Netbeans UML Moves to Community

Today after the hand over conference call, we are proud to be the first set of community developers (The Since 2010 developers) of the Netbeans UML plugin. I’ve been a fan of the Netbeans UML plugin, as it was simple and helped produce neat looking UML diagrams, without a lot of fuss. When the Netbeans developers from Sun decided to abandon the UML plugin, I was pretty disappointed. Nevetheless, a few weeks earlier, some members of the Netbeans community were contacted to get involved in reviving the module and I was among the interested developers.

The primary goal of the community developers will be to create a stable release that can be put back on the Plugin Center. This means eliminating the P1 bugs and then P2 bugs which are listed on the dashboard against UML. I hope we can do this before the next release of Netbeans, which is Netbeans 6.10. There are about 3 P1 bugs and 19 P2 bugs today and I’m sure there are more coming on the way as we move to committing fixes and reaching code that works with Netbeans 6.9… It is indeed a milestone that UML has been handed over to the community. Next is the tough part of make it available to the users, so that they can then start filing more bugs and enhancement request and make our contributions more interesting. The developer wiki pages will be updated soon as we start committing code.

NetBeans IDE UML Features is listed under Netbeans 6.9 Features

I guess we aren’t yet here, but we wanna be there soon…

Netbeans 6.9.1 Released

Update1: Due to technical difficulties as mentioned here… The download links are not available

Update2: Its available for download again…

The latest bug fix release for Netbeans IDE was just released few minutes back. Netbeans 6.9.1 contains some critical bug fixes and includes some new updates to the JavaFX IDE. Hard to believe, but the resources into JavaFX continues…

NetBeans IDE 6.9.1 is a minor update to NetBeans IDE 6.9 and includes the following changes:

• Availability of the latest IDE bundled with JavaFX SDK 1.3.1
• Improvements to the JavaFX debugger
• Important usability issues fixed in the JavaFX Composer and Editor
• Critical bug fixes made to other modules since the 6.9 final release

The complete release notes can be found here… Netbeans 6.9.1 can be downloaded from here.

Slow JSP Editing in Netbeans 6.9

Haven’t blogged in a while, but today was reminded by a friend, that I need to write about this… We’ve been using Netbeans as our IDE for some years now.

I have been acknowledged as the most significant contributor in the Netbeans 6.9 NetFIX program, which is a where community members fix bugs in the Netbeans release… But this is something that I’ve completely missed. The JSP editor performance for free-form projects sucks real bad in the Netbeans 6.9 final release. The problem started somewhere in the beta1 release where the whole IDE hangs after any change in made through the JSP editor. This has been one of the showstopper bugs and yet it became part of the 6.9 release. The issue has been filed here.

Thankfully, the issue has been fixed and is part of the latest release of Netbeans and is a candidate for the Netbeans 6.9.1 which should be sometime during this month. In the meantime, if you have been affected by the slow performance, I suggest that you download the latest release from here. Also keep a watch of the final release of Netbeans 6.9.1 from the dashboard below:

Microsoft launches Visual Studio 2008, Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in Mumbai

Microsoft has been running a campaign called "Heroes happen here" as part of the launch of 3 major products from the 27th February all over the world. The launch of Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 is supposed to be the largest software product launch from Microsoft ever and covers  the most important tools which Microsoft sells to developers and businesses. The campaign reached Indian shores yesterday at Bangalore and today the launch party reached Mumbai. The Mumbai launch about which I had blogged earlier was held today at Regal Theatre from 10am.

Microsoft's odd selection of a movie theatre for the launch of its product was explained VJ Gaurav Kapoor, who played the host to today's Microsoft party. Microsoft explains that developers who use Microsoft products create technology that can help change lives and play heroes in today's world of technology. "Like film heroes, this party is to celebrate their success story and what better place than a movie theatre to showcase heroes", said Gaurav Kapoor.

Microsoft has also created a song for the event, which was quite peppy I may add and definitely better than the "Vista Wow Song"!! A group of young dancers came up to the stage and performed on the song...

S.Somasegar, Senior VP at Microsoft started the keynote and mentioned all the new things that Microsoft brings with these new products. He talked about the upcoming Dynamic IT (read here) and how these products launched today are going to help reach that goal. He also talked about Virtualization being one of the primary goals and future technology in the IT world. A small demo on virtualization was also shown. I would have loved to ask why Hyper-V is still in beta (won't be out-of-the-box feature) and why understanding that the market needed virtualization took so much time for Microsoft. Alas! they didn't have a Q&A session.

