Sprout - The NetBeans Monthly Newsletter - Issue 1

http://www.netbeans.org/
http://www.netbeans.org/ide/download.html

Check this out

NetBeans 3.4 beta 1
available for download.

NetBeans Book !
reviewers wanted!

Sun ONE Studio Portal
NetBeans related resources

Hot threads

nbusers

RE: audit module?
34

About netbeans's cool unknown features
32

nbdev

Draft of new data system API available
33

[editor]
19

nbui

New Debugger Icons
27

Most Active Posters

Jesse Glick
216

Jaroslav Tulach
104

Maxym Mykhalchuk
79

Svata Dedic
66

Nicolai Czempin
55

Statistics : May

IDE downloads

Total: 429837; +23653

Platform downloads

Total: 9278; +2754

Subscribers

2033; +14

Messages Posted

2263

In Prague June 21 2002

Newsletter

Hello everyone,
this is our first issue of the NetBeans Monthly Newsletter. This Newsletter will bring you a high level overview of what cool or interesting has happened with the NetBeans Project since the last issue of the newsletter.

It will not deep dive into any development issues since for that we have the weekly development newsletter. Also, please help us shape the future of this newsletter by sending us feedback at this email address.

In this issue we will introduce Martin Matula and Jesse Glick to you. Martin works on the NetBeans MDR, which was recently contributed to NetBeans by Sun, and Jesse Glick is secretly known as the NetBeans GURU. In the Featured Product we'll bring you up to speed with RefactorIT's module for NetBeans. Also there are a lot of cool "hiden" features that you can read about in this issue. In the end, we are bringing you a fresh testimonial from one of the NetBeans mailing lists, and don't forget to help NetBeans more visible by casting your vote on theJDJ 2002 Reader's Choice Awards

We hope that you will enjoy this issue and that it will bring you information that you would not otherwise find.

George Dvorak

NetBeans IDE 3.3.2 and 3.4 beta are out!

We are happy to announce that the 3.3.2 release has been released, it can be downloaded from here !

If you want a stable, beautiful IDE, check out NetBeans 3.3.2. If you like to stay on the leading edge, check out the beta version of NetBeans 3.4 - and help out the NetBeans community in the process!

NetBeans 3.3.2 is a bug fix release of version 3.3.1 (released in February 2002). It contains more than 120 bug fixes.

For the full list of fixed bugs and improvements in 3.3.2, please see this page .

Enjoy!

Developer Spotlight - Martin Matula

Martin Matula in general:
Martin is 25 years old and lives and works in Prague, Czech Republic. Some of his favorite hobbies are working on MDR, squash, biking, skiing and listening to r&b, hip-hop or classical music. He has a Master's degree in software engineering from the Czech Technical University in Prague.
Along with his studies, Martin worked for almost five years for one of the top Czech IT companies developing, architecting and leading developement of application frameworks for large information systems for banks and big enterprises.

Martin Matula & NetBeans:
Since Martin joined Sun (two years ago), he has been working on the Metadata Repository. He became Sun's representative in JSR-40, OMG's Analysis & Design task force and MOF and XMI revision task force.
He believes that providing a solid foundation for MDA tools within NetBeans is one of the most important things in making the NetBeans the best platform to build on. For him the greatest strengths of NetBeans are its modularity, flexible design, cool features of our editor and java modules, real
openess to the community and excellent support for our users and developers on our mailing lists. And yes, he uses NetBeans for his programming.

Developer Spotlight - Jesse Glick

Jesse Glick is 27 and lives in Boston MA after several years in Prague
in the Czech Republic. He has an AA from Simon's Rock College and a BA
from Hampshire College, concentrating in computer science and
linguistics. Prior to NetBeans and Sun he worked in the online
advertising industry, developing interactive virtual spray-cheese
products and much more. When not programming, he is likely to be found
listening to Bach and/or the Electric Light Orchestra, preparing Yucca
Surprise, or staring blankly at the wall.

