Shout or Leave? - Open-source community governance

I’ve often thought that open-source contributions are towards “social good”, but I also realize it is a fairly naïve way to look at the open-source world. I was listening to a friend’s frustration of getting people to work together. She is a social worker and now in a political party is trying to make people work together to do “social good”. Participating closely in 3 fairly large open-source communities and following a few others closely, she asked me how I saw it works in the world of open-source. That’s where I thought it might be good to post my thoughts.

Open-source in its literal definition is just putting your code out. Doesn’t mean anything more. Though we have associated a few implicit connotations with the concept. Particularly, that there is an open, bazaar-like mode of working, which can be thought of as similar to the concept of democracy. But as we can see from the political conditions in different parts of the world, democracy isn’t one single thing. It is indeed a group of people working together towards a common goal, ideally each person having an equal weight of vote. But as the world is not idealistic, the more pragmatic meritocracy is acceptable. The open-source world looks at meritocracy through a number of aspects like code contributions, advocacy, documentations etc. with the general focus being towards getting work done. Yet, most research and discussion around open-source misses out on the aspect of power, tradition and culture of the communities that political scientists and sociologists have talked about for a long time. Open-source communities like other human networks have a vision of meritocracy and sometimes evangelize this vision, but often find it hard to practice.

Some open-source communities do have a BDFL, while others generally play by the resources rule. Resources include money, people, ideas and the group that possess these are generally considered more powerful. Some companies because of their “cool” products automatically make “cool” suggestions to the community and their work is “cooler” than the average contributor’s work. Because a developer works for a “cool” company, does not necessarily mean that every developer from that company has better skills than your average contributor. Some open-source communities value context-of-use, while others value “de-contextualization”. Many researchers have highlighted that domain-specific open-source software communities are better suited by being contextual. While, this challenge of being contextual and translating the contextual knowledge to a de-contextual developer, is also well studied, it is really not well enacted in domain-specific open-source community governance. Governance relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance. It consists of either a separate process or part of decision-making or leadership processes. Thus, when the next time you read about OSS 2.0, realize that governance plays a vital role in the challenge of domain-specific open-source communities.

Open-source communities are typically expected to work around an open-source license, some code of conduct pages and roles of developers. These alone, as we see from functioning democracies is fairly inadequate – judiciary, legislature, and executive. Media is often considered the 4th pillar of democracy. A vehicle that allows voices to reflect on how the other 3-pillars are doing. Good governance often comes from the fact that reflective voices are heard, understood and acted upon.

Yet, power plays an important role in sustainability or growth of a community. As an independent contributor (just as a citizen in democracy), one can either look at the power play, raise voice so that others see it or get fed up and leave.

Try Netbeans 7.3 RC1

The Netbeans 7.3 RC1 is out for everyone to try. After a lot of hardwork from the Netbeans developers and testing and feedback from the NetCAT community, the latest release of Netbeans is out… for the larger community to accept.

Download from here: http://bits.netbeans.org/netbeans/7.3/rc1/

As has been the tradition, the community will decide if the release is good enough through the Community Acceptance Survey. You’ll need the netbeans.org account to complete the survey. But your feedback is invaluable.

NetCAT 7.2 goodies and 7.3 just got started

The Netbeans Community Acceptance Testing (NetCAT) for v7.2 concluded at the end of July 2012. It was a very productive testing process for the Netbeans community. Details about the NetCAT 7.2 are here. Beyond improving the quality of our favourite IDE, depending on how much you have contributed, Oracle also gives out goodies to the participants.

The goodies I received this time around includes a very large towel, a nice t-shirt, 2GB memory stick, notebook and pen, an acknowledgement letter detailing my contributions and points to the program and this new Oracle-branded mint!! Strong mint!! At least from the envelope, Sun is still alive… Hurray!!

If you’d like to get similar goodies or just improve the quality of Netbeans, participate in the NetCAT 7.3 which started 10 days back. Its not too late to participate. Signup to the mailing list and add yourself to this wiki page. You’ll get points for participating in discussions over email/forums, reporting bugs, participating in surveys and following a manual testing script by being part of Tribes that test specific functionality. So its not very hard… you just have to simply use the daily or beta builds and give feedback to the developers. Go for it!!

