Latiz by Latiz Technologies is a systems modeling event driven simulation environment built on the NetBeans Platform. System block models are constructed in Latiz using GUI components to add existing model components to a palette, connect those components through their predefined inputs and outputs, and to set the model parameters for each of the model components.

We've created a screencast that demonstrates the built-in support for the Symfony framework in NetBeans IDE for PHP 6.8. It shows how to set up the IDE to use Symfony, how to create a PHP project that uses the Symfony framework, and a number of tips, such as handy keymapping to set up in NetBeans IDE.

"OfficeLAF project aims to create a high-fidelity implementation of Office 2007 UI and its Black skin as a NetBeans module," I read today on http://www.pushing-pixels.org/?p=549, from some time ago.

It seems like the huge, data driven, projects are either somehow completed, or were replaced by standard solutions. Especially in tougher times, even big enterprises are interesting in saving money and build software in more pragmatic ways.

These are actually good news. Often (almost always) you can implement the same functionality with only a fraction of the originally planned resources, patterns, architecture, with a few passionated developers.

In the same time Java EE became leaner and leaner, so that it is particularly interesting for smallest projects. In the Java EE 6 release it is hard to find a superfluous artifact. Although projects became leaner, there is still need for transactions, persistency, remoting (e.g. over REST), and concurrency. Exactly that is already addressed by EJB 3.1 + JAX-RS + JPA 2.0.

The small / smallest projects in particular, are built with plain web container - with a considerable overhead. You have to install, sometimes implement, everything by yourself, without any benefit. You could argue that the result is leaner, but you should measure the results and compare it to a full "Java EE 5/6" stack.

I was asked in the recent few months, whether it is possible to install an EJB 3.1 container inside tomcat, just for out-of-the-box management of transactions / concurrency. You will find the answer here. On the other hand developers (I also) were surprised by e.g. Glassfish v3 incremental deployment capabilities - even method signature changes were recognized correctly. I'm already curious about JBoss 5.2.0 Java EE 6 capabilities...

I wanted to review some issues at netbeans.org web site. But I recieved following message :

Nothing unexpected obviously, the netbeans.org is being migrated. The migration started on Monday, November 2, at 5:00 PM CET/8:00 AM PST. Everything will be back on November 9.

What is going to happen during and after the migration?

• All services (except hg.netbeans.org) will switch to read-only mode or become completely unavailable till 11/9
• Bug tracking system, Mailing lists server, and the Wiki won't be available (or only in RO mode) during the migration
• Accounts
  • You'll receive new password for the account in new infrastructure by email
  • If you used more accounts with the same email address then only the latest used account will be migrated (more details)
  • We will use same password for all services in netbeans.org after migration. It means, you will have just one password for web, mercurial and wiki
• Mailing list changes
  • subscriptions will be migrated
  • mapping of old to new mailing lists
  • mailing list archives will be migrated too
• Bug tracking system
  • will be changed to bugzilla
  • there will be lot of changes in the RESOLUTIONS, STATUSES, KEYWORDS - see complete list
  • filling new bug will be easier because the list of projects will be shorter
  • table of all new components/subcomponents
  • all issues in RESOLVED/LATER were closed as WONTFIX in last days. If you don't agree reopen them after the migration. However most of these issues are low priority bugs that were out of the radar of the development anyway. Test in latest NB6.8 Beta if they are still valid, please.
• More details in the FAQs mentioned in the previous post

What to do after migration

• Login to https://www.netbeans.org/people/login with the password mentioned in the e-mail; then create your new password.
• If you use Mercurial to check out the NetBeans sources, you must also change the password in your local hg netbeans repositories
• Update your email client's filters for mailing lists because some mailing lists will have new names

Yet another NetBeans Platform application is a commercial application offered by Exie, in Norway. "Exie provides People-Driven Performance Management solutions architected for widespread adoption by companies serving dynamic markets. Exie drives financial outcomes and accountability across the company and thus effectively involve the entire organisation in the overall strategy. By making performance management available to everyone across the organisation, you create an organisational culture continuously striving to improve performance."

Here's a screenshot:

Reading the documents on the Exie site, it seems to me that Exie 2.0 is a pretty serious application, used amongst others by Norway's largest newspaper, VG: "With Exie we are able to change things quickly, and we could not have a rigid system. The service level Exie has shown is great."

