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.
]]>But they are, today, only available in french.
You can find them on developpez.com, a high quality french website.
developpez.com is hosting a lot of forums (and specially a recently new netbeans forum) concerning development, tutorials, blogs, FAQ, Sources, ...
You can also find other flash tutorials written for NetBeans 4.1 but that are always up to date for NetBeans 5.0. By example, the ErrorStripe flash demo, or How to spare workspace
Hope you will enjoy those flash tutorials.
If you are interested by the tool I use to write such demos, just to say that I am using Wink therefore.
And I have to mention that Wink is free, even for a commercial usage.
Many thanks to Wink development team for such a good product.
Brabant Vincent
My French WebSite
My French Blog
As you can see in the picture, the award was signed by three peoples.
On the right, I can recognize the signature of James Gosling.
But I have no idea about the two other signatures.
If you could help me to identify the two others signatures, I will be very happy.
I just would like to say that this award would not be mine, but the one of the NetBeans Team, that continues to enhance NetBeans and to give us a very powerful IDE, for free, and open sourced.
]]>Thoses tutorials were existing in the past, but exclusively for the french community. Except one I posted here in the past, as a snap preview.
I decided to translate them in english and to submit them to the NetBeans website.
Other tutorials would be available during the next weeks. Stay stuned.
French version of those demos (and other ones) are also available
]]>Today, I received my Examination Score Report where it's indicated that I am now a Sun Certified J2SE 5.0 Programmer.
I passed the exam the 1st February 2005.
Normally, we know directly, at the end of the exam, if we success or not, if we are certified or not.
But, in this case, it was not the case. I had to wait until today to know my results.
And I am now a Sun Certified Programmer for the J2SE 5.0.
But, IMHO, I would have failed.
I will explain you reasons why I have the status only today.
And why I would have failed.
Once upon a time, somewhere in Octobre 2004, I went to
a book festival in Brussels.
And I bought some Java Certification books for less than 5€.
# Mike Meyers' Java 2 Certification Passport (Exam 310-025)
# Sun Certification Training Guide (CS-310-025 & CX-310-027): Java 2 Programmer and Developer Exams, Second Edition
I was thinking that, for that price, it was always a good buy.
But I never look at them, until the 15 Decembre 2004, when Evelyn Cartagena, of Sun, posted this message: a call for candidates for the Programmer 5.0 Beta Certification Exam.
she said
Candidates will have four to five (4-5) hours to complete 138 questions. The time allotted should give you time to respond to all questions and provide your valuable comments while taking the exam.
After reflexion, I though it was a good opportunity. And for that price (in Belgium, it was only 40€), if I failed, it was not like I spend 150$.
It's always good to know about your knowledge level for your daily computer language. So, I decided to subscribe and start studying.
But the problem was the following: Objectives were not yet available. So, what to study?
I started with the great O'reilly book Java 1.5 Tiger: A Developer's Notebook. And I played with all examples of that book by using NetBeans 4.0. It was very useful because NetBeans 4.0 was already supporting the new JDK 5 language features.
I continued to study with the JDK 5, reading a nice French article of Lionel Roux (available on developpez.com), and by reading the draft of the third edition of the JLS (Java Language Specification), that was available at that url
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/java_language-3_0-mr-spec.zip.
(Please note that you can now freely download the PDF file. It is available at http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/ ).
By reading those books, I learned a lot of things I didn't know about, before.
To be sure that I studied all new API of the J2SE 5, I also used a nice tool, called JDiff, that permits to see you on line the difference between J2SE 1.4.2 and 1.5.0.
So, I discovered that I had a lot of things to study.
What I forgot, and it was mentionned in the call of 15 Decembre, was that they posted, the 20 Decembre, objectives of the exam.
So, I was able to enhance my preparation. But the date of 1st February was there.