 

Then there was a presentation on new features of SQL Server 2008. With SQL Server 2008, Microsoft brings a lot features that it lacked in previous versions. New Large User DataTypes, Data/Time Datatype, Spatial Data are some new things for SQL Server 2008, but have existed in other database systems like Oracle for sometime now. SQL Server 2008 didn't seem to me as a revolutionary product compared to the competition, but adds much needed features to this product line. A few SQL Server 2008 benchmarks do tell us that performance has improved considerably. SQL Server 2008 is actually not going to be released now. Microsoft is still testing it and adding last few touches. It will RC sometime in Q2 '08 and will be released in Q3 '08

Visual Studio 2008 was the next product that Microsoft talked about. Microsoft has done some hard work with Visual Studio 2008 and from the audience reaction at the product demo and technical presentations, it seems they have a winner. A lot of new features from ASP.NET were shown and out-of-the-box AJAX controls were shown. Time was running out and everyone was waiting for lunch... but I added to everyone's pain by requesting Harish (the speaker) to demo how to create an app with Silverlight. He obliged by explaining to the audience about Silverlight and its CLR and demo'd a small button animation. The audience loved it and everyone clapped. Silverlight seems to be an interesting proposition and Expression Blend 2 is turning out to be a good product so early in the game. Flash tools still are better, but Silverlight v2.0 with C# is more powerful compared to ActionScript or Flex.

Windows Server 2008 was the last to be introduced. It has a host of new features and IIS 7.0 was the main part which Microsoft highlighted. A few other things like WMS, failsafe clustering, Sharepoint services were also mentioned. Large part of the demo featured on how easy it was to manage the different services and talked about the small "core" of services that were enabled by default. Improved Security was also discussed to some extent and Microsoft said it was one of the main priorities in Windows Server 2008.

After lunch Microsoft showed the movie, "Transformers" to the audience and everyone attending the event left smiling with some goodies in a bag. The goodie bag contained lots of PR material and partner information. A 90-day evaluation DVD for Visual Studio Team System 2008 and Windows Server 2008 RC were part of the goodies. Having already played with Windows Server 2008 during the beta testing, these weren't exactly goodies for me. But all in all the event was fun, but I didn't wait to watch the movie!!

NetBeans 6.0.1 Released

A bugfix update has been released for NetBeans known as the netBeans 6.0.1. It resolves a few bugs in the netBeans 6 final released about 3 months back.

The entire list of fixes can be found here. The latest of GlassFish v2 UR1 is also part of netBeans 6.0.1

You can download the latest release from here.

WYTIWYG - The Challenge of Custom Software

What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG or 'wizywig') is probably the best thing to happen to desktop publishing or web authoring. WYSIWYG enables you to view your output while you are making the stuff. A nice paradigm to put your creative ideas to paper. Thanks to the GUI Builder in RAD tools like Visual Basic or WinForms or netBeans Matisse, this WYSIWYG paradigm is brought to the developer as well. But these GUI Builders only cover the part where you are designing the GUI. What about the part where you are designing the business logic, the real things that get done in the background ?

I was recently working on a project that would enable a client to publish his magazines based on what data is stored in the database. It was kind of a report generation software, but with lots of automated formatting based on the database content. Like if the article was about a horse, it had to be taken from the database and formatted in a specific way whereas if it was about the jockey, then it would have a different formatting. The client had fully imagined how the magazine would look like and how the pages would be formatted. But we as developers had to meet the challenge of trying to sketch what the client was imagining. We were trying to give the client what he was thinking... We were supposed to say, "What You Think Is What You Get" (WYTIWYG) !!

I'm sure as creative minds we have always faced this challenge of taking someone's imagination and putting it to life. When it's your own imagination its easy to execute but when you have to understand and convey someone else's imagination it really gets complicated. And software development is all about meeting this challenge.

UML 2.0 has 13 diagrams and each of them are used to covey that imagination, but how many times have you come to new project and even after looking at all the diagrams, never figured out how to go about it from there?? And when you have a quick deadline to meet, it gets even tougher.

But during the above mentioned project, I realized that WYTIWYG is more about marketing than it is about true development. The reason I say this is because quite a lot of times, if you have good convincing skills you can change the way your client is thinking. This implies that you can always make someone else think what you want them to think. I guess some intellectual said, "You can take the horse to water, but you can't make it drink"... I would dare to disagree and say that if you have the skills you can make the horse drink as well...

May be some day we'll have AI so strong that the computer will be partially able to understand what we are thinking. May be after it's understood our thinking, it can create what we are thinking. But until that's done, improve your convincing skills... most probably, it'll be more useful that all your programming skills...

netBeans 6.0 Final Released

The much awaited and anticipated netBeans 6.0 has been released and can be downloaded from here. You may also want to look at the revamped website which seems to be having all the details about the changes, documentation and plugins updated to point to the release of the final netbeans 6.0 build.

If you have been following my coverage, about the different changes made through the different builds of netbeans 6.0, then you already know how much has improved and this final build is of excellent quality.

netBeans 6.0 is a huge released with an integration of host of products that have been brought together as part of the netBeans package. Below is the screenshot of the download page which has different builds for different needs.

