This is the third year that NetBeans Day San Francisco has been presented in conjunction with JavaOne. Each year it gets bigger and better. Last year we had over 550 attendees. This year the count was just over 800 - another standing-room-only crowd. If we can continue that growth rate, then in just six more years or so we'll have to do this at Candlestick Park. :-)

Tim Cramer, Sun's Executive Director of Java Tools (and our emcee for the day) kicked things off at 12:00. A key focus for this year's event was partner companies. While Sun is the primary sponsor of the project, NetBeans is more than just Sun. So the first speaker Tim introduced was Garrett Rooney of CollabNet, who did a demo of a NetBeans plug-in module that provides support for Subversion. It's still at sort of a preview/beta phase, but it works. To top it off, Garrett brought really nice NetBeans/Subversion tee-shirts - I helped him pass them out before the start of the festivities.

Next up, Tim introduced Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO. This is Jonathan's second NetBeans Day. Last year he was a bit surprised at the size of the crowd. This year he knew what to expect - a full house. He talked about why he is so passionate about creating quality developer tools - he used to work for a startup software company. And he saw first hand how tools make a big difference in developer productivity. He then brought Rich Green up on stage and had some fun with him by asking him some tough questions. Rich has recently returned to Sun as Executive Vice President in charge of software, so Jonathan started out with, "Are you going to open source Java?"

Jonathan then introduced Jared Peterson from Sprint. Jared talked about how the next big revenue opportunity for Sprint is data services via cell phone. The folks at Sprint are excited about the NetBeans Mobility Pack because in their view it is the best tool for building Java applications for mobile devices. They like it so much they have based their SDK on it. Jared had one of his Sprint colleagues do a demo of their toolkit.

After that Joshua Bloch and Neil Gafter did their "Click and Hack" bit with some Java puzzlers, which is always a crowd pleaser. The tricky coding patterns they use in some of their puzzlers could in theory be spotted by static code analysis tools. It is important to note, however, that for many of their puzzlers the tool would have to analyze the source code, not the .class files (which is what many of the static analysis tools use). So their presentation was an excellent lead-in to a demo of Jackpot by Tom Ball. You will hear people describe Jackpot as a refactoring tool, but that does not completely describe it. It provides capabilities that you do not get from standard refactoring tools, in particular the ability to define your own patterns for the types of source code you want found and (optionally) modified. So we are having a bit of trouble deciding what to call it. But it looks powerful - a preview is available now to users of the NetBeans IDE version 5.0 or higher. Just choose Tools > Update Center and then make sure that the NetBeans Beta Update Center is chosen. Alexis has more here.

The opening session was wrapped up by Bob Brewin, Sun's chief architect for developer tools. Bob discussed the roadmap for Sun's developer tools. The gist of it is convergence: all tools built on the same NetBeans binary standard. All technologies eventually available as add-ons to the NetBeans IDE. For more, see this interview I did with Bob a couple of months ago. Also, check Bob's blog later this week - he said he would do an update.

At that point it was decision time. There were two tracks. Track A covered Java ME and Java EE, including the new Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) tools that are included in the just-released NetBeans Enterprise Pack 5.5 preview. Track B focused on visual development tools and on developing on top of the NetBeans Platform.

I decided to go for Track A during most of the day. Martin Ryzl started things off with an overview of the NetBeans Mobility Pack. He was followed by Petr Suchomel who did an excellent demo of the visual designer in the Mobility Pack. And Petr was followed by Martin Brehovsky who demonstrated the CDC development tools that were just introduced two months ago. I do not know much about the Java ME world, but CDC apparently is a more robust platform - support for Swing is included, etc. Martin's demo showed a Swing application that he built with Project Matisse running on a mobile phone.

At that point I decided to slip over to Track B and check out what was going on. This meant that I missed out on the presentations by SavaJe and Ricoh. It allowed me, however, to see the last part of a demo by Sandip Chitale. For a long time now many of us have wanted the cool visual design tools from Java Studio Creator to be available in the NetBeans IDE. And that's exactly what Sandip demonstrated. It is still very early-stage stuff and I cannot wait until it is solid enough to be released into the wild.

