Trung Duc Tran's Blog

NetBeans 4.1 branch created

A few hours ago a new branch, "release41", was created off the NetBeans CVS trunk. The 4.1 final release is coming. We are now in the so called high resistance mode when developers switched the mindset. Do no harm, no new last minute features, strict review-before-commit policy.

Things have been hectic at NetBeans lately. We added a very big and completely new feature set: J2EE and Web services support. The work on JFluid based profiler is finalizing nicely too. Developers even suggested to bump the major version number to 5.0 but our marketing were too conservative :-) We merely released NetBeans 4.0 in December

A few more bug fixes and go into 4.2. But now some sleep first...

Please try out 4.1 builds and let us know what you want to see in 4.2 which should go out late August or September. There is already something in the making but it would be for another blog.

Comments

• see this NetBeans feature wish list for the usability and user-friendly in the near future.

  the new featurest-J2EE and Web services support, you mentioned, just happy J2EE guys and do not deserve to promote a major version IMO.

  sleep , wake up and come on.

  we are all thanks for the great efforts making on Netbeans anyway.

  Posted by: pprun on April 04, 2005 at 07:31 AM

• I have read all the postings in that javalobby thread. But thanks for the link anyway.
  

  Posted by: ttran on April 04, 2005 at 07:37 AM

• As regard for your introduction, implemented the new windowing system, I bring up again the Usability/user-friendly of NetBeans which posted by me and concerned with the above post. Maybe some item has covered in 4.1, but others still for ...

  Posted by: pprun on April 04, 2005 at 07:51 AM

• The IDE has shaped up quite nicely. I think the next phase really has to be doing everything possible to make it dead-easy to develop on the platform. Beyond merely updating the apisupport modules, common use cases need to be made easier.

  For example...

  If I want to create my own flavor of "explorer" (a window that docks on the left, and is a singleton), I have to grok a LOT about the internal workings of the window system. I've covered this in the feedreader tutorial. There should be a SingletonTopComponent class that hides a lot of this. (issue 53252)

  Everyone who wants to brand a platform app wants to provide the same 4 or 5 pieces of information. It's very little input to ask for, and yet the procedure for putting those few pieces of information in the right place is unforgivably complicated. See issue 56626.

  Anyone building a rich client app has to weigh the work of reimplementing the stuff the netbeans platform gives you for free against the learning curve of the platform APIs. Let's make that decision a no-brainer.

  The mantra should be: make the common stuff easy. Make the uncommon stuff possible.

  Posted by: richunger on April 04, 2005 at 12:03 PM

• Re supporting platorm users: they are also module writers. The only extra thing they do is branding. We just had a design session with Jesse, Glick, Tim Boudreau two weeks ago. The plan is to completely overhault the support for module development. This should improve the situation vastly. Coupled with that is developer documentation.

  Re "next phase": it's not IDE is done, now Platform. We'll do both in parallel. The improvements in the IDE will continue

  
  And of course I completely agree with your mantra :-)
  

  Posted by: ttran on April 04, 2005 at 02:20 PM

• Oh, naturally both will continue. I keep forgetting how many people sun has working on netbeans. :-)

  I work on a team of 3.5, so I'm used to thinking in terms of, "what are we concentrating on for this release".

  I look forward to the API spec proposal on nbdev.

  Posted by: richunger on April 04, 2005 at 08:25 PM

• Wow! Great job Trung. :-)

  Posted by: honza on April 05, 2005 at 05:05 AM

• Hi Trung

  Nice work. I really like the latest release. I particularly like the support for Web Services and the JFluid profiler.

  I am looking forward to seeing the new GUI designer when it gets released with a future netbeans versions. Designing menus and using split panes with the designer in version 4.0 (I assume it is the same in 4.1) is not pleasant.

  I can't wait to see what you pull out of the hat for the next release.

  Posted by: jdolphin on April 05, 2005 at 06:10 AM

• So what is the plan for 4.2? 4.1 is nearly out and the roadmap doesn't even mention 4.2...
  

  Posted by: spiff on April 05, 2005 at 11:43 AM

• I've just tried the 4.1 RC1, the whole UIs are all fast enough, even the old one -Options. Great !

  Compare with Eclipse, the equality - preferences got slower and slower recently. (Not as someone said: taking place on linux box , it do on windows)
  

  Posted by: pprun on April 05, 2005 at 11:18 PM

• spiff: the roadmap. Good catch. We need to update that page. In general NB tries to have three releases per year. It's the so called train release model. We are working on multiple releases at the same time. Each major feature is targeted at a certain release which is not always the next one. Something requires more than 4 months to be done right :-) We expect that 4.2 will be released around September this year.

  Posted by: ttran on April 06, 2005 at 01:38 PM

• Any idea when the first release candidate for 4.1 will be out?
  I am interested in registering a remote server in the server registry. Currently the radio button for this appears to be missing (although help claims it is there).

  Posted by: jdolphin on April 07, 2005 at 02:22 AM

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