mobile applications using Matisse GUI Builder. |
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Great Educational Resources. There are alot of new resources to help developers learn all the features of NetBeans - including tutorials and flash demos. In addition, collaboration with BlueJ offers yet a new and very nice way to learn NetBeans. |
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Profiler. NetBeans offers a high quality Profiler. You can attach it to local or remote running applications and monitor heap size, GC statistics, thread count, thread state, object creation, memory leak detection, etc. You can analyze performance looking at per- method CPU timings, call tree, HTTP monitoring, live data, collected data, custom filters , etc. You can look at the Visual GC plugin aspects and inspect the activity of the JVM's GC. Flash demos of basic profiling and profiling a Tomcat web app. |
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NetBeans Rich Client Platform (RCP) Technology. NetBeans at its core is a platform with RCP APIs. If you remove all the NetBeans plugins you are left with a bare-bones rich client (platform). You can accelerate your effort by years of development time by simply using the plugin and RCP features of NetBeans. NetBeans has over 100 partners - there are lots of them that are using NetBeans (Rich Client) Platform to accelerate their develpment. Such items as User Interface Management for menus, toolbars and actions, Settings UI, Data Presentation, Editor, Wizards, Storage Management and Configuration are all provided - saving alot of effort, time and testing. |
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Java BluePrints. What if your IDE offered you best Java practices which you could browse through looking at what the best practices were and the design and once you liked one - you could select it and generate it as your own project. You can do that in NetBeans with Java BluePrints. |
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App Server Support. JBoss just endorsed NetBeans which is very cool. NetBeans includes Tomcat and Sun's Java Enterprise System App Server. NetBeans has support for many other app servers including JBoss, GlassFish, IBM WebSphere 6 and BEA WebLogic 9. |
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Editor Enhancements. NetBeans has come along way in a short time offering a number of Editor features such code completion, editor hints, abbreviations, navigation and source tools. Not to mention shortcuts and keybinds which extend support for Emacs and Eclipse. To understand what Tim did with his abbreviation you can look at this demo. |
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Native C and C++ Modules. NetBeans now supports C and C++. The new project types are C/C++ Applications, C/C++ Dynamic Library and C/C++ Project With Existing Makefile. After the talk, I spent some time with one senior developer who is looking at NetBeans as the complete solution for their Java and C/C++ developer teams. The addition of C/C++ support is also gaining new developers to the NetBeans IDE.
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Matisse GUI Builder. This is the best open source GUI Builder available. It so good that existing commercial companies are using it and selling facsimiles of it on Eclipse. It is as easy as drawing on paper and easier because you get easy internationalization, wonderful drag-and-drop component layout support, helpful guidelines for the platform you are working with (and automatic layout on whatever platform you deploy to), extensible component palettes and much more. Tim showed how easy it is to not only create a simple layout but to turn around an save it as a reusable entry in the palette. The audience was thrilled and applauded the ease of use of what they had just seen. (Wait...there is more coming - look out the next generation of Matisse is on its way)
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Best Cost of Ownership. NetBeans bundles a comprehensive development environment and rich client platform plus a full Java EE 5.0 application server plus database plus UML modeling plus a BPEL engine plus SOA Visual Design tools plus Profiler plus a number of advanced Java EE/SE/ME technologies....and they are all tested and work cleanly. The amount of plugin Easter egg hunts is minimized. The contrast in philosophies between Eclipse and NetBeans is stark : 100 MB Eclipse download of a Java editor/ compiler/debugger (and well...the rest of the stuff you have to find and download) or a 40 MB download of comprehensive Java SE, ME, EE and an Enterprise Pack with a visual SOA/UML environment. There is so much more - a sophisticated profiler, a visual mobile development (drag-and-drop) environment, developer collaboration and lots more. The NetBeans QA team tests the quality of everything that goes into the IDE/Platform, Update Center and Packs. The result is stability and a tested feature-rich IDE/Platform - no running around trying to evaluate plugins to do basic web app development - it is just there in NetBeans. It gets better because NetBeans partners are building some amazing solutions and plugins for the platform. Stay tuned.
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We also talked about two other reasons at the start of the talk - the NetBeans community and NetBeans partners. NetBeans has been gaining partners at a seriously fast rate. We showed the following partner slide which is already out of date ( a number of other companies have joined as partners and as well there was a big JBoss endorsement of NetBeans) :
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One item we didn't show because of time but mentioned a big feature coming soon - Java Studio Creator technologies will be available as an add-on pack in NetBeans. Again free. And Java Studio Creator will be open sourced. To see the Creator technologies in action in NetBeans IDE 5.5 check this out.
This was the third JavaOne presentation for me, the second of JavaOne 2006 and I was happy with it. A number of developers came up after the talk wanting more information on specific things and later I met with a chief architect of a large SI to discuss SOA and UML support in NetBeans. There is growing adoption and interest in NetBeans. If you have questions or are interested in some of the above drop me an email. One of the developers said to me they were surprised by the continuous exposition of technologies - "never a dull moment". To both of my co-presenters - I have to say a big, big "thank you". For our audience members and anyone else that wants to use the technologies they saw - go to NetBeans.org and download NetBeans IDE 5.5 Beta. If you are a Java developer - NetBeans is the IDE to use. Check it out.
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