However, on the face of it looking at the screenshot above, that doesn't really look like a NetBeans Platform application. However, firstly, it's architecture is clearly based on the NetBeans Platform:

A second reason why the NetBeans Platform is clearly being used at Exie is that two recent presentations at Jazoon were about some pretty advanced NetBeans Platform topics, both delivered by Exie employees:

• Eclipse Modeling Framework and Netbeans Client - a forced marriage? (PPT), by Pål Stenslet and Gunnar Reinseth, Lead Architect and Technical Lead (GUI), Exie AS.

• Creating attractive clients with NetBeans Rich Client Platform (PPT), by Mikael Tollefsen, Architect, Exie AS.

Here's the intriguing abstract for the latter presentation:

Engineer tools like the familiar IDEs (Eclipse/IDEA/NetBeans etc.) have user interfaces increasingly different from office tools like Microsoft Office. When creating applications for end users it is important to aim for the look and feel this group is comfortable with rather than what would be intuitive for the engineer. At Exie AS we have developed an open source Swing look and feel component that dramatically simplifies this task.

Just as it is important to utilize frameworks to improve productivity when developing web-based solution, so is the case with rich clients/desktop applications. A significant part of a desktop application consists of UI and IO plumbing. When should various menus, buttons and tool bars be enabled? Flexible docking frameworks, user preferences etc. There are various RCP frameworks available, however for a Swing based client the NetBeans RCP is perhaps the most complete.

How to create an NetBeans RCP client and make it look like a member of the Microsoft Office package? It is quite easy, and I am going to show you how.

And it would be great to get more screenshots, also one for the NetBeans Platform Showcase of this clearly very interesting application!

Do you know what was the first OOP language? I thought I knew - till yesterday when I read great essay about OOP. Enlighten yourself, read it too and learn name of the grandfather of all OOP languages!

--JaroslavTulach 08:20, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

An open source version of the Linux Skype client has been confirmed and is currently under development.  A Skype blog says that the open sourcing of the UI will speed up development and allow the use of any GUI toolkit.  Skype says this initial open source offering is part of a "larger offering," but they haven't said what this larger of

A POJO:

public class CustomResource{

    public final static String JNDI_NAME = "theName";

    public void doSomething(){

        System.out.println("#Done !");

    }

}

can be easily exposed (=bound to JNDI) with a singleton bean:

@Startup

@Singleton

public class ResourceBinder {

    @PostConstruct

    public void bindResources(){

        try {

            Context context = new InitialContext();

            context.rebind(CustomResource.JNDI_NAME, new CustomResource());

            System.out.println("Resource bound...");

            System.out.println(" " + context.lookup(CustomResource.JNDI_NAME));

        } catch (NamingException ex) {

            throw new IllegalStateException("Cannot bind resource " +ex,ex);

        }

    }

} 

 

...and injected into a Stateless, Stateful, Singleton Bean or other resources like e.g. Servlets, Backing Beans etc:

@Singleton

@Startup

@DependsOn("ResourceBinder")

public class CustomResourceClient {

    @Resource(mappedName=CustomResource.JNDI_NAME)

    private CustomResource resource;

    @PostConstruct

    public void invokeResource(){

        this.resource.doSomething();

        System.out.println("----Resource invoked");

    }

}

 You should see the following output in the log files (tested with Glassfish v3b70):

INFO: Portable JNDI names for EJB CustomResourceClient : [java:global/ResourceBinder/CustomResourceClient!com.abien.patterns.kitchensink.resourcebinder.CustomResourceClient, java:global/ResourceBinder/CustomResourceClient]

INFO: Portable JNDI names for EJB ResourceBinder : [java:global/ResourceBinder/ResourceBinder, java:global/ResourceBinder/ResourceBinder!com.abien.patterns.kitchensink.resourcebinder.ResourceBinder]

INFO: Resource bound...

INFO:  com.abien.patterns.kitchensink.resourcebinder.CustomResource@50058560

INFO: #Done !

