The NetBeans Monthly Newsletter - October 2002

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

Check this out

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

NetBeans 3.4
available for download.

OnJava NB Article
NetBeans article from OnJava

Sun ONE Studio Portal
NetBeans related resources

Hot threads

nbdev

Bill Farrell/ATISMD/ALLTEL is out of the office.
92

Bad Boolean pattern through NetBeans
35

PERF: Full GC cycle kicks in when we don't want it
22

PERF: Top 10 list of UI responsiveness issues in NB
21

nbusers

4.0 goals - comments to Evan Adams
27

Most Active Posters

Bill.Farrell@alltelm
90

Jesse Glick
84

Maxym Mykhalchuk
68

Gregor Kovaè
66

Jaroslav Tulach
65

Statistics : October

IDE downloads

Total: 567413; +20202

Platform downloads

Total: 20442; +2229

Subscribers

2205; +75

Messages Posted

2211

Issue 5, October/31 2002

Sprout, Issue 5 (October 2002)

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

October has been a month of moving forward with various changes. We have added a notification system for our module catalogue, which will send an email at the end of any day in which an additional module was made available.

Find out how to participate in NetBeans Move the Needle program, helping yourself and NetBeans.

Report a Bug link has been added for your convenience to the top section of the header between join and search.

The News section now offers a tasty new look and you can also find Newsletter links, In the Press, and Upcoming Events from one central location.

There is also the beginning of a conversation about what possible changes can be made to further improve netbeans.org. Be sure to keep an eye on [email protected] for further information and debate.

NetBeans will be appearing at OOPSLA 2002 in Seattle, Washington on November 6-8. Be sure to catch a demo and support NetBeans if possible.

NetBeans: the Definitive Guide is available
This long awaited release is now on the shelves. You can expect this book published by O'Reilly & Associates to suit most of your NetBeans literary needs; after all it is the Definitive Guide.

Grab a cup of coffee, sit back, relax and become informed of the last months' happenings; if you want to contribute interesting content for future issues or have any comments or ideas on how to make Sprout better let us know .

Rob Demmer

NetBeans Board Elections - 3, 2, 1, Action!

On behalf of the NetBeans community I would like to wish congratulations to the new NetBeans Board. They are listed alphabetically by last name and are as follows:

Evan Adams
Evan Adams, 46, Sun employee for nearly 20 years. Worked
in tools my entire career -- compilers, debuggers,
source code control, team development and IDEs. Original
author of Dbxtool, one of the first GUI interfaces to a
debugger, circa 1986. Spent the last 3 years in Prague working with the NetBeans team; came to Prague as a result of Sun's acquisition of NetBeans and now returning back to California next week. In spring 2000 lead a team of Jesse Glick, Tim Boudreau and Jack Catchpoole that coordinated the process of opensourcing NetBeans, Sun's first sponsored open source project. Since then, amongst other things, has been working with Danese Cooper, Dick Gabriel and Ron Goldman to deal with the corporate issues regarding Sun's participation in netbeans.org.

Michael Wever
Michael Wever, 25 years old, born and breed Australian, but recently (3 weeks) immigrated to Norway. Bachelor in Computer Science and Physics, with thesis in Robotic software, Java3D, and reverse transformations. Worked with www.ECSI.com.au for 3 years developing solutions for the Coal and Metals Mining Industry primarily with Minex. Worked for the last 2 years designing and implementing architecture for Minex5, separating the existing product into a server application, and the client-gui on top of NetBeans. Experience also in C/C++ with OpenGL, and Fortran. When not cutting code I relish in rockclimbing and snowboarding.

William Will

William Will 43 years old, living with my domestic partner in San Francisco, California. My past lives were as an engineer, consultant and engineering manager. Xemus Software, the software engineering firm I helped found in San Francisco in 1997, is the main sponsor of Project XEMO, an open source project building music software with the NetBeans Platform. Having come from a primarily C/Lisp/Smalltalk background I have been working in Java since it hit the market in 1996. In a previous life I worked for Siemens/Nixdorf in Germany, which is where I received my high school and college education in Computer Science.

[More about: Governance ]

Move the Needle & NetBeans Visual Guidelines

Move the Needle :
How you can help NetBeans and help yourself!

You can help NetBeans be successful - which means more people will contribute more ideas, more modules, more bug reports and fixes...which means you get a better IDE and a better platform! NetBeans is an open source project - if you don't promote it, who will? And it's quick and easy to do.

You can move the needle. On the Move the Needle informational page are graphics you can use to link to NetBeans from your web site. But there's more - you can actually see what effect you're having. That's why we call this project Move the Needle. Just sign up by filling in the URLs that you will add links to, and your name (or a nickname if you want).

Each week, the results will be tallied up - we'll process the web logs for the entire site and list your name (or nickname) and how many times the referring page was yours, so you can see exactly how much effect you had! There will also be a tally of how many referring pages came from community sites, as a whole. Making this number bigger is what we call moving the needle.

Win a Prize and Win the Glory for the top traffic originating from your site/sites! More details to follow.

NetBeans Visual Identity guidelines

If you're building an application that is a distribution of NetBeans, you can help NetBeans itself evolve faster and better by making it visible that what you are distributing is built on NetBeans. For this reason, we ask you to include the Built on NetBeans graphic in your application's splash screen and web content. Also if you are building plug-ins for the NetBeans IDE or another app built on NetBeans, you can include these graphics, with links to the NetBeans web site.

And if you're just a fan of NetBeans, you can also help by linking to NetBeans from your site - see the Move the Needle page to find graphics and how you can measure the effect your links have.