NetCAT goodies

Some people might have followed on the blog that I had been participating in the Netbeans Community Acceptance Test (NetCAT) program for the 7.1 release. The release in my opinion is one of the most stable versions of Netbeans ever. This should be attributed to the co-operative effort between the developers, quality managers, community of testers and Jiri Kovalsky, who manages the NetCAT program.

There are some points for bugs, fixes, RFE, feedback, surveys etc. during the alpha and beta phase of the development and the NetCAT final tally for 7.1 is here. The best part in my opinion during this NetCAT release compared to earlier years was the quick bug fixes delivered by the Netbeans Engineering Team.

I also got some goodies for participating in NetCAT.

A Review of NetBeans IDE 7 Cookbook

A few weeks (actually a month+) ago, I was sent a request to review the NetBeans IDE 7 Cookbook and blog about it. Incidentally, I was preaching/teaching Netbeans to a few students during the same time. So, although I thought it came at the right time, later I was travelling quite a bit and didn’t have much time to read through the book. Finally, in the last few days, I decided that I should read through the book and see what it is all about. 

The book is published by Packt Publishers and written by the Brazilian Rhawi Dantas. It is nicely arranged in terms of the chapters and the kind of details that it talks about. Starting from the basics of creating projects, importing projects, to designing GUIs, Web projects, Mobile development, Profiling and Testing… It covers most parts of the IDE pretty well.

What it lacks is the depth of coverage. Like Maven and some of the options like skipping tests is a very useful feature in Netbeans is missing from the book. Or the WSDL Editor. Or Navigation features like Go To Implementation is missing!!

In conclusion I’d say the book is interesting for beginners and slightly boring for experienced Netbeans users. If you are preparing for Netbeans Certification, then this is a book you should read, but otherwise I feel the web documentation of Netbeans is good enough to find your way through… I’d rate this book 2.5/5

NetCAT 7.1 Bug Counting

Since, I have signed to NetCAT 7.1 (Community Acceptance Program), I wanted a quick way to see the number of bugs that I have filed compared to the other top 20, I’ve written a small script to go through bugzilla. The one that is on the page seems a little complex to look at and has lots of numbers to look at.

I’ve done this instead:

Beyond the bugs, there is also the email count… We will get to that later!!

Netbeans Community Testing for 7.0 starts

Netbeans has just started its Community Acceptance Program (NetCAT 7.0) for Netbeans 7.0. Basically developers who are using Netbeans as their IDE need to download latest builds and report bugs. Good experience to get involved with testing and learn more about Netbeans. Also makes some friends with community and developers at Sun Microsystems.

Helps improve the IDE you use daily!!

Go HERE: http://wiki.netbeans.org/NetCAT

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:

The first axe on Sun after Oracle acquisition

Although the hardware business and the way of working at Sun Microsystems would continue as outlined in a detailed 5hr marathon by Oracle Boss Larry Ellison, we have the first victim of the merger... and its the not-so-successful "Kenai" project hosting services from Sun Microsystems. According to the announcement, "It's with a sad heart that we have to announce that the Kenai.com domain will be shutdown as part of the consolidation of project hosting sites now that Sun is a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle."

Kenai.com was never a good launch... Not a lot of marketing, nor a lot of support or projects jumped into their bandwagon. But it was kind of a nice set of features that Kenai.com was providing. It had source-code hosting with version control where you could choose between Subversion, Mercurial or Git. Issue tracking you could choose between JIRA and Bugzilla. It also provided you with mailing lists, wiki, forums, downloads, chat room etc. Basically covering most of the part of the web infrastructure that today open-source projects want. Nothing innovative or original, you get all of those at other places and probably somewhat better packaged, but Kenai definitely gave a lot of choices.

