Tim Boudreau's Blog

Zdravstvujte NetBeans 5.0 (yes, 5.0)

The next release of NetBeans will be called 5.0, not 4.2.

What's in a version number? Well a lot of things. There was a lot of debate on the mailing lists about what should be the upcoming version number, and it's clear that there are many different schools of thought on when you increment version numbers. In the end, we took the bull by the horns. It's 5.0.

Some of the big changes driving the decision are Matisse, the new GUI builder, brand new, rewritten CVS support, support for Struts and JSF, deployment to many more app servers, and the really nice new support for building RCP apps on the NetBeans platform. As some of you know, we had pretty good support for building plug-ins through NetBeans 3.6; the same guy who maintained the apisupport module was the lead on 4.0 projects - so something had to give, and apisupport was what did.

In NetBeans 5.0, apisupport is back in a big way. Some of the highlights:

• Create a new plug-in from a template (hmm, gee, that's not that exciting...)
• Create a "suite" of plug-ins that make up your application
• Build/run/debug your NetBeans-based application within the IDE
• Hot-redeploy your plugins into a running copy of your application
• Debug "fix and continue" (hotswap) with your plug-ins
• GUI for configuring menus, toolbars and more in your NetBeans-based application
• Create the branding for your application (replace the splash screen, application name, hide/move/rename/etc. menu items, toolbars, main window contents, etc.) via a wizard
• Build a distribution of your application painlessly
• Templates and wizards for creating common NetBeans classes and components

So this is big stuff - it deserves a bigger version number :-)

I'm really looking forward to the Russia trip - I studied Russian at MIIS in college, but have never been to Russia. However my Russian is terribly rusty - five years of speaking Czech (which is close if you're not a native slavic language speaker, and doesn't seem nearly so close if you are one) has not helped. Today I speak Russian words with Czech grammar, or Czech words with Russian grammar. So we'll see if I can say anything coherent.

After that it's on to Beijing. Alas, I speak no asian languages.

Comments

• > Zdrasvitsie - huh??

  Zdravstvujte ;-)

  Welcome to SPB.

  Posted by: hedin on September 05, 2005 at 09:23 AM

• is it still as slow and heavy as usual???? i like netbeans, but it's heavy and so running a "little" bit slow on my machine :(

  i hope you guys can do something about that, well at least the 4th version release is a little bit faster than 3.6 version. even though i didn't feel it much on my computer.

  still i'm waiting for the next release, always....

  Posted by: adeanom on September 05, 2005 at 10:04 PM

• Thanks for the spelling correction, Hedin. I've fixed it (my rendition does look more like Polish, doesn't it?).

  Posted by: timboudreau on September 05, 2005 at 11:07 PM

• Privet, which means "Hi"...
  I am not a big fan (so far) of NetBeans, but would be happier to see this tool with more advanced features and better "human interface", especially when the Rich client is mentioned. Let me know if you would be interested that NetBeans will have a much more powerful Rich client features and a true RIA platform as IAB Studio is recently provided to other IDE.
  On the WorcsNet home page you can find a link to the number of sample pages that demonstrate Rich abilities of IAB Studio.
  Roman

  Posted by: iabstudio on September 07, 2005 at 11:22 AM

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