Patrick Keegan's Blog: June 2005 Archive

I just finished up an article on NetBeans Day for the JavaOne Today, the conference's daily newsletter. It was fun trying to sound like a newspaper reporter, but now I want to reinsert my own voice into the proceedings, and I'll start with one word.

Wow!

There were the announcements (collaboration plugins, Matisse, new refactoring) and the stats (550 people or so attending according to Greg Sporar, who also has a recap). But beyond that I was impressed by how focused the attendees were. I figured that since it was a free event, there would be a lot of people popping their heads in and out. Easy come, easy go. But no. It was standing room only at the beginning and standing room only at the end. Check out some photos here.

At one point, Tim Boudreau was talking in front of 150-200 people about plugin module development and digging into some API details. I cringed, figuring that most of the people there were IDE users and not particularly interested in adding to the IDE or building with the platform. I was waiting for the awkward mass exodus of people suddenly finding a need for a drink of water or a walk on Market St. But it never came. People stuck with him and had a ton of questions. I imagine the BOFs that the NetBeans team are doing at JavaOne will be similarly popular.

I don't think anybody on the team was really prepared for the in-person developer response yesterday. At this time last year, 3.6 was the current release and we were just beginning to publicize and sell users on vast changes to the IDE's project workflow. Replacing the 3.x "filesystems" concept with the 4.x Ant-based project system was a big risk for us, but one we felt we needed to take to avoid sinking into irrelevance. People were curious about our new direction, but were taking a wait and see approach.

Since then, we've seen a huge increase in our download numbers and some great press, which tells us that we're on the right track. But there is no more gratifying validation than seeing the excitement of real users in person.

Our big little NetBeans IDE book

Posted by pkeegan on June 23, 2005 at 03:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My name is Patrick Keegan. I've been a NetBeans IDE technical writer for the past six years. I'm starting this web log to communicate my impressions from JavaOne 2005 and I imagine I'll continue with it as long as I feel like I have something unique to say in this ever increasingly densely populated blogosphere. Today I'll start with a round of shameless self-promotion and get that out of the way.

I'm coming to this year's JavaOne as co-author of the NetBeans IDE Field Guide. Pretty exciting for me personally and professionally and hopefully interesting for some of you as Java technology fans. If you're at the conference, stop by the Digital Guru stand to flip through a copy. Or come to NetBeans Day on Sunday and get a free copy (get there early!). I'll be at the Digital Guru stand Monday 4 - 4:30 p.m. with two of my co-authors - Ludovic Champenois and Charlie Hunt to sign copies and talk about the book. If you aren't coming to the conference, you can find it for a discount at Bookpool as well as other online vendors.

When we started writing on the book, we wanted to include as much information as possible about the IDE. There's lots of documentation on the NetBeans project web site and we've gotten better at organizing and presenting it. But for many (like me) there's an undeniable pleasure about being able to leave the computer at the desk, flop down on a couch, flip open a book and start reading. (Also, since NetBeans is the premier everything in one package IDE, why not have a single book to reflect that.)

That said, it's awfully hard to make a book comprehensive, comprehensible, *and* timely all at the same time. However, I think we've done a pretty good job in all three categories. The book delves deeply into the IDE's edit/compile/debug features and explores development of desktop, web, enterprise, and mobile apps. Timeliness is not the norm for such books when the target is constantly in motion as NetBeans IDE is, especially given the typical 3-4 month lag between submitting the manuscript and seeing the printed book. I'm proud of the fact that the Field Guide is coming out only a month after the 4.1 release and will remain relevant for a long time.

More later. Hope to see you at JavaOne!

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