The announcement also mentions:
Project Kenai has always existed as two different things: Kenai the infrastructure, and Kenai the website (Kenai.com).  While it has come time to close the domain of Kenai.com, the infrastructure (which is already used under NetBeans.org) will live on to support other domains in the future.

So, you see the real added advantage for using Kenai was for developers and projects using Netbeans 6.8 because it was very nicely integrated. You could manage issues, code, forums etc from inside Netbeans. Nevertheless, its the death of one of the failed products of Sun Microsystems. This may just be the beginning where we see many axes chopping failed projects. Hopefully none of the huge, monolith trees get chopped, only because they aren't fetching money!

High-Res Dock Icons from Netbeans

I often use Netbeans and hence want that on my desktop. This time when I dragged to the desktop, it looked a bit out of touch... Edgy icon didn't look to good for  my favorite IDE. Luckily I knew Netbeans ships an icns file for the OSX.

The icns (Apple icon format) - as wiki states "supports icons of 16×16, 32×32, 48×48, 128×128, 256×256 and 512×512 pixels, with both 1- and 8-bit alpha channels and multiple image states (example: open and closed folders). The fixed-size icons can be scaled by the operating system and displayed at any intermediate size"

So, I go ahead and install "icnsutils" which gives me the nifty tool icns2png. Then I run the tool:
icns2png -x -s 128 -d 32 netbeans.icns
...and get a nice 128x128 32-bit png file. This I use as the icon for the launcher or use it at the dock.

Netbeans 6.7 RC2 Released & Your Feedback Required

The new and shiny Netbeans 6.7 RC2 was released today and if you haven’t tried it out yet, please go and download it. It has host of new features which you can read here. My favorite feature in Netbeans 6.7 has been the out-of-the-box Maven integration and the ability to create Hudson continuous integration servers.

But more importantly, after you have downloaded Netbeans 6.7 RC2 and played with it enough, please give feedback to the Netbeans developer team about the release. There is a survey called the Community Acceptance survey which is integral to guarantee that the release is acceptable to the community. Isn’t that what open-source software is all about – the community. Please fill in the survey and give your very important feedback.

Netbeans 6.5 Final Released

After some delay in the release due to quality issues, Netbeans 6.5 is out for download. It is indeed a feature-rich build and some great changes have been added for this new release. Along with the new features, I can vouch that Netbeans 6.5 is also a pretty stable release since I was part of NetCAT 6.5 (Netbeans Community Acceptance Program).

The list of new features can be found here… My favorite features are the improvements in Database Query, Python, HTTP Client Monitor, JavaScript Debugger and PHP. If you are a developer from the php world, I would really suggest that you take a closer look at Netbeans 6.5. I love the documentation and code hints that Netbeans will give you.

Netbeans also completed 10yrs a few weeks back and celebrate by downloading Netbeans 6.5 here.

A Look At Free/OpenSource Cross-Platform Installers

Software Distribution is an essential part of Software Development and can sometimes be the first impression that can make or break the user's opinion about a software. We, as software programmers forget the importance of easy distribution and easy installation of software that we develop. We do not understand the problems that a new computer user or a non-programmer may face. And I experienced this first hand about 2 weeks back, when a physician friend of mine heard that I was working on OpenMRS.

I was lucky enough to work on OpenMRS this summer and learnt a lot more about Medical Informatics during this period than I expected. Hearing this, my friend wanted to install OpenMRS at his clinic which already used Tally (hehe... isn't that innovative??) for storing patient records, observations and prescriptions. He practices at Kolkata, visits different hospitals and sometimes the patients he attended at a hospital come to his clinic. When I told him that OpenMRS was a webapp, he got all excited and I narrated him all the features that OpenMRS could provide and help him manage his patients better through the web, only if he could host OpenMRS from his clinic. I'll skip the other interesting parts and his extra-terrestrial expressions ;-), since we are actually talking about software distribution.

