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 JavaOne 2005 – Day 0
This year’s JavaOne got off to
a bang with the 2nd annual NetBeans Day at the Argent Hotel in San Francisco.
After arriving bright and early at 9am and quickly getting our bearings, we were
amazed to soon after see people lining up at the stairs to get in (the first 350
people got a shirt and a book). Attendance appeared to be shaping up nicely for
the event, with around 850 people, and more still showing up today to register
at the door. There was a lot of excitement in the air and it was great to see
all the guys from Prague eagerly waiting to show off the tools they have been
working so hard on for the past several months. NetBeans Day was a great success
and the team that put it together should be proud. I was amazed at how many
people drove into San Francisco just for the event and looks like everyone had a
great time!
Incredible Growth in the Last Six
Months
After the opening keynotes, I had a chance to catch up with
NetBeans director, Tim Cramer. Tim and I had a great discussion about the
competition that NetBeans has with Eclipse and about the work that NetBeans has
ahead of it. According to Tim, their task is split into two parts: build a core
that is strong and bring developers back to it, then get the community involved
with extending the core. The first piece of their task is just about done now,
with developers starting to return to NetBeans at a blistering rate. According
to the NetBeans.org statistics, there were over 135,000 active users in May
(people who actually use NetBeans and connect to the auto-update site), three
times the number of users of just eight months ago. In addition, 25% of all
downloads since NetBeans was open sourced have happened in the last 7 months. No
matter what way you slice it, NetBeans is back and people are definitely trying
it out.
Bright Future for NetBeans
The theme of the
day was what NetBeans Next was going to look like. The presentations that were
bookended by the keynotes were designed around showing you the latest and
greatest features of NetBeans 4.1 and beyond and the tools that build on what
NetBeans has to offer (such as Creator). One great example of NetBeans really
pushing the envelope was the Mobility Pack (available for download now!) During
the session talking about the new features in the 4.1 Mobility Pack, the
NetBeans team demonstrated how to build a MIDP application using the new flow
builder and form builder and the wireless connection wizard (bind your web
services to form components). I was very impressed with the whole process and it
seemed to bring J2ME development down to a level where even the casual developer
can finally try it out. I’m looking forward to digging around for a Treo
emulator and building my first J2ME application.
Next generation layout builder blows the crowd
away
The long day ended with a keynote by the “father of Java”,
James Gosling. Gosling started by discussing the great strides the community was
making on helping to improve both Java and NetBeans. He quickly led into a demo
by Romain Guy (who has some excellent demos at JRoller) showing the new Matisse
GUI builder. On stage, Romain was able to build a complete MP3 player feeding
off an iTunes XML file and using some of the new components from the community
such as JDNC and SwingX. I have to say that the demo was very, very impressive
and the GUI builder made quick work of the normally difficult alignment. If you
ever felt that Java wasn’t up to snuff for cool UIs, then you’ve never seen the
new stuff being released from the community. The software that was built during
the demo will even be released at Java.net in the coming days.
Finally, Gosling gave out a few awards to people who had been
active in the NetBeans community recently. Each winner received a framed
certificate, a framed poster, and a new AMD powered workstation. Certainly a
nice set of gifts for helping out with the community. I wish I had one of those
sweet looking machines!
Catch you at JavaOne,
Matthew Schmidt
matt@javalobby.org
Yahoo IM:
mattschmidtjl
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