After several years at the Argent Hotel, for 2007 NetBeans Day San Francisco moved to the Moscone Center. The room at the Argent was no longer large enough.

There were 1,380 people registered for this event. Actual attendance at the opening general session looked to be around 1,000 (last year we had about 800, the year before about 550). This year for the first time there were additional sessions going on as part of CommunityOne and folks were free to mix-and-match NetBeans Day sessions with the talks that were done by the GlassFish folks, and OpenSolaris, etc.

The opening session for NetBeans Day was straightforward. Jeet Kaul, who is the Vice President of Developer Products and Programs at Sun was the emcee. He talked about how the NetBeans community has grown over the years and used a chart that showed email list subscribers to make his point. He chatted with Adam Myatt of General Electric, the author of a recently released book about the NetBeans IDE. Jeet also talked with folks from two of the companies that are in the NetBeans Strategic Partner Program: Sprint and InfoSys.

The main entertainment during the opening session was from the big brass: Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green. They did an informal discussion where Jonathan asked Rich "hard questions" such as, "Where did Java go wrong?"

After that, it was time for an entertaining lunch with the Java Posse. They got up on stage and recorded a podcast episode while the attendees were eating lunch. According to Dick Wall, some of the feedback they have gotten is that they should be more controversial. So they went through and did not only a top ten list of things they would like to see added, but also a top ten list of the things they would like to see removed from Java. My favorite from that list was Tor's suggestion that close() should not throw IOException.

Lunch was followed by break out sessions. There were two tracks. In Track A the first session was all about the new features in NetBeans 6.0. Jan Lahoda started things off with a demo of the vastly improved editor. He was followed by Geertjan, who talked about Project Schliemann. After that Arseniy Kuznetsov got up and did some quick demos of new debugger features and also showed the local history and visual diff features. Finally, Jiri Sedlacek (who blogs here) did some demos of new features in the NetBeans profiler: profiling points, the areas of interest graph, and dynamic attach. I finished things up with a quick demo of the JMeter integration and the profiler's Heap Walker.

Meanwhile, over on Track B there was a session I did not get to attend. It was a showcase for two NetBeans Strategic Partner companies. Collabnet showed off their Subversion support in the NetBeans IDE and Yasu Technologies demonstrated their business rules engine plugin. From what I heard it went okay.

The second session on Track A was all about the enhancements to the NetBeans GUI builder (formerly known as Project Matisse). The big news is support for the Swing Application Framework (JSR 296) and for Beans Binding (JSR 295). Hans Mueller and Shannon Hickey, respectively, led those discussions. The 296 demo was a Flickr "search" utility and it was entertaining to see what sorts of random images were found for various terms. For some reason, the first image found for "James Gosling" was a picture of swans.

The other topic covered in that session was additional GUI building features that are being added in NetBeans 6.0. These have been available on the NetBeans 5.5 Update Center for a while so I was already familiar with them. So I went over to see the remainder of the session on Track B, which was all about support for developing mobile applications. By the time I arrived, Martin Ryzl was introducing Eric Arseneau, who demonstrated the NetBeans mobility tools being used to develop an application for Sun SPOTs.

The final break out session on Track A was on JRuby and I decided to skip it. I had just seen an excellent presentation by Charlie Nutter and Thomas Enebo on JRuby a few weeks ago and I have also seen Tor Norbye demonstrate the excellent Ruby tools that are available in NetBeans 6.0. So I decided to attend the final session on Track B, which was another partner showcase featuring Intland and Xoetrope.

The Intland presentation was mostly done by Olaf David, who is a customer of Intland. Olaf works for the United States Deparment of Agriculture (USDA) and he and his team make extensive use of both NetBeans and Intland's CodeBeamer server software for application lifecycle management (ALM).

The Xoetrope session was about XUI, an open source framework for building rich Internet applications. The speaker was Luan O'Carroll and he did demos of XUI applications. He used plugin modules that Xoetrope has created for the NetBeans IDE to build the sample applications.

At the end of the break out sessions there was a closing keynote by James Gosling. My co-worker Brian Leonard told James about the two guys who went all the way to Israel to deliver a NetBeans CD. Brian showed the short film that they made, which was actually pretty entertaining. Using this film as inspiration, we will be doing a video contest - more details soon.

And then it was time for James's NetBeans "toy show." There were three toys this year. First up was Henry Story who does research on the semantic web. Henry did a demo of his NetBeans plugin. Next up was Geertjan with his NetBeans-based movie player.

But the biggest hit by far was Bob Beasley and his dog-training application. Bob used the NetBeans Visual Web Pack to create a web application that he can use for doing remote training of his dog Sadie. Sadie was unable to make the trip, but Bob brought a movie of Sadie in action.

So as usual, another fun and informative day. Photos soon (I hope).