So then came the day when I was about to leave office and he was in his clinic trying to install OpenMRS. It was Independence Day and the clinic was closed but he was excited to experience the new-age medical informatics :-)) When I first got his call he had downloaded the Windows Installer. I was pretty sure it was for an older version and hence told him to instead download the OpenMRS Appliance, which is a VM Image that can be run from one of the virtual machine softwares. Yaw Anokwa made this wonderful Virtual Image with Ubuntu + All Necessary Stuff (tomcat, mysql, demo data) and OpenMRS running. You just have to have VirtualBox or VMPlayer or VmWare Workstation and load the VMimage and wait for Ubuntu to start. It is simple, fast and safe to play with... But for novice users, I just realized it wasn't easy enough. My friend installed VirtualBox and loaded the image. It booted fine, but the network wasn't working and OpenMRS webapp could not be reached from the Windows host. After being on call for close to an hour, we just couldn't make the networking work!! I advised him to install VMPlayer instead and run the image. This time everything ran fine, but some changes had to be made in the Norton 360 Firewall. He kept complaining that Windows XP was punishably slow and then I realized that his 512Mb wasn't enough to virtualize :-( ... So we were back to where it all started!! The Windows Installer that OpenMRS distributes is based on Bitrock. He first tried the OpenMRS 1.1 Installer, but it is an older version that hasn't been upgraded for a year or so... Everything installed fine and he was happy to use it, but it didn't have the features I talked about that were added in newer releases of OpenMRS. I walked him through the manual installation and finally we managed to get OpenMRS up-and-running at 2am in the morning and he having spent about 8hrs on it. Last week when I asked him, he still wasn't using OpenMRS for his clinic and hospital. May be the first experience made him bitter!!

With that episode in my mind, I pledged him that within the next month or so I'll give him and easy to install setup and he'll be happy using OpenMRS. And that's when began my chase to find an easy to use, cross-platform installer framework. OpenMRS has lots of implementations on different platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac) and hence I wanted the installer to be cross-platform. At my office, we generally use Windows Installer or NSIS for making installers. But those are only for Windows. These 2 frameworks are so simple and extensible to use that I was thinking if there was something similar and cross-platform, I could make an OpenMRS Installer in an hour. But sadly, that wasn't the case... I tried a variety of installer frameworks, but couldn't find any of them as simple as NSIS or Windows Installer (msi). The following are the installer frameworks I tried working on:

Installer Framework	Short Description	Problems
1.) Antigen	Antigen (Ant Installer Generator) is a tool to take an Ant build script, combine it with a GUI and wrap it up as an executable jar file. Its primary purpose is to create powerful graphical installers from Ant scripts.	Couldn't get it to execute ant-calls at lots of places. Didn't work in openSuSE 11.0 due to some incomplete ant configurations. Hasn't been updated in a long time
2.) IzPack	IzPack-generated installers require Java. They are simple, efficient and fast to use. Simple executable deployment is best done through IzPack.	Isn't very powerful. Good for simple image deployment, but isn't highly configurable and powerful.
3.) OpenInstaller	A newer cross-platform installer framework that is completely customizable and written in Java. Glassfish uses this installer framework.	Not much documentation. Complex to implement and doesn't look native on all platforms
4.) Netbeans Installer (nbi)	A completely customizable and powerful installer framework. Configuration Logic is written in Java and can be used to do anything and everything that Java programs can do.	Old documentation. Requires some effort to get up and running with all the scripts.

So finally, I decided to work on using the Netbeans Installer. Netbeans Installer already has components like Tomcat, MySQL, Glassfish, OpenESB and their deployment scripts. And I thought it will simplify my effort... Dmitry Lipin of Sun Microsystems, the lead developer of the NBI team has been of great help over the past weeks and has helped a lot in explaining about nbi... While I was building the installer, 2 other colleagues of mine got interested in OpenMRS and have helped build some parts and want to contribute to OpenMRS code in a larger way!!

I have successfully been able to build an Installer/Uninstaller that can deploy Tomcat/Glassfish, MySQL and the OpenMRS web application on Windows, Linux, OSX, Solaris. The demo data set, JRE/JDK and starting the respective servers are yet to be completed.

