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Sultans of Swing

Posted by editor on February 8, 2006 at 9:51 AM EST

Why NetBeans is back on the radar

"Fan mail from some flounder", as Bullwinkle would say, this time from the comments on the latest java.net poll:

Java.net is slowly becoming less of a Java community and more of a sales barge for all things Sun. The coverage of Netbeans on this site gives one the mistaken impression that it has relevant market share, when in fact I know of only one poor sod I've ever met who uses it; and he has a binary clock.

Ohhhh kay...

Let me give you two reasons that you see NetBeans on the front page on a rather frequent basis. The first, and most important, is that they are one of the communities of java.net, and a key part of our editorial mission is to promote our communities. One day it's NetBeans, the next it's Jini, followed perhaps by Enterprise and WS-XML later in the week. It's a community site, and the reason we have an editorial side is help communicate what's happening in the communities, and to bring interesting content to the java.net community as a whole.

So, not a "sales barge for all things Sun" (how would we be selling something that's free?), but rather a "promotion barge" for all java.net communities.

The other reason you're seeing more NetBeans content on the page is, frankly, NetBeans has gotten a lot more interesting with version 5.0, and people are noticing. Completely out of the blue, Tim O'Reilly blogged on this Monday in What's Up With NetBeans? His analysis is based on a technologies futures market run with Yahoo! Research, in which you "buy" stock in a concept and its "share price" goes up and down based on Yahoo searches for the topic. Tim writes, "I was just browsing the buzz game, and discovered something that surprised me. While the futures market still has its money on Eclipse, in the past year Netbeans has passed Eclipse in actual Yahoo! search volume."

Stuff is up over at NetBeans, and we're not the only ones to notice.

Also tn Projects and Communities, the Scenic project has just released version 0.9.0 of its scene-based, anti-aliased, hardware-accelerated graphics library. Major additions in 0.9.0 include square, radial and conical gradients, line dash patterns, support for multiple simultanious canvases, re-parenting of the Shape and Brush classes for added flexibility, and an enhanced demo.

Returning to the NetBeans theme, Joshua Marinacci shows how to Easily Use Custom Swing Components with Matisse in today's Weblogs: "I've recently begun using Matisse for all of my GUI building tasks and overall I'm pretty pleased. I can quickly whip up dialog boxes and basic layouts very easily. However, I often use custom components and it's not easy to integrate them with Matisse."

David Herron has "A little about java history and... the Mustang Regressions Contest." in Is Java 10 yrs old, or 15 yrs old?

In Service Oriented Architects, John Reynolds writes: "Service Oriented Architects need to focus on business processes and on business services. The SOA architect has to understand where a business process is likely to change, and where it probably won't. They need to understand factors that impact multiple process steps, and those that are specific to a single step."

Looking for more Java-oriented podcasts? Also in Java Today points to ONJava's The Java Podcasters, Part 2, which looks at some of the unique voices in the Java podcasting realm, including the voice-of-experience style of ZDot, the laid-back shooting-the-breeze musings of DrunkAndRetired.com, and a podcast that focuses entirely on NetBeans.

In the latest SDN "Meet the Engineer" article, Meet Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Staff Engineer and XML Schema Developer at Sun Microsystems, Kohsuke Kawaguchi discusses his work with XML schema languages, the cultural differences between Japan and the United States, the transition from C++ to the Java language, and more. Kohsuke is involved with many java.net projects, including JAXB, txw, com4j, Stapler, and more.

In today's Forums, kcr has a status update on the Java 3D 1.4.0 release: "We plan to release the 1.4.0-beta4 build tomorrow, if all goes well with our testing today. The beta4 build will include an InstallShield installer for Windows and self-extracting shell scripts (.bin file) for Unix. I have updated the Wiki to reflect the current plan: We plan a short (less than 2 weeks) testing period for beta4, so we would appreciate your help in testing the installer when we release it tomorrow."

tjquinn helps figure out a GlassFish / Java Web Start issue in Re: ACC Client's Permission: "Great question. There is a way to specify an alternate policy to use for a particular Java Web Start app client launch. Before I get to that, though... Does the client behave as you expect if you use the appclient command? In the second case you described in your post are you certain that the client is only getting property values and not trying to set any? Here's the background. An app client launched via the GlassFish Java Web Start feature should receive (by default) the same permissions as if it were run using the appclient command."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

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Why NetBeans is back on the radar
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