My friend Jarda has a NetBeans-based application which uses only the NetBeans module system - i.e. you can use the NB module system to write server-side modular applications or whatever you want. It's a SourceForge project called DVB Central, which I believe he wrote for controlling his home video setup (signal comes into the computer and is routed to one of various destinations).

It's a pretty cool example of just what you can do with the NetBeans platform. The crack-cocaine of coding for NetBeans is the module system - the fact that you can have public classes that are public only within their own JAR, so you can design really clean, well-separated APIs. And it comes with a Manifesto - what's not to love about that?

We'll probably use DVBCentral as part of our workshop at OOPSLA 2006 in Portland, Oregon this October.

This little fellow was crossing the sidewalk early the other morning when I interrupted him (her?) to pose for the camera