Update: The OpenMRS Windows Installer based on Bitrock has been upgraded to install the latest version of OpenMRS. Is it useful for the OpenMRS community to have a cross-platform installer?? Or do the Windows guys only need an Installer ??

Netbeans 6.5 Beta Released

Netbeans, “the only IDE that you need” is undergoing a major overhaul and the new version is called Netbeans 6.5. Today after weeks of development and testing, Netbeans passed a few test criteria and has been decided to be stable enough by the Netbeans team to be called a Beta. Now begins the real stabilizing process and ironing out the bugs that remain.

Since, I’ve been doing the Netbeans Community Acceptance Testing (NETCAT 6.5) Program, I’ve been closely watching how the entire development has gone through. New features were quickly implemented and each development team co-ordinated with all the quality managers and community to get the best features out in this version. Congratulations to the Netbeans development team on the release and I’m sure a lot of other developers are excited to use the new features.

The following are some noteworthy features, and the complete list can be found here:

1.) PHP – Php support has vastly improved and will ship out-of-the-box with Netbeans, unlike previously where a plugin from the plugin center had to be installed.

2.) Database Tools – The new database tools for designing queries, viewing connections, tables, views, procedures is great. It still a work in progress, but I must say its a pretty good job for a first-time release.

3.) Glassfish v3 has been integrated with Netbeans 6.5 and Glasshfish v3 is surely more sleeker, faster and modular than v2.

4.) There are host of other improvements like Groovy and Grails, SQL Editor Improvements (code completion, save/recall queries, and more), RESTful web services from database tables or from JPA entities, JavaScript debugging on Firefox 2 and IE.

You can download the beta from here and please report any errors that prop up in your work. Enjoy the build and happy coding!!

Netbeans 6.1 Vs Visual Studio 2008

Its been a while that Netbeans 6.1 has been released and I thought it would be a good time to update my previous comparison between Visual Studio 2008 and NetBeans 6.0. Netbeans 6.0 added major features and NetBeans 6.1 comparatively is a minor upgrade, but nonetheless added lots of new improvements. Visual Studio 2008 was also in beta at that time. In light of new improvements and changes, I thought it'd be good to have an updated comparison between the two IDEs.

We need to understand that each IDE has something better and makes the developer more productive. Also, please keep in mind that I'm not comparing .NET and Java here, but only 2 IDEs, so we discuss features that can be applied to both languages/platforms.

