In the first three weeks of March I visited three different cities: Houston, London, and Madrid. The software developers I spoke with ran the gamut. Some were new to Java and had never heard of NetBeans, others were familiar with Java but do not currently use an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), some use an IDE other than the NetBeans IDE, and finally there were some long time NetBeans IDE users.

I answered (or attempted to answer :-) ) lots of questions and the same three kept coming up over and over again in each city. So below I present a recap of each city, with the three questions interspersed.

Houston

The Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) had their annual symposium in Houston from March 1-4. The NetBeans team shared a booth on the pavillion floor with the OpenSolaris team. We also got a chance to talk with attendees (and answer questions) at a reception that we hosted.

Q1: Why should I use the NetBeans IDE? I have a lot of answers to this question, but they fall into two categories: general and specific. The general answers include things such as: it's free, it's open source, it's 100% pure Java, it runs on any platform that has a JDK 1.4 or higher, and its Ant-based project system allows you to use the exact same build environment inside and outside the IDE. But I don't typically use those answers, at least not initially. Instead I ask the questioner: "What type of Java applications are you developing?"

That allows me to customize a response with specific answers. For developers who are building Swing applications, I talk about Project Matisse. For web and enterprise developers, I talk about all the tools the NetBeans IDE provides right out of the box for them. Things like a JSP editor and debugger, an HTTP monitor, wizards to create everything from servlet filters to EJBs to web services, and a large number of sample applications (including Java BluePrints ), etc. For mobility developers, the answer is easy: I just point them to all the cool features in the NetBeans Mobility Pack. Regardless of what type of applications they develop, I ask about their need for collaboration tools and/or a full-featured profiler, both of which are available for free with the NetBeans IDE. Looking out a few months, free Unified Modeling Language (UML) tools and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) tools will also join the NetBeans family.

For the members of SIGCSE there is an additional reason for using the NetBeans IDE: support for BlueJ projects. BlueJ is a very popular Java IDE used in high school and undergraduate college courses. It is a great teaching tool, but with its focus on beginners it has its limits. For example, it does not support any type of code completion. The problem with professional-strength IDEs is that they can be a bit overwhelming for beginners. So in a joint effort with the BlueJ folks the NetBeans team will be adding support for BlueJ projects. This will allow a student to open an existing BlueJ project in a special version of the NetBeans IDE and see a familiar view of their project. By default the more advanced features of the NetBeans IDE will be turned off, but the student can turn them on when ready. So it provides a great bridge from one environment to the next (to see a screen shot, check out this entry from Roumen). Many thanks to Milos Kleint, who did most of the heavy-lifting to make all of this work in the NetBeans IDE.

The BlueJ team was in Houston which was great because it gave me a chance to meet Michael Kölling and Ian Utting along with the rest of the BlueJ team, all of whom seem like great guys. At the NetBeans/OpenSolaris reception on Friday evening, Michael did a demo of the forthcoming BlueJ support in the NetBeans IDE and it got a very positive response from the crowd.

London

I staffed a booth and did a session on J2EE development at JavaUK06. It was a good conference - they had over 1,000 attendees. Roumen was also there and wrote up this entry. There were also folks there talking about Java Studio Enterprise and Java Studio Creator, which led to Q2: Why does Sun have three Java IDEs? I have actually blogged about this topic - see this entry, in particular the discussion in questions 1 through 8.

Madrid

The most recent stop on the NetBeans World Tour was last week in Madrid. You can see photos of all the different speakers and some pictures of the crowd here. As usual, I did my demo of Project Matisse, this time building a dialog box and then showing how it displays correctly regardless of whether the locale is English or Spanish. As it has so many times before, it led to Q3: How did you get the i18n stuff working? I was going to add a brief tutorial in this blog entry, but Marek Grummich has created a complete tutorial on the topic, saving me the trouble.

As is usually the case with a NetBeans Day event, the best part of Madrid was the people I got to meet. In Madrid I got to meet Francisco Morero, who I have corresponded with via email for a while now. For his contributions to the NetBeans project (including source code, articles such as this one, and tireless evangelism) he was presented with a special community award by Jeff Jackson.

In preparation for the event Francisco helped me learn a bit more Spanish so that I could say things such as Lo siento, disculpen mi castellano. The best part though was when he took us to a bar in Madrid - Geertjan has a photo of that here.