The Best Kept Secret : NetBeans' Successful (Rich Client) Platform
posted Saturday, 2 April 2005
Alot of the focus has been
on the IDE portion of NetBeans, but there is a powerful NetBeans
Platform framework that many have used to create rich client
applications.
Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine
correctly points
out that one of the best kept
secrets of NetBeans is the strength of the NetBeans Platform.
"The NetBeans Platform
is the engine behind NetBeans. " The platform is an application
runtime - a "generic" large desktop application. The NetBeans
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Platform
jumpstarts your
application - it provides UI management, data and
presentation management, an editor, setting management, a wizard
framework, configuration management and all done in a cross-platform manner.
You can see what others have been doing here
and here.
If you couple the NetBeans platform and the fact that NetBeans has the
best UI building tools
built-in to the NetBeans IDE - the NetBeans rich client platform
rocks. Is it any surprise that Eclipse developers point
to NetBeans for doing rich client development ? Not really.
NetBeans as a whole is a mature IDE and Platform and has been around
awhile. The Platform portion is very successful and offers (from
the website) :
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User
Interface Management
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Windows,
menus, toolbars and other
presentation components are provided by the Platform. Developers write
to a set of abstractions such actions and components, saving time, and
producing cleaner, more bug-free code. Custom components and behaviors
can be written, but for most cases this is not needed.
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Data
and Presentation Management
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The
NetBeans Platform
contains a rich toolset for presentating data to the user and
manipulating that data.
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Editor
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Available
as an extension to the Platform,
applications built on NetBeans can use the NetBeans Editor, a powerful
and extensible toolset for building custom editors.
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Setting
Managment
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The
NetBeans Filesystems infrastructure
abstracts file-based data. Files may exist locally or remotely, on FTP
or CVS servers or in a database; access to them is transparent to
module
code that works with files. The Platform can be extended to support new
forms of storage.
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Wizard
Framework
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a
toolset for easily building
extensible, user-friendly Wizards to guide users through more complex
tasks.
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Configuration
Managment
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Rather
than tediously write code to
access remote data and manage and save user-configurable settings,
etc.,
all of this is handled by the Platform. Applications consist of the
platform and the logic code important to that application.
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Storage
Managment
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An
abstraction of file-based data access.
"Files" in the NetBeans paradigm may be local files, or exist remotely,
for example, on an FTP server, CVS repository or in a database. Where
this data is stored is completely transparent to other modules that
work
with this data.
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source : NetBeans Platform
Despite the marketing dollars IBM has thrown at promoting Eclipse RCP -
Eclipse developers have acknowledged
that for building rich clients, NetBeans is the better platform.
An example, of NetBeans Platform development is the recent
adoption of the Platform version of NetBeans by Nokia.
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