Feature	Netbeans 6.1	Visual Studio 2008	Comments
Supported Languages	C/C++, Java, Ruby, Php, Javascript, HTML/CSS, JSP, JavaFX, XSL, WSDL, UML, Groovy, Scala, Prolog, Tcl	C/C++, C#, VB.net, XAML, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, LINQ (Language INtegrated Query), ASP.net, XML/XSLT.	Both Visual Studio and Netbeans are extensible and can support new programming languages. VS2008 uses languages services through which VS supports languages like Ruby, Python and F#. These are not out-of-the-box though and are difficult to add to the IDE. You even have to pay some bucks to get those languages integrated with VS and different vendors sell configured IDEs for those languages. Netbeans on the other hand has an excellent plugin system and finding and installing new language support is simple and easy. The plugin manager shows available plugins that support the new languages and anyone can create/install these new plugins free of cost.
Supported OS/Platforms	Windows, Linux, Unix, Solaris (SPARC, x86/x64), Mac OSX (Intel, PowerPC)	Windows and different versions of Windows	Netbeans 6.1 can be installed and run on a host of different platforms. It's open-source and it's Java. So, it generally means it can run anywhere with the JRE installed. VS2008 on the other hand is only targeted towards the windows developer.
Code Completion	Excellent code completion for a host of different languages and understands lot more language docs.	Fast code completion, but less options at a time. Need to use arrow keys.	Visual Studio 2008 has a snappier code completion compared to Netbeans 6.1. Code completion and hints speed has improved in 6.1, over previous versions, but still slower than VS2008. VS2008 requires using the arrows to scroll through different parameters of methods while Netbeans shows all at one go. Thus, learning through Netbeans is better for newer programmers, who want to find the best method.
Source Code Editor	Editing code is simple and easy. Provides different events when you right-click on the component and code can be written for that specific event.	Editing is simple and easy. Switching between the designer and code screen is double-clicking the control	Source code editing is equally good in both. Netbeans 6.1 has a better feature where it can highlight a variable that used at different places. So you can easily identify the lines at which the variables are used when you are writing code. Refactoring code is slightly better in Netbeans and offers a lot more options compared to VS2008. Moving code is slightly better in Netbeans 6.1 than VS2008. Visual Studio's code editing is lot more integrated across different types of projects. Netbeans still seems to be separate IDE for Java EE and Java SE or Java ME development. Like #region works on all projects for code folding, but Netbeans doesn't have such a common code folding (i.e. <editor-fold> doesn't work in all projects).  Netbeans 6.1 has an excellent JavaScript Editor which is on par with VS2008's Intellisense JScript & AJAX Editor. The JavaScript docs integration in Netbeans 6.1 is better and code hints are better in Netbeans 6.1. Check this video to see the strength of the new JaavScript editor in Netbeans 6.1.
GUI and RAD Tools	Netbeans Matisse, JSF Components, Database Application, Beans Binding, Excellent UML design tools, Mobile Designer, BPEL designer are some RAD tools not found in VS2008. Java ME GUI development is excellent. Excellent device management in Netbeans 6.1. SVG support helps create great looking scalable mobile applications. Useful common components from Netbeans for MIDP.	WinForms, ASP Form designer are great. XAML visual designer, Database schema managers, VB-XML bindings, Vista UAC manager are some of the enhancements to the VS2008's RAD/GUI tools.	Both IDEs are probably the best GUI builders and RAD tools. VS2008 Team System Database Edition has excellent database-code integration tools. LINQ code generators are another excellent feature in VS, not found in Netbeans. Netbeans plans to add similar features in Netbeans 6.5 and it makes more sense to add these features, since MySQL is now part of Sun Microsystems. Visual Studio's VB designer was excellent and probably helped VB reach great popularity. Today Microsoft expects same with XAML designer which can import designs made in Microsoft Blend. Winforms and ASP forms are great as always, may be sometimes better than Netbeans. You can create the Ribbon UI of Office 2007 very easily using VS2008. Netbeans until version 4 not much of a RAD tool, but today is probably the best RAD Java IDE out-of-the-box. JSF web app designer is great, maybe not be better than ASP forms, but its not behind as more JSF components are added. Swing Application Framework and Database applications are awesome and you can build amazing dB driven apps in minutes. Check out the video and you'll realize how?? Netbeans 6.1 features an even better Mobile Application Designer for JavaME (J2ME), which can design screens and play with SVG menus. Haven't seen a simpler mobile app designer ever, with nice flow designer. RAD tools are something netBeans 6.1 scores higher than most other IDE
