I was fortunate enough to spend last week in Singapore. The first part of the week was spent teaching a training class. Geertjan Wielenga has already blogged on this topic quite a bit - Sun offers Java training courses and some of those courses have been updated so that the lab exercises now make use of the NetBeans IDE. In order to teach these courses you have to be certified as an instructor. The training class that Geertjan and I have been teaching during February is for those certified instructors. The goal of the one-day class was to get them up to speed on the NetBeans IDE so that they will be ready to assist their students.

Geertjan and I are not certified to teach Sun's Java courses. We are both somewhat familiar with the course materials because we were involved in modifying the lab exercises to make use of the IDE, but we have never used the materials to teach a course. The NetBeans IDE is our area of expertise. Luckily, we had assistance over these past three weeks from certified instructors who have taught these Java courses. Alan Petersen assisted me during the classes taught in the United States, John Cosby helped Geertjan out in Munich and London, and Jimmy Lim was my co-instructor in Singapore. Having these three gentlemen on hand made a big difference: they were able to relate to the instructors' perspective and helped alleviate some of their concerns. My thanks to all three of them.

Speaking of concerns, one of Geertjan's more interesting blogs on this topic is an interview he did with one of the instructors. It provides an interesting perspective on the use of the NetBeans IDE in the real world of Java instruction.

After teaching for two days I spent a day at Sun Tech Days Singapore. I wasn't on the hook to deliver a presentation so I just got to hang out. I attended a session that Joey Shen did on Java Studio Creator and Java Studio Enterprise. The best part though was just talking with attendees. Jiri Kovalsky who runs the NetBeans Community Acceptance Testing program (NetCAT) hooked me up with KC Somaratne a NetCAT participant who lives in Singapore. KC likes the NetBeans IDE but admitted that he does not always use it - he decides which IDE to use based on the type of project he's working on. He would like to see UML support added to NetBeans. As luck would have it, the NetBeans 5.5 Preview had just been released and it includes the Enterprise Pack which contains a full set of UML tools: forward and reverse engineering, etc. This steered our discussion in the direction of Sun's strategy of eventually making all the features of its other IDEs available to NetBeans IDE users. KC agreed that would be great, but he suggested that to improve usability a role-based installer should be provided. That's a suggestion I've heard from other developers.

Since he was wearing his NetCat tee-shirt I got a picture with him:

One of the more interesting conversations I had was with a couple of gentlemen from a large university in Singapore. They are investigating using the NetBeans IDE as the standard tool for students who are learning Java. Which takes me to a preview of this week's conference: SIGCSE is having a conference in Houston. I'll be there, talking to academic-type folks about NetBeans. One academic who I won't have to convince is Dr. Daniel Liang of Armstrong Atlantic State University. Dr. Liang uses the NetBeans IDE to teach beginning and advanced Java students and will do a presentation at the conference to describe how well it works.

After Sun Tech Days was over, it was time for NetBeans Day Singapore. This is my third appearance on the NetBeans World Tour. We had a decent size crowd and they seemed to enjoy the four presentations: I did an overview, Choon-Yin Teo did a presentation on the NetBeans Mobility Pack, I did a presentation on using the NetBeans IDE to do J2EE development, and then Chuk-Munn Lee did a presentation on using the NetBeans Platform to build rich-client applications.

So we had a good time and once again the best part was the questions from the audience. Some highlights:

1. Can the NetBeans Mobility pack be used on the Mac?
   Officially, there is no support for the Mobility Pack on the Mac. Unofficially, however, it does work. Check out this blog entry from Lukas Hasik.
   
   
2. Does the NetBeans IDE have a utility that will convert a Struts application to Java Server Faces (JSF)?
   No, unfortunately not. It does have support for both frameworks though. So you could specify both frameworks for a web application. The expert on the topic of Struts to JSF migration is Craig McClanahan who wrote this on the topic.
   
   
3. Will there be UML tools for the NetBeans IDE?
   Yes. As discussed above, the 5.5 Preview contains UML tools.
   
   
4. How do you get a Swing application to display strings in English and then in simplified Chinese?
   This was in the context of my demo of Project Matisse. I did the same demo that I used at Java China: a simple name and address form. I switch the locale and re-run the application in simplified Chinese to show that the layout manager still has things "look right." This led one member of the audience to ask detailed questions about internationalization (i18n) in the world of Java. She has a Java application that uses hardcoded string literals that are in English and she wants to be able to support simplified Chinese. I did a very quick demo for her of the i18n tools available in the NetBeans IDE; she really liked the idea of being able to use a wizard to do most of the grunt work of creating .properties files and inserting the appropriate calls into her code in place of the string literals.
   
   
5. What's with the .form file that the IDE's GUI editor creates?
   This is a somewhat controversial subject that I've covered before. The .form file is used to generate the intialization and layout code that the IDE creates. For more, see #4 and #5 here.
   
   
6. What 3D software did ECS International use in their Minex application?
   During my opening presentation I show some of the screen snapshots from the NetBeans Platform web page of different applications that are built on the NetBeans Platform. One of them is MINEX 5 , from Surpac Minex Group (formerly ECS International). One of the reasons I include it is because it has a cool looking 3D map. I don't know the answer to this question, but I will follow up with its developers in order to get an answer.