The NetBeans Monthly Newsletter - April 2003

http://www.netbeans.org/
http://www.netbeans.org/downloads/ide/index.html

Check this out

Module Catalogue

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

NetBeans 3.4.1
available for download.

OnJava NB Article

NetBeans article from OnJava

Sun ONE Studio Portal

NetBeans related resources

Hot threads

nbdev

Improve usability of AutoUpdate
21

StatusDisplayer
14

Starup class paths are removed from launchers ???
11

illusion of quick shutdown?
11

nbusers

Memory Leak?
14

Most Active Posters

Jesse Glick
134

Thomas Kellerer
41

CL Gilbert
31

Radim Kubacki
29

Jaroslav Tulach
27

Statistics : March

IDE downloads

Total: 721619; +34150

Platform downloads

Total: 34438; +3808

Subscribers

2385; +26

Messages Posted

1504

Issue 10

Sprout, Issue 10 (March 2003)

Welcome to the tenth issue of Sprout, the NetBeans monthly newsletter.

April is shaping up to be a swift-moving month of anticipated events. This is great news for all involved with NetBeans.

There will be a beta release of NetBeans 3.5 within the month of April and we have a sneak preview of a feature available in 3.5.

The website redesign has been completed. See the information box below to find out how you can help to ensure its' quality.

The Java Developer's Journal Readers' Choice Awards polling has started. Read below to find out which categories NetBeans has been nominated for and follow the link to cast your vote.

In the press we highlight six outside articles that are connected with NetBeans. Systinet announces WASP Developer 4.5 and OpenVMS announces Alpha version 3.4.1, see below for more news stories.

In the module catalogue there were two new additions, read all about those and give them a try.

In Community Corner we give you preliminary results of our community reading habits, pose another question to tickle your brain and take a guess who sent 2205 people to netbeans.org last month?

Which team could be in the spotlight with the motto, Quality is a Feature? We examine their activities and speak with two out of the twenty people involved in this tight-knit team.

NetBeans is involved in some more development action, take a look at who else is using NetBeans.

Last but not least Frank Cohen has been hosting a chat channel on freenode.net for NetBeans users. If you want to talk to others users drop by. Use an IRC client to access:

server: irc.freenode.net
/join #netbeans.

If you have compliments or complaints, suggestions or comments you can always give us a Shout at Sprout .

Robert Demmer

NetBeans Tegal Beta

We are pleased to announce in Sprout 10 that NetBeans is planning to release a Beta version of 3.5 within the coming days of April. If all goes accordingly you can test drive this high octane beta and provide feedback through NetBeans mailing list.

As you prepare for this, please remember feedback is welcomed when you begin the test drive. Try to be constructive, to the point and ask yourself some questions. On a scale of 1-5 how would your rate the improvements so far? Would you migrate to the new version? Your responses with comments like the above are valuable to judge the work leading up to this beta and thereafter.

Keep watch on netbeans.org and be one of the first to try the beta and discuss it with other community members. As the Tegal beta is made available write about in your blogs and encourage other members and colleagues to give it a try and don't forgot to inform other communities, portals and news sites when it becomes available.

New Website Launched

The new netbeans.org website was launched on Sunday, April 13th and we are ready for your help. The transfer of content has been completed and we are relying on NetBeans users to test the site and report any broken links, out-dated information or formatting problems. By doing this you will begin to understand the navigation and site structure, as well as viewing the new netbeans.org look and feel. Please take the time to provide us with yourfeedback and opinions on the new design and site structure.

Important URLs for Module website maintainers:

- How to configure your site navigation bar and icon

http://www.netbeans.org/community/guidelines/module-navigation.html

- How to add your docs to the Knowledge Base

http://www.netbeans.org/community/guidelines/kb-tagging.html

- Templates of new design styles

http://www.netbeans.org/community/guidelines/templates.html

Happy surfing and congratulations to all of the people involved in the redesign effort! Superb job.

Readers' Choice Awards 2003

On April 1, 2003 voting began for the Java Developer's Journal Readers' Choice Awards . NetBeans has been nominated for six awards, listed below.

- Best Java IDE - NetBeans IDE

- Best Team Development Tool - NetBeans IDE/Sun ONE Studio

- Most Innovative Java Product - NetBeans IDE/Sun ONE Studio

- Best Java Application - NetBeans IDE/Sun ONE Studio

- Best Java Debugging Tool - NetBeans IDE

- Best Book - NetBeans: The Definitive Guide

Click your mouse in the direction of the voting and let the world know who loves NetBeans. CLICK THE VOTE!

[JDJ Readers' Choice Awards 2003 ]

Community Corner

April's Question:

Rate the level of improvement in the performance of NetBeans 3.5 beta versus the previous release on a scale of 0-5. "0" means that you rate it as being the same, 5 being the highest degree of improvement. Submit your rating and comments here .

March's Answer:

Last month in Sprout 9 we asked our users to tell us where they are getting their development and technical news on the Internet. Top answers were:

- www.javalobby.org

- theserverside.com

- java.sun.com

- www.javaworld.com

- Various Blogs

Stay tuned to NetBeans news for the full announcement and results and thank you for your answers.

March's Move the Needle winner is:

- .::AleX::.
Hits: 2205
URL: http://www.reduc.cl/openblog.nsf

[current move the needle standings ]

Module Catalogue

Recent Additions & Categorical Listings:

- Trita, Java Tools - Trita source code beautifier that learns your style

- SQL Toolbox, Database - Set of tools for database administration, browsing and EJB code generation.

If you know of a module that we do not have listed and it works with NetBeans please inform us .