Compiler /Loader / Debugger	Newer Lexer makes faster runtime compilation, JavaScript debugger with Phobos support and jMaki. GWT is also supported.	Parallel compilation on multicore systems, Standard Template Library (STL) for C++ devs to use .net framework, Web Services hosting for WCF-based apps. Debugging AJAX scripts and AJAX components within ASP.net pages are excellent.	Multicore compilation in VS2008 does improve performance by a good 25-30% over previous versions on C# apps. I wonder how much of multi-processors or multicore, the java compiler uses. Really couldn't compare compiler benchmarks since they are different languages. Visual Studio 2008 brings integrates web services hosting, which earlier had to be done separately by the users. netBeans has tomcat 6 and glassfish v2 integrated, so VS2008 comes on par with netBeans 6.1. Netbeans 6.1 still takes about 30sec to start whereas VS2008 starts in 20sec. But for Netbeans it really depends on how many modules you've installed. I've seen Netbeans load within 20s with only the basic modules installed.
Profiling	NetBeans 6.1 has a profiler integrated and a really good one too.	VS2008 improves load testing capabilities by providing a multiple machine graph view that brings together the test results, performance, and health of all the machines under test.	A new area in VS2008 is the ability to drive system performance tuning and diagnostics through the VS test tools. This enables developers to run profiling during tests. Profiler is great addition to Netbeans. While coding you can experiment and choose the best algorithms/implementations by checking memory, processes through the profiler. A load analyzer like Mercury's LoadRunner is a highly specialized 3rd-party tool, but people who want simple stuff should really be happy with the Netbeans profiler.
Designing / UML	UML, BPEL, Flow Designers for Mobile apps and web apps.	Not much Designing tools, but Visual Studio 2008 Team System does have some improvements. Team System does have nice code tracking features.	Netbeans scores pretty high on this one. Although you can always use 3rd-party software, but its great to have it in the IDE itself. VS2008 is not much of a software designers tool, although the Visual Studio Team System is a great improvement. IBM's Rational is great, but then for the money-saver there's Netbeans UML tools. Code comparison and tracking isn't available in Netbeans. VS 2008's Code Metrics does an excellent job at analyzing code and reporting about code. Excellent stats can be found through Code Metrics
Testing/Maintenance & Collaboration	CVS, Subversion and Mercurial are integrated in Netbeans 6.1.	Unit Testing tools have slightly improved, Source Control System is added to Team System	Unit Testing is excellent in Netbeans compared to VS2008. Ant tools are useful, but VS2008 creates scripts in Team System that can do nearly similar things. CVS, Subversion and Mercurial make Collaboration Tools in Netbeans better than VS2008. Clearcase is also available as a plugin for Netbeans.
Installation Size & Price	Netbeans 6.1 has increased in size, but is very small compared to VS2008. Netbeans 6.1 available with different bundles. Netbeans can be downloaded free online or you can request a free DVD to be shipped.	Visual Studio installation size is huge and so is the size for the setup program. It is also costly. But developers can try Express Editions free of cost to get the basic IDE.	Not much here to say, but VS2008 has .Net Framework 3.5 integrated with it and is a requirement. Also SilverLight CLR is added. A lot of other required libraries for WPF and WCF, which makes it larger in size. After MySQL buy, we also have Netbeans 6.1 bundle available with MySQL. Netbeans 6.1 bundles are also available with JDK 6.
Misc Specialities	Visual Studio 2008 has a something called "Visual Studio 2008 Shell". Its just like the Netbeans RCP or Eclipse platform. It allows developers to create their own IDEs based on the platform and we know how successful eclipse has been to do that. Read here for the discussion Netbeans 6.1 also has Ruby on Rails Template for making quick blogs. Netbeans 6.1 has derby as an integrated database (since JDK 6 provides derby out-of-the-box). It means you can have databases embedded within your application and no requirement for an external database server like SQL Server or MySQL. Netbeans 6.1 is ideally suited for creating Web services. Axis2 is supported for Web Services in Netbeans 6.1. Netbeans also allows faster creation of apps that make use of web services. Developers can simply drag and drop operations under those services into a POJO, Servlet, JSP or RESTful web service and the IDE will generate all the plumbing code to access those services. VS 2008 does not include specific tools for editing WCF's XML configuration files. After Microsoft Blend import, web designs cannot be exported back to Blend.