People who use these graphics can get maximum impact by following the NetBeans Visual Identity guidelines described on this page.

Find out:
What is a visual identity?

Why use it?

How does it work?

and more.

[A few more ways to Contribute ]

NetBeans: The Definitive Guide, is now available!

By: Tim Boudreau, Jesse Glick, Simeon Greene, Vaughn Spurlin, Jack J. Woehr

In NetBeans: The Definitive Guide, you'll find out how to use this IDE to its fullest, making your Java programming more efficient and productive than ever before. You'll understand the basics of the IDE, and quickly be utilizing the various editor and explorer windows. You'll also master many of NetBeans advanced features, and be working with XML documents, CVS repositories, Javadoc trees, and web applications, all within the NetBeans framework. Whether you are an enterprise developer looking for an IDE that can handle your complex program tasks, an open source developer looking to integrate NetBeans into your own visual projects, or a manager trying to maximize your team's development potential, NetBeans: The Definitive Guide is the book for you.

To read more about NetBeans: The Definitive Guide please visit O'Reilly.com Online Catalogue , where you can also order the book.

Hot Demos on NetBeans: OOPSLA 2002

Who:
Sun Labs Projects "Jackpot " and "MVM" providing demonstrations on NetBeans software.

What:
Three demonstrations to be given at the 17th Annual ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications:

- Source Code Metrics which are fully integrated into NetBeans.

- An experimental code analysis and transformation tool.

- MVM will hold a demo on a NetBeans module for Mixed Languages.

When:

- Wednesday November 6th, 4:30-6:30

- Thursday November 7th, 9:30-12:00

- Friday November 8th, 9:30-12:30

Where:
Washington State Convention & Trade Center,
Seattle, Washington, USA. Booth 133

For further information concerning OOPSLA 2002 Seattle please visit the website at www.oopsla.acm.org .

[Related: Aspect-Oriented Programming with Sun ONE Studio ]

Module Catalogue Enhancements

The module catalogue is the garage to play with spare parts, try some new ones and to enhance what is already available in your NetBeans software. What has been done this month:

An alert notification system that can send to you an email any time a module is added to the catalogue.

You can now view the module catalogue by sorting through additions made in the last 7, 14 and 30 days. Just go to the Module Catalogue and then to go to New Modules .

Recent Additions & Their Categorical Listings:

- X-Fetch Wrapper ® - 30 Day Evaluation - XML

- MagicDraw UML Tool - Modeling Tools

- OpenVMS EDT Editor Keybindings - Tools

- OpenVMS Compiler Support - C, C++ and Fortran

- ObjectAssembler Enterprise, & Professional Editions - J2EE Tools

- UML Bridge - Modeling Tools

- ANT (1.5.1) - Tools

[Sign me up for Module Alert! ]

In the Press: A Look at NetBeans

JDJ Readers' Choice Awards:

The 2002 Java Developer's Journal Readers' Choice Awards have been a success again. The awards commonly known as the "Oscars of the Software Industry," have seen NetBeans enter the top three products in three different categories. There was a bit of confusion surrounding NetBeans, which was listed twice on some ballads under the names; NetBeans and Forte for Java/NetBeans. This led to some votes being mistakenly cast and distributed between the two names lowering the overall total for NetBeans. That said, congratulations on a job well done and let's strive to take the winning positions next year!

- Best Java IDE Environment - Readers' Choice Award

1st Runner-Up: NetBeans (NetBeans.org)

- Best J2EE IDE - Readers' Choice Award

1st Runner-Up: Forte for Java/NetBeans

- Best JS2E IDE - Readers' Choice Award

2nd Runner-Up: Forte for Java/NetBeans

TheOpenEnterprise: Open Source Tools: Inside NetBeans

TheOpenEnterprise recently interviewed Ian Formanek of NetBeans in a two day report that covered NetBeans and Eclipse. You will find both articles covered in their feature section of Week 3: Open Source Development Tools .

Have you seen NetBeans in the news or other interesting materials? Would you like to write for Sprout? Get involved here .

[Submit News ]

Cool Functionality: CORBA

Another cool feature in NetBeans 3.4 allows you to quickly and easily write your distributed applications
using the CORBA technology. The CORBA support module assists you through all the steps needed to create and run
your CORBA application.

While specifying the server interface(s) using IDL (Interface Definition Language), you can take advantage
of basic IDL templates and of a full featured IDL Editor with customizable syntax highlighting. Optionally,
the IDL specification of the server interface(s) can be obtained from the Interface Repository (the standard
CORBA service providing runtime information on interfaces of CORBA objects). To that purpose, the Interface
Repository Browser is available in the Runtime tab.

Having the IDL specification finished, you can invoke the CORBA Wizard from the Tools menu to help you
implement both the server and the client parts of your application. The CORBA Wizard compiles your IDL
file using a vendor-supplied IDL compiler to create the stubs and skeletons needed for remote client-server
communication, generates implementation skeletons (implementation classes with empty method bodies) for
all interfaces contained within the IDL file, and generates the client and server mainlines.

Since using the Naming Service is the most common way to establishing connections between clients and servers
in CORBA, the Naming Service Browser is ready in the Runtime tab to help you to find out running instances of
CORBA servers, and to generate respective binding and lookup codes. Among other features, a GUI-based
interactive POA Support and IOR analyzer should be mentioned.

Finally, a plug-able architecture allows the CORBA support module to cooperate with the majority of CORBA
implementations nowadays available at the market.