The NetBeans Monthly Newsletter - August 2002

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Module Catalogue
Catalogue of free and commercial add-on modules available for your NetBeans IDE.

NetBeans 3.4
available for download.

OnJava NB Article
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Re: Reformatting Code.
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Statistics : July

IDE downloads

Total: 497008; +28016

Platform downloads

Total: 14907; +2384

Subscribers

2090; +27

Messages Posted

1863

Issue 3, August/28 2002

Sprout, Issue 3 (August 2002)

Welcome to the third issue of Sprout, the NetBeans monthly news.

The month of August is typically a silly season, but not for NetBeans! The community was busy finishing the NetBeans 3.4 release as well as planning for the upcoming release. The NetBeans web and marketing teams prepared new pages on the website dedicated to extension modules available for NetBeans IDE - the Module Catalogue. The O'Reilly Open Source Conference and LinuxWorld were noticeably busier for NetBeans than their previous versions.

There was the first ever community voting on the code names theme for NetBeans releases which attracted a lot of attention. The agreed-upon theme is the names of villages on Java (the island :-).

Read through this issue; if you want to contribute interesting content for the next issues or have any comments or ideas for how to make Sprout better, we would be eager to hear them!

Ian Formanek

NetBeans 3.4 Just Released!

The NetBeans open source project has just released NetBeans 3.4!
The
NetBeans 3.4 IDE offers improved performance and new features to help you
be more productive.
One of the things that really counts in productivity is
features that save time in doing what you do most - writing code. And that's
where most of the enhancements you'll see in NetBeans 3.4 are focused. You can download it now from
netbeans.org and begin to enjoy:

- Pop-up Javadoc documentation -
NetBeans' already excellent code completion now displays documentation for
classes as you navigate them, resulting in fewer missteps during
development.

- Live parsing and error marking - syntactical and
semantic errors are highlighted as you type. Where before you might need to
recompile to find simple typos and minor errors, you now get instant feedback.
Compile less, compile successfully more!

- Completely redesigned
debugger user interface

- New editor toolbar for fast
navigation to class members and easy access to powerful editor
features

- Drag and drop support - drag tree nodes such as
methods and fields between classes and more

- Windowing system
improvements to use screen space more efficiently

- Close buttons
on tabs in the editor and elsewhere

- And much
more...

You also get all of the features you've already come
to expect in NetBeans, such as CVS support, code completion, JSP & Servlet,
CORBA, RMI, JDBC support, and support for multiple JDKs.
And of course, there
are plenty of both free and commercial extensions available, from refactoring,
profiling and UML support to Java3d, and even audio and video players! For more
information about extensions to NetBeans, see:

The NetBeans module catalogue -
http://www.netbeans.org/catalogue/
and
The SunONE Studio module marketplace - http://forte.sun.com/ffj/downloads.html

Happy coding!

Module Catalogue

We are pleased to announce the availability of the NetBeans Module Catalogue, the list of add-on modules available for your NetBeans IDE.

The catalogue lists modules from NetBeans project as well those developed by third-party companies and other open-source projects. It is organised by technology-specific categories, and in each category modules are marked as stable, beta or alpha depending on their state. By default, only stable modules are displayed, but you can easily switch to also see the alpha and beta ones.

If you are a NetBeans IDE user, check it out! Some of the modules can be downloaded via the Update Center, but many are only available from the catalogue, especially the commercial ones.

The catalogue is definitely not complete yet, so come back often to see the new stuff. If you have a module that is not yet listed, let us know .

[Module Catalogue ]

Team Spotlight - NetBeans WebTeam

You might have been wondering whom to give credit or blame for the netbeans.org website. In this issue we'll put those guys under the spotlight.

The team at Sun that handles both the structure and the design of the website are two guys - Jack Catchpoole and Marek Vinar.

Jack has been NetBeans webmaster since time began - his first web visualisations of NetBeans date back to 1997. An Australian import to the Czech Republic, the story goes that he was helping out carrying boxes when NetBeans was moving to a new office, and just forgot to leave afterward! Jack can be found listening to music anywhere from Tool to techno, playing too many computer games and travelling.

Marek is a tool enthusiast. For any problem he does not think about how to solve it, but rather how to make a tool that would solve this problem, and many times also multiple others. Right now, this article is being written in a PHP tool for writing articles for Sprout :-). Marek is a fan of nature documentaries and hiking and rock climbing, and has been working with NetBeans for a year and a half.

For more information about Jack and Marek and what they're up to, visit the webteam pages at http://www.netbeans.org/about/webteam/

[WebTeam Pages ]

O'Reilly Open Source Convention Report

The O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) happens every July in combination with the O'Reilly Perl conference. It is a very tutorial and eduaction oriented show centered around open source software. It's a great place to learn about your favorite open source projects, and possibly end up sharing an elevator with Richard Stallman or Larry Wall or someone else who's changed the world of software in one way or another. OSCON is not traditionally very Java-centric, so I was pleased by how much interest and attention NetBeans received!

We had a number of events at OSCON, including a 4-hour tutorial on module-building, which got some press in this article . 17 people attended the tutorial (which, for a smaller non-Java conference is actually a good number). I gave an overview, Jesse Glick presented NetBeans innards, and how it all fits together. Then Tomas Zezula talked about the metadata repository . He was followed by William Will, of Project XEMO , a music composition environment built on NetBeans, who made a great case for why someone might want to use NetBeans infrastructure to build an application!

