The NetBeans Monthly Newsletter - January 2003

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

nbusers

Fw: goldfish
41

pmd-netbeans 0.6 released
28

Doubt !
19

nbdev

Proposal: A rendering hints mini-API
27

nbui

NetBeans Look & Feel
20

Most Active Posters

Jesse Glick
84

Maxym Mykhalchuk
68

Gregor Kovaè
66

Jaroslav Tulach
65

Svata Dedic
61

Statistics : December

IDE downloads

Total: 618152; +26959

Platform downloads

Total: 25676; +2672

Subscribers

2271; +23

Messages Posted

1895

http://www.netbeans.org/newsletter/sprout/2003-01-07.html Issue 7, January/07 2003

Sprout, Issue 7 (December 2002)

Happy New Year and welcome to the seventh issue of Sprout, the NetBeans monthly news. You will find in this newsletter some of December's highlights.

Sprout in French? You bet, spread the word. Interested in providing Sprout in your local language? Shake the beanstalk and let's see what languages fall into place.

Searching for a new job or want to advertise for one? Find out how NetBeans can help.

Module Catalogue and Auto-Update (AU) changes have taken place, be sure you have the latest details.

Status of 3.4.1 Merak release. Read in brief below and follow the links to get the details you want.

Developers Spotlight - Who is on the OpenVMS Team and what are they working on? You too, will soon know.

PMD and the people behind the those three letters. A review and interview by Vincent Brabant that will climb inside their heads and provide insight into the PMD gossip.

Rob Demmer

Coming soon: NetBeans 3.4.1

NetBeans 3.4.1 code-name Merak is the first non-Sun driven release of NetBeans, and that's why it wouldn't be borne without the following people: click for credits

A total of 99 issues have been resolved in NetBeans 3.4.1. Some were smaller issues such as documentation while others solved larger nuances. View changes with descriptions.

Great job to everyone involved with the Merak effort and we look forward to the final release, approximately January 15, 2003. Stay tuned to www.netbeans.org for more information.

[complete information for 3.4.1 ]

Module Catalogue & AU Changes

New in December

- XPath Explorer-XML

- Jtagmanager-Web

- JellyTools-TestTools

- XTest-TestTools

- The jSyncManager Project-Wireless Access

Auto update Changes

Basically there are 3 changes implemented on the NetBeans 3.4 Update center:

1. Unstable and not working modules are removed

2. Standard NB 3.4 release modules are put on the UC for NB 3.4 - it means, people who are running NetBeans platform will be able to download the rest of release modules from the update center

3. Modules were grouped into following categories, to make the structure more meaningful:

- Platform

- Extended Platform

- IDE Platform

- IDE Version Control

- IDE Tools

- Java Language Support

- Java Debugger

- Java Tools

- C++ Language

- Web Technologies

- XML Support

- HTML Support

- Web Applications

- Enterprise Integration

- NetBeans Development

- Test Tools

[add my module ]

Help Wanted: New Year, New Opportunities

Companies are building on top of NetBeans and they seek consultants and developers knowledgeable in the NetBeans architecture. Be sure to subsubscribe by sending a blank email to [email protected] . , or advertise a position by sending an email with all relevant information to [email protected] .
To view existing advertisements please visit our job summary page .
Good luck and happy hunting.

[who is building on NetBeans ]

Developers Spotlight: OpenVMS Team

The NetBeans for OpenVMS team provides NetBeans to OpenVMS customers. They also develop OpenVMS-specific plug-ins for OpenVMS customers. To date they've written an EDT-keypad bindings plug-in, an OpenVMS C/C++ support plug-in, and a CMS profile for generic source code control. They are currently working on an OpenVMS FORTRAN plug-in, a 3GL debug support plug-in, and a remote OpenVMS development plug-in.

They are based in Nashua, New Hampshire, USA and India. Their warm weather hobbies include gardening, cycling, hiking, and golf. Their cold weather hobbies include woodworking, ice climbing, skiing, reading, home improvement, and of course, Java programming!

They've been working with NetBeans for 2 years and believe it is an incredibly well-run project. They really enjoy the open source community too.

Members - Meg Garrison, Wendy Blatt, David Penney, Isao Yanagimachi, Larry Ingram, Michael Ross, MR Renukaprasad

[NetBeans for OpenVMS ]

Press Center

How to setup a basic Struts project using NetBeans IDE

This simple How-To shows you one of many ways to setup a working project using the Struts framework. This is mainly geared toward struts users who are new to NetBeans, and don't want to spend a lot of time figuring out the differences between their old IDE (if any) and this one.

Jackpot Project Targets Tools

"We now have a platform that's open-source extensible, and we have an audience of well-informed and interesting developers who are used to looking at experimental modules for NetBeans." - Michael Van De Vanter

NetBeans: Working with XML, Part 1-3 (from: O'Reilly Book Excerpts: NetBeans: The Definitive Guide)

Learn how to work with XML within the NetBeans framework by installing XML support and working with XML editors.

Eclipse Could Face Sun's Java Through Oracle Prodding (requires free registration)

...Eclipse, though, is built on Java Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) while Sun, and a majority of Java vendors, use the rival Swing toolkit and Java foundation
classes for IDEs and tools...

[archived press articles and press releases ]

PMD: Project Mess Detector

This month we are featuring a very interesting tool, named PMD .

We interviewed one of the authors of the PMD project, Tom Copeland and also the author of the NetBeans module that interacts with PMD, Ole-Martin Mork.

PMD is a tool developed in Java that scans your java files and provides interesting remarks about your code. It can point out some potential problems such as:

- Unused local variables

- Empty catch blocks

- Unused parameters

- Empty 'if' statements

- Duplicate import statements (two times the same class, or import of a class belonging to an imported package)

- Unused private methods

- Classes which could be Singletons

- Short/long variable and method names

PMD can also provide tips like: avoid using implementation type, but use the interface instead or avoid to call the toString() method for a class of type String.

Thanks to the work of Ole-Martin, PMD can be directly used in NetBeans. What this means is that you can configure PMD via the NetBeans Options panel and that you can see the results of PMD by select menu item of the contextual menu of your source, and click on output-line to open the source and position the cursor to the good line. Very easy to use and to install.

In the future (maybe it will be ready for release 4.0 of NetBeans), thanks to Tor Norbye, the output of the NetBeans PMD's module will be managed by the NetBeans module tasklist. And in particular his suggestion panel. For more details look at the tasklist module .

Enjoy it.

[interview: Tom and Ole-Martin ]