After that I went back to Track A, which meant I missed out on another partner demo, this one by InsiTech. But by returning to Track A I got to see another preview of upcoming technology: Martin Ryzl was doing a demo of the NetBeans Profiler being used to profile a mobile application. Handy!

During the next hour I stuck with Track A. Ludo Champenois from the Glassfish team did a presentation on Java EE 5 and the just released NetBeans IDE 5.5 Beta. Martin Adamek followed Ludo with some cool demos of the new features that are available in NetBeans IDE 5.5. The focus of the 5.5 release is support for Java EE 5 and the engineering team has delivered a pile of cool features. Geertjan has blogged about these features in a two part series: here and here. Martin's demos included both the CRUD application generation and web services.

The next hour in Track A featured Todd Fast, Mike Frisino, and Chris Webster, all from the Enterprise Pack team. Todd did an overview of the features in the Enterprise Pack and then Mike did a demo of the SOA tools, which include a visual BPEL design tool. Chris then did a demo of the XML schema tools. Both were impressive.

It was hard to do, but I pulled myself away from Track A before Chris had finished up so that I could go back over to Track B where Tim Boudreau was concluding the second hour of his presentation on how to build on top of the NetBeans Platform. He did a similar talk last year, but things were oh so different then. That was before the release of NetBeans IDE version 5.0, which includes tools so powerful that even I can create plug-in modules. :-)

Tim's second hour included a demo by Frank Waldman of Lattix. Frank showed a plug-in module for the NetBeans IDE that integrates Lattix's Lightweight Dependency Model (LDM) tool. The Lattix stuff looks really nice - it has a very concise display of the dependencies in a codebase. A couple of years ago I was put onto a legacy project that had a large body of (mostly) undocumented source files. I ended up using JDepend to help me sort it out, but I would have benefitted from something like Lattix LDM. (Shameless plug: I will use that legacy project as one of the case studies in my JavaOne BOF on Thursday night at 8:30, Memory Leaks in Javaâ„¢ Technology-Based Applications: Different Tools for Different Types of Leaks) If you are attending JavaOne you can learn more about the LDM approach at a Technical Session on Friday, May 19 at 1:15: TS-6037, To Know the Dependencies is to Understand the Architecture.

The track sessions ended and everyone got back together for the closing keynotes. Rich Green said a few words and then introduced James Gosling. James held up a SavaJe phone and referred to it as the "device of the conference" for JavaOne this year. He also talked briefly about the version of NetBeans that includes support for BlueJ projects (more on that here). He then announced the winners of this year's NetBeans community awards: Ramon Ramos, Wade Chandler, David Strupl, and Tom Wheeler. Each gets a signed certificate and a Sun Ultra20 workstation.

The show finished up with a short film. After last year's big success in San Francisco we decided to take NetBeans Day on the road. Between September, 2005 and May, 2006 we held NetBeans Days in Beijing, Tokyo, Toronto, Bangkok, Chennai, Singapore, Madrid, Sao Paulo, Moscow, and Johannesburg. The movie provided highlights from the world tour. Judith Lilienfeld, the Manager of Java Tools Evangelism at Sun was executive producer of the film. And Roumen was the producer - he even missed the beginning of the day's events so that he could download the finished product. He said he would write a blog that recognizes all the hard work done by folks from California to Prague to put the film together.

There was a reception with snacks/beer and the attendees got their goodies: a 256mb USB drive and a copy of the NetBeans IDE Field Guide, 2nd Edition. That seemed to put most folks into a good mood. Among others, I chatted with Norman Richards of JBoss, who had an interesting comment: "The EE 5 stuff looked good, but the coolest thing shown was Jackpot." Norman is a hardcore emacs guy, so if Jackpot can get him interested in using an IDE, it must be something special.

And then like that, it was all over. As was true last year, everyone seemed to have a good time. Photographic evidence below - click for full size.

	The crowd in chairs
	The crowd in line for food and beer
	Ãœber blogger Charles Ditzel with Marketing Director Dan Roberts
	Event Manager Leela Bennett with Judith Lilienfeld
	Geertjan with community award winner Tom Wheeler