[module catalogue ]

In The Press

Where NetBeans has appeared this month.

Eclipse, NetBeans and JSR-198 by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols - In NetBeans, cross-platform interoperability is the name of the game. With Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) and Swing, an IDE not only produces code that works on multiple platforms, the IDE itself, right down to its windows, works and looks the same...

Building a sample Web App with STRUTS by Harshal Deo - We will create a very simple web application just to demonstrate screen flow and action handling using STRUTS. We will use NetBeans to create the JSP aNDjava files, use tools such as auto generation of getters and setters and finally use the IDE to compile and test the app. NetBeans comes with integrated TomCat.

Integrating Jtagmanager , by James Goodwill and Chand Johnston - While preparing for the design and build of Jtagmanager, Virtuas investigated many different platform options upon which to deploy, eventually choosing NetBeans technology due to its ease of extensibility and efficiency of its inner workings.

Systinet Announces WASP Developer 4.5 - Free development environment seamlessly extends popular Java IDEs for Web services creation, debugging and deployment, supports latest editions of NetBeans and Sun ONE Studio among others. Find the download on NetBeans.org module catalogue or on the home site of Systinet .

NetBeans for OpenVMS Alpha version 3.4.1 , OpenVMS Engineering is pleased to provide NetBeans Version 3.4.1 for OpenVMS Alpha. This is the latest release of NetBeans and is available on the OpenVMS platform for free download.

Sun Simplifies Java Tools by Martin LaMonica - By combining Sun's Java server software, including its portal and integration software, with its development tools, programmers will have an easier time writing Java applications.

[news ]

NetBeans in Action

3DGeo Development Inc.

INSP (Internet Seismic Processing System) provides the software infrastructure that enables geologists and geophysicists to have direct control of depth-imaging projects by accessing remote seismic processing centers. It is a Java based client-server application that allows the users to remotely create and submit for execution processing flows, and also to visualize and QC seismic data. The third-generation client is built on top of the NetBeans 3.4 Platform, as a NetBeans module.

Strategic Test Solutions (STS)

Based on NetBeans, STS has developed a versatile Constraint Automation Tool (CAT). Using ASN.1 type definitions as a starting point and the rich GUI components of NetBeans, the CAT helps writers of TTCN Test Suites become more productive by automating the construction of ASN.1 constraints so as to eliminate hard to find syntactical and semantic errors. The initial development approach focused on a pure Java core with NetBeans being used to provide the GUI elements. However, as the flexibility and extensibility of the NetBeans application framework became apparent, additional features gains were quickly realised in the CAT and this component oriented approach to STS tools is leading on to new NetBeans based products in the STS range.

[third party page ]

Team Spotlight: QA

The QA (Quality Assurance) team has twenty people standing guard ensuring the quality of NetBeans' releases and gathering a slue of tools to wage this battle. With their motto, "Quality is a feature" you can be sure that they mean business.

This team located in Prague, are responsible for the testing of NetBeans/Sun ONE Studio and projects. QA springs into action with a defined plan: reviewing the project specifications, monitoring projects as they begin, understanding the scope of the work taking place, development of QA plans, testing of the product through existing tools or creating their own (UI Test Library, XTest, JUnit ), execution of plan, bug tracking, following mailing list and trying to reproduce bugs to squash. Their hands are full.

With Tegal there were a large number of issues and testing the IDE is always a difficult task. They are working hard to get NetBeans 3.5 Beta ready for download and I am certain they will accomplish their goals. QA is also responsible for Q-Builds . They are the people behind this initiative testing, reporting, promoting and ensuring that any show-stoppers are fixed. QA is runs test daily on NT 4 to XP, Solaris 8,9 and Linux among other required testing. They've also put together and maintain the pages that show the project status in graphics and numbers .

We caught up with the Quality Assurance Managers to have a brief chat.

Martin Balin has been part of the team since April '99. Taking from development stage, it is QA's responsibility to provide a release version in the best possible form. He has found satisfaction in seeing a product mature from early development to a polished IDE we can afford to release. In his free time Martin enjoys biking, taking photos with his new digital camera and spending valuable time with his family.

Jan Chalupa has been working in QA since February 2000. He is responsible for the administration of Issuezilla among many other duties. He spoke about his anticipated career path.
"I was hired for QA and promised to become a NetBeans developer in a few months, if good enough. Apparently, wasn't good enough (grin) and thus was sentenced to stay in QA until today."

We are happy that he is holding down the fort in QA. Making NetBeans better and its' users happier is his top priority as well as taking care of his family. Jan is into playing the guitar in addition to listening to Bob Dylan.

After speaking with Jan and Martin I agree Quality is a Feature. To all of the QA team keep up the great work, we appreciate your efforts!

----------

*Please Note* In the last edition of Sprout(9) it stated that Tim Boudreau's previously worked supporting the marketing manager when it should have said he was the Marketing Manager.

[QA development pages ]

Feature Preview for NetBeans 3.5: "New" Menu Item

The NB 3.5 release focuses primarily on performance, but it also contains several nice small features.

One of them is a completely different behavior of the "New" menu item in the popup menu in Explorer, optimized for productivity of creating new documents.

The submenu under New now contains 3 parts:

- "All Templates..." giving you access to all the templates available in the IDE

- A list of the 5 most frequently used templates (Folder, Java package, Java Class with and without Main method and a JFrame form) is available right in the submenu

- A third part of the submenu is a list of the top 5 other most recently used templates - e.g. if you create a lot of XML files and JAR archives, you would get a very fast access to their creation once you created them for the first time

[3.5 planning pages ]
Ian Formanek