The NetBeans Monthly Newsletter - July 2002

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

Check this out

NetBeans 3.4 beta 3
available for download.

NetBeans at OSCON
Learn to develop NetBeans Modules at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference

Sun ONE Studio Portal
NetBeans related resources

Hot threads

nbdev

Contributed module: Todo List
37

Cookie "design pattern"
26

nbusers

Eclipse and Netbeans
32

Java indentation
27

nbui

New Debugger Icons
23

Most Active Posters

Jesse Glick
173

Nicolai Czempin
58

Niclas Hedhman
34

Marek Slama
33

Jaroslav Tulach
32

Statistics : June

IDE downloads

Total: 464309; +33913

Platform downloads

Total: 12181; +2539

Subscribers

2063; +30

Messages Posted

1445

Issue 2, July/26 2002

Sprout, Issue 2 (July)

Hello everyone, and welcome to the second issue of the NetBeans Monthly Newsletter, a high level view of what has been happening with NetBeans in the last month.

A lot has been going on! The big news is that NetBeans 3.4 is nearing release, with a pile of improvements to make your coding life easier.

In addition to that, translations of NetBeans into French and Russian are nearing completion, thanks to the hard work of community members Vincent Brabant and Maxym Mychalchuk. So if you are a native speaker of either of these languages, you'll soon have a version of NetBeans in your own language. To check out their progress, see the translatedfiles project pages.

The new contributions site has attracted a flurry of new modules you can try out in NetBeans! These range from support for Java Data Objects and Apache Struts to automated code auditing, instant messaging and even viewing videos and playing audio files from within NetBeans!

If you have an idea for a module that would make your coding life easier, find out how to get started here .

Tim Boudreau

Developer Spotlight - Petr Hrebejk

Petr Hrebejk has worked on NetBeans since April of 1999. He is the original author of the MDR, JavaDoc, JavaBeans and AutoUpdate modules for NetBeans, and is currently working on the new Looks API and the NetBeans Platform in general.

When asked why he took the job at NetBeans, long before it was open source and before the NetBeans company had been bought by Sun, Petr says "I had been working on enterprise software in Vienna, and I really liked the chance to go home to Prague and work for a start-up there, and work on software that was good for the whole Java community."

What he likes about NetBeans is the possibility extend it to do anything - "It can be used for applications, tools, whatever. It is a promising framework."

Petr studied Information Technology and Economics at the University of Economics in Prague, and recently coauthored this article which appeared on news.com. For hobbies, he is known to like bicycling in the mountains - and claims to have other hobbies which he does not want to reveal :-)

Developer Spotlight - Jarda Tulach

Jarda (pronounced "Yarda") was one of the founders of NetBeans when it began as a student project back in 1996, and has been NetBeans' primary architect since then. He wrote the first three generations of the NetBeans APIs, and is currently working on improving the modules APIs in cooperation with others on the OpenIDE mailing list. Primarily, his work is focusing on infrastructure that will make it easier for module developers to create their own APIs without making mistakes or running into roadblocks.

When asked about his hobbies, Jarda (naturally) says NetBeans is his favorite hobby - but he finds time for snowboarding, squash and David Lynch movies.

Asking one of the creators of NetBeans what he likes about gets an interesting answer: "It is a nice playground - I can materialize my dreams - whatever I want within it, and since it's modular, others can too."

Jarda has a Masters degree in Computer Science from Charles University in Prague.

NetBeans 3.4 Beta 3 is out

The NetBeans IDE 3.4 Beta 3 is out! NetBeans 3.4 is reaching the end of its beta cycle. We think you'll love some of the new features in it! Some of them are:

- Drag and drop support (including dragging tabs out of windows)

- Pop-up JavaDoc in the editor - when you invoke code completion another window pops up showing the JavaDoc documentation

- Marking of errors as you type - if there is a syntax error in your code, or an unknown variable, for example, the IDE will underline it for you - no more compiling to find out you made a mistake!

You can download it from here ! And keep those bug reports and feature requests coming!

NetBeans at OSCON

If you're attending the O'Reilly Open Source convention or are interested in what was/is happenening there, check the page listing all of the NetBeans related events at this conference here .

Cool feature of the month-generating properties

The cool feature of the month allows you to generate getters and setters for properties quickly and easily. Often people miss this wonderful bit of functionality in NetBeans.

Say you have a field, and you want to make it a property of the class you're writing. You can either select it in the editor, or open up the class in Explorer and select the field (or even multiple fields, to generate many properties at the same time!). Then just right click and choose Tools | Generate R/W property for field from the popup menu. It's that simple!