The performance improvement in Netbeans 6.1 is a welcome change. Performance has improved as much as 40% in Netbeans 6.1 compared to Netbeans 6.0. Visual Studio on the other hand has slowed down over the years starting from VS.NET.

Both the IDEs still need to improve a lot more on RIA development with the focus slowly shifting towards a more desktop looking web. Expression Blend is moving pretty good for Microsoft and is an excellent tool for XAML/Silverlight designing. On the other hand, Netbeans isn't doing enough to support JavaFX Script yet. With all the talk about JavaFX at JavaOne 2008, we hope to see JavaFX come better in Netbeans 7!!

NetBeans Misses Bundled SVN

Subversion or SVN support was added in Netbeans 6.1. It is one of my favorite and most used feature from Netbeans. For those who don't know SVN or Subversion, its a tool for software collaboration where you can easily share and checkout code differences. It is like a new generation CVS (Concurrent Versions System) and is very popular among open-source projects.

The Subversion support in Netbeans 6.1 and 6.0 is through the Versioning menu, which in 6.1 lists CVS, Subversion and Mercurial as options. CVS is working out-of-the-box without any additional work. You can select pserver, ext, local, fork and all of the access methods just work. On the other hand, Subversion and Mercurial don't work out-of-the-box and require binaries for SVN, Mercurial to be installed and Netbeans has to be told about the path where these exist.

Now why would you have to install those things separately! I always thought Netbeans did excellent bundling of all the tools. There is GlassFish, JRuby, Nice Ruby Gems... and now we also have Netbeans + MySQL + GlassFish bundle. If it was not bundled, we atleast found the good things from the Netbeans Plugins Center. Hibernate, DTrace, jMaki and other awesome things could be easily added to Netbeans through the Plugins Center, then why not SVN?? SVN is free, open-source and community driven. So bundling shouldn't have been a problem. The Netbeans FAQ on the topic doesn't give much hints, but the Guided Tour seems to be a nice place to see the feature.  Even the error when SVN is not found is quite explanatory and gives good direction, but why isn't a bundle available??

netBeans 6.1 Final Released

The guys from netBeans have released the final version of netBeans 6.1 after ironing out a lot of bugs. Its an awesome release and the speed increase is pretty awesome. NetBeans 6.1 is not just about performance improvement but also has a few new features along the way.

Whats New In NetBeans 6.1

• JavaScript support.
• Spring Framework Support.
• New MySQL support in Database Explorer. This feature allows you to register a MySQL Server, view databases, view, create, and delete databases, easily create and open connections to these databases, and to launch the administration tool for MySQL. This also allows you to easily create NetBeans sample databases so that following tutorials, blogs, and so on is significantly easier.
• Support for Java Beans. You can now view Java Bean patterns in the Navigator and BeanInfo Editor.
• JSF CRUD Generator. With this feature, you can generate a JavaServer Faces CRUD application from JPA entity classes.
• Javadoc Code Completion. Editing of javadoc comments is more convenient with code completion.
• Shareability of projects. This new feature in Java SE, Java Web, and all Java EE project types allows you to create projects that share definitions of libraries. That in turn allows you to create self-contained projects or sets of projects that can easily be built from the command line, on continuous integration servers, and by users of other IDEs without problems.
• Existing infrastructure has been enhanced to support window transparency (on platforms that provide it).
• Javadoc and sources association. Now any JAR item on the project classpath can be associated with its Javadoc and sources too.
• Inspect Members and Hierarchy Windows. Inspect Members and Hierarchy actions now work when the caret in the Java Editor is on a Java class for which there is no source available.
• On Demand Binding Attribute for Visual Web JSF projects.
• Axis2 support for web services.
• SOAP UI integration for Web Service testing and monitoring.

The full list of features are here... Download it from here and have fun with the coding!!

NetBeans 6.5 will be the next version of netBeans and the developers want to improve the database connectivity in that version. And its not just for MySQL, but a lot of SQL improvements as well as drivers for not just JDBC. You can read all about it here.

NetBeans 6.1 RC1 Needs Your Feedback

If you have been among the people using netBeans 6.1, then its your time to give some feedback to the netBeans developer team. netBeans 6.1 has just finished on a release candidate and your comments can be invaluable to ironing out the final bugs that you may have faced.

If you haven't yet looked into netBeans 6.1, then probably this is your time to look at the really fast and cool new netBeans. netBeans 6.1 has improved a lot on the performance and startup of the IDE. Some other important updates include the fast javascript debugger, Spring 2.5 support, JSF CRUD Generator and a lot of other useful features.

You have to go here and fill the survey.

In netBeans news, there is also the upcoming NetBeans Day 2008 held alongside JavaOne. You can get into it FREE and does not require a JavaOne registration. From that room probably you can sneak your way into the JavaOne Conference free, but don't tell anyone I told you to do that :))