The NetBeans Day @ JAZOON

The real name for the event was NetBeans Day - Get to know the only Java IDE you need. I didn't expect it to be very interesting but at the end of the day I can say that there were a lot of good things to pick up from this tutorial. So what was it really about:

• NetBeans new and Cool by Romal Strobl. At the talk Roman showed what are the new things that were added to NetBeans 6.1 and some tricks and tips how to use the IDE. From my point of view, NetBeans is just copying the best features from IntelliJIDEA and eclipse. The IDE looks nice, the features are reasonable, but isn't it plagiarism in respect to the other IDE vendors?! FWIW, personally I do like NetBeans even more that eclipse.


• Isolating Performance Bottlenecks and Memory Leaks by Peter Gassmann. This was an in-depth review of NetBeans Profiler which is really easy to use, and specially with Java 6. I have to give it a try! :)


• SwingApplication Framework and Beans Binding by Roman Strobl. This was about JSR-295 (Beans Binding) and JSR-296 (Swing Application Framework). In fact both of this specs look promising in sense of desktop application development. There's a very good suport for that in NetBeans also, which is cool! But what disturbs me is that in the resource injection, which is claimed to be "automatic", you have to write some code (e.g. call a method setName(String) for a Swing component that needs some some configuration. In my opinion this is not really automatic way to do things and there should be more elegant solution. Writing your own Java code to make things work "automatically" - this is kind of a stupid thing.


• Incorporating Animation and Media using JavaFX by Rags Srinivas. I cannot tell why but I still being skeptic about JavaFX. It looks lika Sun is positioning JavaFX as a technology for cross-client UI development. That's OK. But as a language, JavaFX looks very odd. For small UIs it may be a nice tool, but I doubt that for the larger apps it will be very complicated to use and the code will be hard to follow. The technology is still in development and Sun promised to finalize it by the end of the year.


• NetBeans Mobility by Roman Strobl. This is the most interesting feature in NetBeans perhaps that I have seen this time. Constructing the application workflow visually using NetBeans is something I was really missing at the days when I did some J2ME development. Definitely, if I'd had to develop and application for mobile phone today, I'd used NetBeans just for this feature! A very nice feature of NetBeans Mobility Pack is that it provides some basic support for game development, and this is something that I was missing the most!

Roman Strobl was the guy who made the day. The presentations were very well prepared and we gotta thank Roman for that :). The only thing that I would suggest is to add more live coding to the presentations.
So to conclude, I'm quite satisfied with the sessions and I've picked up some useful stuff as well.