Vincent Brabant's Blog

Community: Java User Groups Archives

Reaction about the Charles Ditzel Interview

Sun Developer Network published an interessting interview of Charles Ditzel. But I wanted to react on some part.

We also occasionally hear that the layout manager, GroupLayout, which the NetBeans IDE GUI Builder uses to create its great user interfaces (UIs), causes some sort of lock-in or is proprietary. It's in JDK 6 and included as a library for use in JDK 5.0 and 1.4. As you can see, it's neither a lock-in nor proprietary.

He is right by saying that you have no lock-in nor proprietary. But at run-time only. Because at development time, you are locked with NetBeans, and his famous .form file.

When that will be fixed. When the GUI editor of NetBeans will be able to edit any java source file WITHOUT needs of a proprietary .form file, then, only then, you could say that there is no lock-in.

Javapolis 2004 Day 4: NetBeans 4.0 and Beyond

NetBeans really rocks.
As many of you know, I am a long-time user of NetBeans, now. Already 4 years now that I am using NetBeans. Already 8 months that I was playing with the alpha, beta, RC1, RC2 of NetBeans 4.0.

And yesterday, it was a big day:
The official announcement of the NetBeans 4.0 release.
The first time I met a NetBeans developer, after 4 years exchanging mails about NetBeans.

When Tim began his presentation, he asked how many people in the audience already used NetBeans. And, if I remember well, a large majority of the audience were people that never used NetBeans.

But I am pretty sure that Tim convince them to try it.

He showed how nice was supported the JDK 5.0, and how powerful is the Ant driven projects.

Also how JUNIT is really well integrated in the development of the workflow.

What was bluffing is when he creates a new project in netBeans to compile and run JEdit. How easy it was. Really amazing.
He justs indicate that he wanted to create a project with an existing
Ant script, indicate where the ant script is. If the build.xml follows Ant best practices, NetBeans does by itself the mapping between the actions in the IDE and the target in the Ant Build Script.

He also showed the J2ME support, and how easy it is to develop midlet application and how easy it is to test your application under different portable emulators.

He also announced that you will be able to debug your midlet application that run directly on your mobile.

Another very interresting part of the presentation was the one of JFluid. Personally, it was the first time I saw it running. And it is a very powerfull tool. You can really tuning your piece of code without decrease the performances of all the application.

That demo really convince me that I did the good choice when I adopted NetBeans 4 years ago.

Javapolis 2004 Day 4: NetBeans 4.0 and Beyond

NetBeans really rocks.
As many of you know, I am a long-time user of NetBeans, now. Already 4 years now that I am using NetBeans. Already 8 months that I was playing with the alpha, beta, RC1, RC2 of NetBeans 4.0.

And yesterday, it was a big day:
The official announcement of the NetBeans 4.0 release.
The first time I met a NetBeans developer, after 4 years exchanging mails about NetBeans.

When Tim began his presentation, he asked how many people in the audience already used NetBeans. And, if I remember well, a large majority of the audience were people that never used NetBeans.

But I am pretty sure that Tim convince them to try it.

He showed how nice was supported the JDK 5.0, and how powerful is the Ant driven projects.

Also how JUNIT is really well integrated in the development of the workflow.

What was bluffing is when he creates a new project in netBeans to compile and run JEdit. How easy it was. Really amazing.
He justs indicate that he wanted to create a project with an existing
Ant script, indicate where the ant script is. If the build.xml follows Ant best practices, NetBeans does by itself the mapping between the actions in the IDE and the target in the Ant Build Script.

He also showed the J2ME support, and how easy it is to develop midlet application and how easy it is to test your application under different portable emulators.

He also announced that you will be able to debug your midlet application that run directly on your mobile.

Another very interresting part of the presentation was the one of JFluid. Personally, it was the first time I saw it running. And it is a very powerfull tool. You can really tuning your piece of code without decrease the performances of all the application.