Will test and write a few tutorials about the new tools in netBeans 6.0 later. So please check back and enjoy the tutorials!

Netbeans 6.0 - The IDE to own

I have just qualified to the NetBeans IDE 6.0 Community Acceptance Testing program (NetCAT) and before I begin giving some feedback, I thought... how about sharing some info about the NetBeans 6.0. What it is all about and how it has improved and how it can become the IDE for all programming languages.

Any programmer will tell you how much he/she loves the IDE. How much time of their lives they spend looking at the IDE screen? and how much the IDE is part of their creative exploration (programming)? These days with so many programming languages, a developer in my organization comes across a minimum 3 IDE or WYSIWYG Editors. We use Zend, netBeans, Visual Studio 6, VS2005, Dreamweaver, Eclipse, MS Expression Web, Anjuta, KDevelop ... and even after that I'm sure I missed something that we use. You see what I mean when I say there are zillions of IDEs.

Since, I have been programming a lot in Java, netBeans has been with me since version 4 and I always thought it had promise. Initially though eclipse was better! But I believe netBeans 5.5 was awesome and 6.0 is gonna beat a lot of other IDEs out there. Im currently doing a short preview of netBeans 6.0 Vs Visual Studio 2008 (my next post), both IDEs from different worlds, but then they still are IDEs right!! I know its apples vs oranges, but then netBeans 6.0 is not just a Java IDE, its got a lot more to it... Its a platform as well but I'm looking at it as an IDE for many languages. The templates to build Ruby on Rails blogs is just an example how much netBeans 6.0 team is trying to make it an all-language IDE.

The following are some of the new features to netBeans 6.0:

1.) Improvements to the Code Editor:
a.) Smarter & Quicker Code Completion - Faster and better options & methods shown.
b.) Highlighting - common variables are highlighted

2.) Language Support:
a.) JRuby/Ruby/Ruby on Rails Support - Excellent template, auto-structuring of folders. Great Ruby Debugger. Nice RHTML file editing and highlighting. Example Video
b.) Improved Javascript and CSS Editing - Although dreamweaver is better, its gotten better than the previous versions.
c.) Schielmann language support - Its a technology that allows anyone to add support to new languages. Php and Jython plugins are available.
d.) C/C++ Support: Greatly Improved support for programming in C/C++. Libraries are easily accessed and also has pretty good code editing.

3.) Swing GUI:
a.) Swing database applications - Probably the single-most awesome feature from netBeans 6.0. Great for making RAD for people who want to make fast database application.
b.) Beans binding: You can now bind beans and control their behavior from the GUI. You don't need the BDK (Beans Developement Kit) as a GUI for looking at beans behavior and property editing.
c.) Swing Application Framework (JSR 296): Awesome support of application state saving. The state of the application is saved as default. You don't have to worry about the size of the window of your application. It'll come up at the same size that you closed last time, and for all this you dont have to write a single line of code. netBeans does it for you.

4.) Profiling:
a.) Integrated Profiler - The profiling tool within netBeans is elegant and perfect. May be you can compare it to LaodRunner yet, but then it does most things perfectly.

5.) Web & Java EE:
a.) Improved Visual Web (JSF): After Sun decided that Studio Creator will be netBeans, you find that there's no better tool for making JSF web applications that netBeans 6.0. Just drag-drop the components, write some business logic as EJBs and you have a well made web app.
b.) Support for AJAX-enabled JSF components
c.) Great Javascript editing, with error and debugging, not found in other WYSISWYG editors. CSS support is improved.
d.) Brilliant flow management for Web application. You can now make nice design for page flows in netBeans 6.0

6.) Java Mobility Support:
a.) No other J2ME/Java ME IDE has the ease of use and quick drag-drop MIDlet developement like netBeans. Fast and feature rich. You can make flow diagrams with it. Designing mobile apps were never easier.
b.) Support for APIs: JSR-172 stub compiler, JSR-226 SVG support is worth a wow!!
c.) Game Builder: Easy tiling allows nice design of game screens and sprites

7.) SOA:
a.) Graphical WSDL editor: Don't we all love interoperable WSDL documents?? But hate the binding. netBeans has great visual tool to do all the binding work for you.
b.) Easily edit the transformation on XSLT editor
c.) Improved interoperability with .Net through WSIT

8.) UML:
a.) Enhanced code generation: Lesser difference in your designs and code. I love it!!
b.) Don't we architects love design diagrams. Making them from the IDE, is just a boon. Brilliant UML editing improvements, although some standalone tools do a better job, its still a great thing to have in your editor

9.) Misc:
a.) Improved graphing in the platform API
b.) A new lexer in the netBeans seems to make it faster for code editing

There's a lot more to netBeans 6.0... You can read about all the improvements here

See you on my next post, when I compare the upcoming IDEs Visual Studio 2008 and netBeans 6.0, with references to few other IDEs