Questions From Singapore

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.