That demo really convince me that I did the good choice when I adopted NetBeans 4 years ago.

Javapolis: Day 4: Real Time Java

During the keynote of this morning, Someone of Sun (I am sorry, but I don't remember who) speaked about Java and Real Time Application.

Java and Real Time Application ? Not possible, I though. You can't garantee Real Time when you use applications based upon JVM having a Garbage Collector that can suspend your thread at any moment, and for somes time (it may be short, but always too long for Real Time Application).

But, aside the guy, everyone could see a strange machine. Because I have'nt find a photo of that machine, let me try to describe it.

On the table, we could see 2 pc (Sun Solaris machines, and between those two pc, you had I/O Cards.
Each one of those PC were linked to those I/O Cards. Those I/O Cards were connected to something that could move along a rail. That think was in fact a pendule.

But a really strange pendule, because in place of go down, the pendule was up. In fact, the Java application always looked at the angle of the pendule and, when necesary, move the machine left or right along the rail to do some correction and be sure that pendule is always vertical, but in up position. That's the reason why someone called his demo the viagra demo.

When the guy pushed the stick, automatically, the machine moved along the rail to correct the angle, and let the stick well vertically.

He explained that only one PC was controlling the machine. And started the second machine as Backup. When backup machine was launched, he stopped the application that was running on the first machine. And the stick were always well vertically. The second PC take the relay.

Then, he restarts the application on the first PC. At that moment, that application become the backup. And he unplug the cable of the second PC, that was at that moment the master controller of the I/O Card. And the stick continues to be vertically.

Also, I forget to say that other applications were running in the same Virtual Machine on each one of those two PC. And those applications somethimes freezed due to the carbage collector.

I hope that I someone will post a photo somewhere on the web, and that I will be able to add a link here.

And the java application continues to keep the stick vertically during all the time of the next keynote. So, if people are not yet convinced that RT Application can run under the JVM, personally, I am now convinced.

Want to share your experience with RT Java Application ?

Update: Someone take a photo of the machine and publish it on Javapolis. Look at the
picture

Javapolis: Day 4: Real Time Java

During the keynote of this morning, Someone of Sun (I am sorry, but I don't remember who) speaked about Java and Real Time Application.

Java and Real Time Application ? Not possible, I though. You can't garantee Real Time when you use applications based upon JVM having a Garbage Collector that can suspend your thread at any moment, and for somes time (it may be short, but always too long for Real Time Application).

But, aside the guy, everyone could see a strange machine. Because I have'nt find a photo of that machine, let me try to describe it.

On the table, we could see 2 pc (Sun Solaris machines, and between those two pc, you had I/O Cards.
Each one of those PC were linked to those I/O Cards. Those I/O Cards were connected to something that could move along a rail. That think was in fact a pendule.

But a really strange pendule, because in place of go down, the pendule was up. In fact, the Java application always looked at the angle of the pendule and, when necesary, move the machine left or right along the rail to do some correction and be sure that pendule is always vertical, but in up position. That's the reason why someone called his demo the viagra demo.

When the guy pushed the stick, automatically, the machine moved along the rail to correct the angle, and let the stick well vertically.

He explained that only one PC was controlling the machine. And started the second machine as Backup. When backup machine was launched, he stopped the application that was running on the first machine. And the stick were always well vertically. The second PC take the relay.

Then, he restarts the application on the first PC. At that moment, that application become the backup. And he unplug the cable of the second PC, that was at that moment the master controller of the I/O Card. And the stick continues to be vertically.

Also, I forget to say that other applications were running in the same Virtual Machine on each one of those two PC. And those applications somethimes freezed due to the carbage collector.

I hope that I someone will post a photo somewhere on the web, and that I will be able to add a link here.

And the java application continues to keep the stick vertically during all the time of the next keynote. So, if people are not yet convinced that RT Application can run under the JVM, personally, I am now convinced.

Want to share your experience with RT Java Application ?

