POV-Ray support for NetBeans...and pix from the road

I'm doing a NetBeans module-building presentation inside Sun next week. POV-Ray scene language makes a nice demo for explaining how to do some things. So NetBeans now has POV-Ray support...

POV-Ray is pretty cool - I used it years ago in my brief period doing commercial graphics work. Unlike most 3D rendering software, rather than a modeller (though Moray is a good one), it uses a "scene language", so you enter things like sphere <0, 0, 0> to define what's there. And since it's working with mathematically perfect geometric primitives, rather than triangle-meshes, you don't end up with weirdness if you zoom in too close.

It will work well to demonstrate some basic NetBeans concepts like how to recognize and edit file-types, how to write a basic project type, and do loose coupling between the two. The sources are now uploaded into NetBeans CVS in the contrib project. To try it on Windows, it's worth getting a non-GUI version of POV-Ray.

If you're saying to yourself, I want that NetBeans module-building tutorial! Why is it only for Sun people?!, you can get it. This is the shake-down-cruise for doing this - we'll do it for more people around JavaONE, and elsewhere. Of course, if you're interested, please comment to this blog - gauging interest is a good thing.

And after a month on the road demoing NetBeans, I'm back in rainy Palo Alto. A few people commented that they liked the pictures in the last blog about my travels, so I'll share a few more. My last stop was a great dinner with Ben Galbraith and a bunch of folks from the Utah Java Users Group in Salt Lake City. I'll be back there to talk about NetBeans to the full group on March 17th. Please come!

The pictures below were shot on my drive across Utah and Nevada, on the next to last day of driving. Yes, polarizing sunglasses can be used as a filter on a digital camera :-)

The Great Salt Lake

Hills with shadow

A power plant at dusk