Editor's Daily Blog

Light To Follow

NetBeans 6.1 makes an early debut

Now this is a good idea. Rather than risk getting lost in all the news and hype of JavaOne week, when everyone and their brother seems to be making a major release announcement, the NetBeans team has surprised us by releasing NetBeans 6.1 final today, a week ahead of JavaOne.

Go ahead and kick off the download, then keep reading.

OK, so actually, it wasn't a surprise to everyone. I did get an e-mail from the NetBeans team in Prague telling me they were planning on a release Monday morning at noon their time, which is 6 AM here in the Eastern US (and therefore perfect for putting together the morning java.net page), and 3 AM out in the Pacific Time Zone, home to Sun, O'Reilly, and many of the world's techies. They'll be waking up in a few hours to the surprise.

Of course, if you've been watching the front page for the last few months, you've seen NetBeans 6.1 coming together, with bloggers pointing out its great new features (particularly Ruby/JRuby/Rails support), and the community giving overwhelming approval last week to greenlighting the release.

So now, NetBeans can enjoy the spotlight for a week, and by the time JavaOne hits next week, attendees should already have had a chance to download and install 6.1, and check out NetBeans-related sessions with an up-to-date perspective.

In light of the significance of the news, we've set aside the entire Java Today section for the NetBeans 6.1 announcement:

"NetBeans IDE 6.1 supports a wide range of open source scripting technologies and offers improved performance. This release extends language support beyond Java technology by providing a rich set of features for C/C++, JavaScript and the Ruby language, including Ruby on Rails.

One of the downloads available is an Early Access preview of support for PHP. Advance versions of new modules, such as JavaScript debugger, support of ClearCase, AXIS, and Hibernate are available as separate plugins.

NetBeans IDE 6.1 also contains all of the improvements made in 6.0 including: the new smarter editor, next generation of the ground-breaking GUI builder (formerly known as Project Matisse), visual mobile designer, integrated profiler, and Java EE 5 support.

For more information about NetBeans IDE 6.1 features visit the NetBeans IDE 6.1 Release Page."

This week's Spotlight is on java.net at JavaOne 2008. After all, JavaOne 2008 begins next week, and as always, java.net will be a big part of the event, as captured by our JavaOne wiki page. On Saturday, May 3, we're holding a Community Leaders Weekend, an unconference in which community leaders can discuss the online community and help shape the future of the site. Then, of course, the Community Corner on the Pavilion floor will be your place to meet up with fellow community members, see demos, and check out 20-minute mini-talks from java.net project owners and community members. The mini-talks will be recorded as podcasts, sent out during and after the show; you can subscribe to the feed at the podcast's home page, or via the iTunes link. Finally, if you're presenting a technical session, hands-on session, or BoF based on your java.net project, please be sure to add it to the list of java.net sessions on the wiki.

We've also added a second spotlight to announce that there's still room in the The JavaOne 2008 Student Program. This is a five-day program to attend the CommunityOne and JavaOne conferences in San Francisco next week, for free. Participants will have full access to the conference, including general sessions, technical sessions, birds-of-a-feather sessions (BoFs), specially developed Java University classes, a coupon for a free Java Certification Class, access to the JavaOne pavilion, t-shirts, lunches, the AfterDark party with Smashmouth, and more. Interested students should download and fax back the registration PDF as soon as possible, as space is limited.

Elsewhere, in today's Weblogs. Bruno Ghisi explains what he means by Marging a FX Tetris at JavaOne! "Project Marge got a mini talk in Community Corner! If you want to get introduced in Bluetooth, JSR 82 and Project Marge, that is the place! Also, if you just want to see some cool demos, including a mobile controller for a compiled JavaFX Script game, come there too!"

As for conferences just concluded, Alexandre Gomes takes a look back at Mobile & Embedded Community in FISL 9.0. "The Mobile & Embedded Community was greatly represented at the International Free Software Conference, held in Porto Alegre, south Brazil. Look what was showed."

And finally, Eamonn McManus previews a A query language for the JMX API. "The JMX API is being updated by JSR 255. That JSR is currently planned to be part of Java SE 7, and some of the API changes it defines have started to appear in JDK 7. So far, the main one is a Query Language. Here's what that is and what it's for."

Today's Forums start with davester offering user-experience commentary in Re: Feedback on new applet plugin. "What I was getting at when I gave you my times was to convey that there are three distinct startup periods that my (and I suspect many other) applets progress through. The first two, plugin startup and time to Applet.start() getting called, really need the Flash treatment. Plugin startup and VM launch are getting the optimized on many fronts. And in the time to Applet.start() getting called something like a mini applet, or a JavaFX animation, or a Flash animation needs to run that gives the user something to look at while the main Applet jar loads."

Finally, sfitzjava points out the realities of scrolling in ME in Re: CustomItem - scrolling is disable. "Are you doing any special coding to manage the scrolling? If you are relying on JavaME to do this scrolling for you then you are going to have hits and misses. Some devices will allow for this scroll features others expect you to handle it. So usually it's best to do it yourself so that you know it gets done. Typically you would use the translate(x,y) on the object being painted to alter it's origin to a point off screen. However this can be very costly if you are painting a lot of detailed graphics on a large canvas."

Current and upcoming Java Events :

• May 2-4 - Rocky Mountain Software Symposium 2008: Spring Edition
• May 5-9 - Java Training Philippines
• May 5 - CommunityOne 2008
• May 6-9 - JavaOne 2008
• May 12-15 - Java Power Tools Bootcamp
• May 16-18 - Greater Oklahoma Software Symposium
• May 19-23 - Daring Java Conference: Java to Celebrate Its 13th Birthday at Bangalore
• May 19-23 - Great Indian Developer Summit 2008 Features Co-located Conferences on Java, Rich Web and .NET
• May 19-23 - J2EE Training Philippines
• June 18-20 - TheServerSide Java Symposium-Europe
• June 23-26 - Jazoon'08

Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our events submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site.

Archives and Subscriptions: This blog is delivered weekdays as the Java Today RSS feed. Also, once this page is no longer featured as the front page of java.net it will be archived along with other past issues in the java.net Archive.

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