Jesse joined NetBeans in early 1999 as tech support and maneuvred into
API documentation and programming. After the acquisition by Sun that
fall, he was active in the creation of the netbeans.org site and the
transition to an open-source development infrastructure. Since then he
has worn many hats, but has mostly worked on the NetBeans core, and the OpenAPIs and their
documentation, as well as the Ant integration. He likes NetBeans for its
extensive modularity and the ability to look at what is happening under
the hood from the IDE itself. As a diehard Emacs junkie he also
appreciates that it lets you choose how much help you really want,
matching individual development styles more easily than
"bondage-and-discipline" IDEs.

JDJ 2002 Reader

The JDJ 2002 Reader's Choice Awards voting is happening right now. Please, help NetBeans be more visible by voting for NetBeans and SunONE Studio formerly known as Forte for Java which is build on top of NetBeans.

You can vote for NetBeans and SunONE Studio by clicking on the button below "Vote NetBeans / SunONE Studio (FFJ)!"which will preselect NetBeans and
SunONE Studio (FFJ) products in the categories where they are nominated or by following this link and manually filling in the categories.

NetBeans in the press - First Open Source Tools Platform to Implement Model Driven Architecture (MDA)

On May 7, Sun announced that it has contributed a series of modules supporting Object Management Group's (OMG's) Model Driven Architecture to NetBeans. This makes the NetBeans platform the first of its kind to support the Model Driven Architecture.

The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) helps capturing business logic -- business processes and their appropriate interactions -- in re-usable models. The MDA can help significantly simplify the implementation of Web services, as the architecture insulates models from changes in the deployment infrastructure for the services.

Sun has recently contributed Metadata Repository (MDR) modules to NetBeans, to make it easier for developers to support another programming language without extensive extra programming and to write NetBeans-based tools that interoperate with standards-based modeling tools. These new modules underline NetBeans' commitment to a totally standards-based, language-independent approach to software design. You can get a look at the contributed modules at http://mdr.netbeans.org .

<more detail >

Cool Features in the NetBeans Editor you might not know about

As you probably know, NetBeans has a lot of features, which are of course all documented, but sometimes we don't have the time to go through all of the documentation, so here are some NetBeans Editor features that are cool and that get sometimes "rediscovered" by NetBeans users. To see the complete list of the Editor features see the http://editor.netbeans.org page.

NetBeans Editor Cool "hidden" features:

- [Tools - Options - Editing - Java Sources - Show Editor Toolbar = True]

- Shows Editor Toolbar

- [Alt-Shift-O] - Fast Open

- [Alt+Shift+I] - Fast Import

- [CTRL-SHIFT-F] - format file

- [Ctrl-K, Ctrl-L] go to previous/last word

- [CTRL-T and CTRL-D] indent/unindent multiple lines

- Bracket highlighting (a la emacs)

Featured Product - Refactoring from RefactorIT

About Refactoring

Let's face it: all code will have to evolve and be modified. Software of any sophistication just isn't destined to harden. New styles and practices of development are advocated by the Agile Software Manifesto and the iterative deployment processes of extreme programming to keep software flexible and more useful over time. The latest articles from Robert C. Martin highlight the importance of continuous care, showing that the evolution of code -- through a process of refactoring -- is more important than initial design.

All of these practitioners advocate Refactoring as a primary discipline, to be applied to code bases within each iteration. Refactoring isn't a fad: it's a fundamental way to keep your code flexible and clean, as you keep learning about what the actual design needs are.

Using the methodology of Refactoring makes change manageable - using the RefactorIT tool makes change easy.

What RefactorIT Does

RefactorIT is a NetBeans module that performs common refactoring operations safely and automatically. RefactorIT adds new menu items, such as Rename, Where Used or Extract Method, to IDE-s context menus.

With RefactorIT you can safely select any item and rename it, search for its usages or its dependencies. Extract a piece of code into a separate method. Move a class to a different package, encapsulate field to be accessed by getter and setter methods, turn constructor usages into factory method, explore classes hierarchy, extract a superclass or superinterface out of existing class, save and compare snapshots of API, find where exception is caught, track your TODO/FIXME comments, find not used fields and methods, see source code metrics, quickly navigate the source code or search for source code constructs like 'search for methods returning java.io.File'.