]]> I choosed the date of 1st February because I am working only 4 days a week and that days was my free day. And it was not possible after, because I was in vacation for one week. And the end date for the beta exam was the 13 February.I also buy the book "Programmer's Guide to Java Certification" to learn J2SE 1.4 features that were not in other books.
But the week before my exam, due to a bad family event, I was unable to study. And I have not yet study stuffs concerning multi-threading. I just read the last chapter of the book therefore, but without practice it.
Come then the 1st February. 5 hours suffering. I have to answer to 138 questions, an average of 2 minutes by questions. 1 minutes to read the question, translate it in my language (I am a French native speaker), and understand what they mean. Another minute to look at proposed choices. And, because it was a Beta Exam, also fill in comments because some questions were wrongly exposed, or piece of code were incorrect.
I started at 9AM and finished at 2PM. It was really short.
During the exams, I was surprised about the number of questions related to multi-threading and I understood that I would have study deeper that part.
Then, I had to wait, and wait, and wait, until today.
Today, I received my Score Report. I passed.
But Score is not so nice (69%).
Reason was that I totally failed the section concerning Concurrency (multi-threading). It was less than 50%.
Personally, I am happy, because I am a Sun Certified Programmer, but
IMHO I would fail.
When I was at school, to pass end of year exams we need to fill in two criteria's:
The passing score was 60% (similar to Sun Passing Score)
The minimum score, for each section would be 50%.
And because I completely failed the Concurrency part of the exam, I really think that I would fail.
Sun would introduce such a restriction in their exams.
Will you agree if someone obtained his licence driving because he passed with 69% but completely missed the section concerning the one-way road or gyratory direction ?
Vincent Brabant
http://fr.netbeans.org
They organized a Technical workshop on May 25 (Luxembourg) and May 26 (Belgium).
In the mail it was said
Please feel free to forward this invitation to your colleagues.
Because we are belonging to the same community, I can consider you as my colleagues.
More details and registration on the following page:
P.S. It's possible to win a trip to JavaOne.
I hope to meet somes of you.
Vincent
]]>But what is very nice is that you have possibility to choose the JDK. So, you can decide to run your code by using JDK 5.0, but also by usng JDK 6.0.
It's really simple to use.
Hereunder a screenshot of a little java class that display the version of the JRE, but also the parameters given as input.
Please note that signature of the main method is
public static void main(String... args) {}
If you compile it with an old JDK, it will never compile. That new notation has been introduced with Tiger (JDK 5.0)
Note also that they are using build 13 of the JRE 6.0.
I hope they will update the used JDK with the last build available on java.net. That would be really great.]]>
NetBeans EDI 4.1 is not yet released that they are already preparing the NetBeans EDI 4.2. And, therefore, it seems they are reviewing the colormap and changing their logo.
Please discover what you can see now when you download the last daily build of the NetBeans IDE 4.2.
How do you like it?]]>
So, hereafter is my wish list:
When I compare the number of modules created for Eclipse and the number of modules created for NetBeans, I conclude that creation of a module for Eclipse seems simpler than creation of a module for NetBeans. If you do no enhancements in that domain, you will never be able to eclipse eclipse.
Success for NetBeans 4.1.
Vincent
]]>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.
]]>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
Then, he speak about Jython, that is running upon the Java Virtual Machine and could easily be connected with all the current Java APIs.
So, could you imagine the advantage of a dynamic language like Jython or Groovy, having the possibility to use the huge number of java Apis ?
He also showed that responsible of JDK 1.6 (sorry, JDK 6.0) meeted people of Jython and that we will certainly see somes modification in the Byte Code of the JVM to facilitate usage of dynamic language as Jython.
He finished his keynote by showing the new recently version of NetBeans 4.0 and encourage people to download it and play with it.
I can also encourage you to look at it.
What do you think about support of other language on the JVM ?
Do you agree that somes modifications are necessary in the Byte Code to facilitate support of other language ?
Please tell me your thinking
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.
]]>