Update: Someone take a photo of the machine and publish it on Javapolis. Look at the
picture

Javapolis Day 3: Rick Ross

Yesterday morning, Javapolis began with a Key note of Rick Ross, the founder of http://www.javalobby.org.
He explained why it's very important to have a strong and active java community. He said that we, as Java developper have to play an actor's role, and not be passive.

Then, he does a little presentation of web sites that form the javalobby community.

He also speaked about what he will set in place in the future, and it seems very interresting.

Firstly, he wants to set in place a JUGCommunity or JUGCentral, where all JUG around the world could be hosted and have nices tools to manage events, calendar, ...

Secondly, he wants to create a JCampus, permitting to have an on-line campus concerning Java World.

I hope it will happens shortly. Because I am very curious about which content will be available on that site.

What do you think about Rick Ross's initiatives and his plans for new website.

Javapolis 2004 University Day 1: JDK 5.0 In Action

Firstly, I was amazed that they were using a Apple portable. Reason why I was amazed is that JDK 5.0 is not yet available for Apple's PC.

I was thinking how they will show JDK 5.0 in action with a portable running under Apple Mac OS X.

But in fact, it was only presentation of slides. So, in fact no "JDK 5.0 in Action".

The first part of the presentation was the most interresting. The reason was that second part of the presentation was exactly the same as the one given by Neal Gafter at Javapolis 2003 ( JSR-176: Forthcoming Java Programming Language Features by Neal Gafter [ Sun Microsystems ]).

I really think that Javapolis people would avoid to organize two times the same presentation.

The best part of the JDK 5.0 in action was when they show a very simple but complete test framework that run every methods of a class having a @test annotation and indicating how much methods failed or success. I am curious to see presentation of TestNG to know if it's based upon the same principle.

What I also liked was the fact that Joshua Bloch, working now for Google, speaked about NetBeans and encourage people to install it.

As a netBeans Community Member, I can also encourage you to download the release 4.0 of NetBeans (would be available this week) and play with it. I am pretty sure you will like the fact that netbeans projects are now ant-driven.

By the way, impossible to know what they are doing at Google. :-(

Javapolis 2004 University Day 1: AspectJ in Action

Javapolis 2004 started today.

Today, it was the first day of the University.
The morning, during 3 hours, I listen to Adrian Colyer explaining AspectJ and explain us how it worked and why we would use it.

He wins. I will certainly try AspectJ one of those next days.

The demo he does that convinces me is his demo concerning Hibernate.

He had a class called Address with somes fields. And without modifying one line of his existing Address class, thanks to Aspects, he was able to add persistance via Hibernate mechanism.

All the stuffs concerning the management of session and transaction
like the following piece of code

Transaction tx = null;
Session s = null;
try {
s = sessionFactory.openSession();
tx = s.beginTransaction();
somes code concerning Address here
tx.commit();
return address;
} catch (HibernateException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
tx.rollback();
} finally {
s.close;
}

was contained not in a java class, but in a aspect. And the part that appears in bold were in a dao java class, but not linked to Hibernate, and was high level, so the code could be reusable for the save, update or delete of the object.

By the way, he also shows how to encapsulate all HibernateException into DAOException (required by his virtual architecht), and also how to preserve people to directly call Hibernate oriented methods appearing in your DAO class after compilation by AspectJ.

As a demo, It was really incredible.

Many Thanks, Mr Colyer.

Now, I really hope that somes next version of NetBeans will include a module to manage aspects like the eclipse one.

NetBeans @ Javapolis

Edition 2004 of javapolis will start the 13 of decembre.

Last year, Sun did a presentation of Rave (Sun Java Studio Creator).
This year, Tim Boudreau will do a presentation of NetBeans 4.0 ( that would be out for the javapolis event) but also explain us what we can expect from the future versions of NetBeans.

I will certainly blog here my impression of each session I will follow. And I also hope to meet you at the Bof session concerning NetBeans the 14 December at 7pm local time.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.