Friday's business session was even more heavily attended as we went over what it means for a business to build their applications on NetBeans. Danese Cooper, Sun Microsystems' "Open source diva" (her business card really says that) talked about why Sun opened the sources to NetBeans, and what else Sun is doing in the world of open source.

It was a great show, and we'll be back there next year with more tutorials and events!

Tim Boudreau

O'Reilly book on NetBeans to be published in October

As some of you are probably aware, O'Reilly is publishing a book on NetBeans, called NetBeans: The Definitive Guide, by Tim Boudreau, Jesse Glick, Simeon Greene and Vaughn Spurlin.

The book is divided into two parts: The first half, Using NetBeans, covers everything you ever wanted to know about using the NetBeans IDE. The second half, Extending NetBeans covers everything you need to know to write NetBeans modules to integrate with the IDE or build your own NetBeans-based applications. If you are using one of Sun's Forte for Java/SunONE Studio distributions of NetBeans, the book applies equally to that.

Since O'Reilly tends to be the gold standard in technical books on open source software, we're very proud they chose to publish a book about NetBeans!

The book is scheduled to hit the shelves in October, but you can order it now from O'Reilly's web site, by clicking here .

Tim Boudreau

In the press

If you are a user of the NetBeans IDE (or SunONE Studio/Forte for Java) and wondering what all of the talk is about the "NetBeans Platform", this article in O'Reilly's OnJava web site provides a great overview of what it is and why it's interesting.

NetBeans Board Elections

It's election time again! The current netbeans Board's 6 month term is about to finish, and we'd like to begin the process of electing Board members for the next term.

The Board consists of 3 members - 2 seats nominated and elected by the community, and one Sun-appointed seat. For more info about the Board, and their role in the NetBeans community, please see

http://www.netbeans.org/about/os/governance.html and http://www.netbeans.org/about/os/who-board.html

Please take a minute to think about someone you'd like to nominate - someone you think has a good understanding of NetBeans and open source, and would represent the interests of the community fairly. Please post your nominations to the [email protected] mailing list.

Once the nomination period has closed, the list of nominees will be collated and we will prepare a public poll (similar to the recent NetBeans codenames poll). Approximately a 1 week voting period will follow, during which all community members are invited to vote for their chosen Board member.

Votes will be tallied and the new netbeans.org Board members will be announced to the lists and on the website. Sun will announce their appointed Board member at this time.

Election Timeline :

- Now until 5pm CET Friday, September 6th : please post nominations for the 2 non-sun positions on the board to the [email protected] mailing list;

- September 7th to 5pm CET Monday September 16th : voting for nominated candidates in public poll. Voting will close promptly at 5pm CET.

- Tuesday September 17th : announcement on the lists and website of the new netbeans.org board members.

Please take part!

Jack Catchpoole

Cool Feature of the Month: JavaDoc in Code Completion

One of the cool new features added in NetBeans 3.4 is a JavaDoc displayed in the code completion.

This feature provides a quick way to retrieve javadoc information for the selected item in the code completion popup, such as class, method or field. By default, the Javadoc box appears above or below the code completion box when you are completing Java expressions, as a simple HTML browser, which also allows to navigate across hyperlinks if a additional info is needed.

From the Javadoc box, it is also possible to open the Javadoc in external browser or open the class where the Javadoc is declared in the editor.

It is possible to open the Javadoc box independently from the code completion. Just place the cursor on the item for which you want to get the Javadoc and press Ctrl+Shift+Space.

Please note that for the Javadoc documentation to display while you are using Java code completion, you must have the sources for the classes added as a filesystem.

Martin Roskanin

Featured Product - WASP Developer from Systinet

Systinet’s Web Applications and Services Platform (WASP) is a complete solution for creating, deploying, securing and managing SOAP Web services. One of the WASP products, WASP Developer, features a free plug-in module that turns NetBeans into a powerful environment for building and deploying Web services.

WASP Developer provides powerful and simple tools that help developers rapidly and efficiently create Web services. There are two approaches to Web services development. With the first, existing Java code is used to generate a WSDL file and Web services package that can be later deployed to the Web services runtime. The second approach is to generate the Java Web services from existing WSDL. WASP Developer can automatically generate client-side code for an existing Web services, regardless of where it is running, what programming language it was developed in, or what SOAP implementation it uses. While WASP Developer automates the creation process, it also allows for complete control: Developers have access to all generated resources and can modify them at any time.

WASP Developer allows both client and server-side Web services debugging, and server-side debugging can be performed remotely. WASP Developer can debug a Web service running in any environment.

Finally, WASP Developer fully integrates with UDDI and automates querying and publication to the registry.

Running Secure Web Services

Once you’ve created your Web service using NetBeans and WASP, it needs to be deployed to a runtime container.

WASP Server for Java is a powerful runtime environment that is free for small-scale applications. WASP Server is platform independent, and can be integrated with almost any operating system, Web server, application server, database or development environment. It provides the industry’s best performance and scalability and addresses the greatest concern about Web services by providing a powerful security framework.

For the complete documentation and free product downloads, follow this link . You can also find whitepapers that explain Web services technologies, and demos that show Web services in action.

[Systinet Website ]