RefactorIT's Underlying Technology

Basic functionality is not the only criteria for a refactoring tool to be useful and efficient. The tool must also meet certain requirements, among them:

- Accuracy - Automatic refactorings must retain the original behavior of the code as fully as possible, and analysis tools must provide accurate information about the code. This is clearly the most basic requirement for any refactoring tool.

- Speed - Analysis and transformations performed by a refactoring tool are very sophisticated, especially for large projects with hundreds of source files. If those processes are not well optimized, they can be quite time consuming. Naturally, a refactoring tool which takes a long time to perform its tasks will not be widely used.

- Integration with an IDE - Research suggests that developers are less likely to use a standalone refactoring tool – whether it's powerful or not – than one integrated with their development environment. The ability to invoke actions directly from the development environment is a significant feature to many users. A flexible integration to IDE(s) is a high priority of RefactorIT, but one which also requires that the target IDE has an extensible plug-in architecture such as NetBeans.

For the complete document about Refactorit, follow this link and read about the Architecture of RefactorIT, RefactorIT in Practice, RefactorIT Walkthrough or visit the refactorit website at http://www.refactorit.com .

Testimonial of the month

Hi,

I would like to share our 4-5 week of experience with NetBeans OpenIDE.We are a team of 8 developers, who found ourselves built in to a tough corner with our dedicated client application (Color Physics for Textile Supply-Chain). It was largely a matter of "let's worry about that later" attitude that put us in the situation.
While looking for solutions, one of my collleagues, took a close look at NetBeans, and he tried to explain the intricate problems we were facing, and the complex solutions required. I took a look at the History of NetBeans, especially since I considered the product for another development 4 years ago, and the history trail made me slightly nervous. Not only did it list
early how the original NetBeans developers solved the kind of problems we were facing now, but also looking further than that popped up a lot of issues, not yet come to our intention, and I realize we are going to face that later.

A very intense brain-storming meeting between my top guy and I, we went through the basics, the branding, and I then read the Extending NetBeans book overnight, and I had that same "gut feeling" I had when I gambled the future
of my company in 1996 that Go Java 100%, which was far from an obvious choice in the 1.0.2 days. The "gut feeling" was, this is right.

Main arguments in favour:

1. NB is heavily documented.

2. NB has extensive support.

3. NB is extremely flexible.

4. NB is mature.

5. NB has many generic features.

6. World-wide recognition.

Net result, we estimate that we will manage to release a product by July, that
is;

a. Faster time-to-market,

b. More features,

c. More stable,

d. Lower R&D cost,

e. Higher end-customer value,

f. More extendible,

g. Easier long-term maintenance.

After the July release, we believe that we can exponentially increase our
features, since existing developers are now high on the learning curve and
can mentor new developers joining us later.
In fact, the previous gloomy outlook of supporting all the features requested
by the upper-management, are now turned into optimistic enthusiasm to make
the "Best Color Physics Software for Textile industry in the world." and
perhaps the "Color Physics" will be dropped when we include all the non-color
related features, and perhaps "Textile industry" will be dropped when we
support all color sensitive industries, such as plastics, printing, paint and
food. Future will tell...

To all people out there, who are considering using NetBeans for non-IDE
application, I can only RECOMMEND, the strongest, the OpenIDE Platform.

To all the NetBeans developers, working at Sun Microsystems, privately, or
elsewhere, thanks for bringing the world the most complete Client side
framework I have ever seen.

To Sun Microsystems, I would like to honour and acknowledge my greatest
respect for not only giving NetBeans as OpenSource to the world, BUT foremost
for bring Java to the developers, and fighting to protected it from being
raped (you know who).

To everyone else, still reading, thanks for putting up with my dravel (is
there such word in English)....

Niclas Hedhman

To read Niclas' complete testimonial which we had to shorten for the purpose of Sprout, please visit the following link .