INFO: ----Resource invoked 

The ResourceBinder project was tested with NetBeans 6.8beta and Glassfish v3b70. It was pushed into: http://kenai.com/projects/javaee-patterns/.  Closing remarks:

1. It is easier and better to declare a POJO as a Session Bean. You gain a lot with almost no trade-offs.
2. You should be careful with the concurrency. Such an exposed POJO will be accessed by several threads / transactions concurrently.
3. You easily inject POJOs with interceptors as well.
4. You should never use System.out.println on the server in production, because of:
    public void println(String x) {
   synchronized (this) {
      print(x);
      newLine();
   }
       }

 [See "Resource Binder" pattern, page 243,  in "Real World Java EE Patterns Rethinking Best Practices" book for more in-depth discussion] 

I don't know what "Fenix" is or what a "Fenix Client" should do, but here's clearly a NetBeans Platform application that is a "Fenix client".

Click to enlarge the (very cool!) pics:

I found the pics above in Rich Unger's blog, although he doesn't know anything about it either:

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/richunger/archive/guada1.png/guada1.png

Can anyone let me know what this apparently very cool application is for, what it does, and who is behind it?

Sun's stock price has fallen to 16% less than Oracle's offer price for the company.  It appears that more investors are concerned that the Sun acquisition could be blocked by the European Commission.  Oracle recently withdrew notification of the acquisition from Russia's antitrust authority to wait for the EU ruling.  Now that Oracle has drawn a line in the sand, saying it will keep My

If you're using Wicket, you're using its forms, text fields, labels, and so on. So, you call up code completion and you see "java.awt" and "java.text" being offered first, meaning you need to scroll down in each drop-down for the applicable Wicket class:

You can save yourself that trouble, by excluding the "java.awt" and "java.text" packages (which you're not using with Wicket anyway) in the "Editor" section of the Options window (under the Tools menu):

With those packages excluded, the first class that appears in code completion is the one you want for your Wicket applications:

Then just press OK and you have all the imports from Wicket and you're ready to continue coding right away.

I’m moving. Initially I was sorry, because I liked my old office a lot, but since the new one is a lot bigger and in the same street, I’m quite happy now. There’s only one very annoying thing about moving and that’s my DSL provider. I’m with m-net because they have a very fine grained collection of optional features (like fixed IP address). So yesterday I called them to talk about moving my phone and DSL connection to the new location, because even though I’m moving I’m not allowed to cancel my contract. That’s already a little bit annoying, because if e.g. a couple decides to move in together, they’ll end up with two phone lines + internet connection, but OK. The really annoying thing is, that when reading the form for moving I found that the contract starts again, so in my case I’ll again be bound 24 months to this provider.

I called them again to find out if I misinterpreted the form, and the (very nice) person on the customer service told me that I was right. So I’m not allowed to cancel my contract, and I’m not allowed to keep it, I must make a new contract over the full period again. Obiously I started arguing and asked for the rationale behind that, and the guy told me that even though I was actually paying an additional fee for moving my phone number and IP address to the new location they’ve got enormous costs of hundreds of Euros for setting things up. After a while the guy on the line said “that’s the official version I have to tell customers, my personal opinion is different”. So while being sure that this is only crap, I’ll have to bite the bullet.

Update: it seems, that what they (and other providers) are doing is against German law ( Paragraf 313 BGB ):

http://www.geldundverbraucher.de/index.php?node=1593

O³MiSCID GUI is an extensible graphical user interface for visualizing, controling, and interacting with O³MiSCID services. Existing extensions range from generic service manipulators to dedicated service viewers and controllers.

Here's a screenshot:

O³MiSCID can be really helpful in the following areas:

• you are looking for an easy way to design an application with a Service Oriented Architecture
• you want to design peer to peer or client/server distributed applications
• you need a cross-platform cross-language (Java, C++, Python, Matlab) library for network communications and service advertisement and discovery
• you want a cross-platform C++ library for system abstraction (threads, Mutex, ...), containers (lists, ...) and network Sockets (UDP and TCP)

O³MiSCID is born in the PRIMA project from INRIA Rhône-Alpes.

For further information, go here.

ICANN, the nonprofit responsible for worldwide domain names and IP addresses, has decided to allow the introduction of non-Latin characters into domain names.  ICANN chairman, Peter Dengate Thrush, says its the biggest technical change to the Internet in four decades.  The change will be especially welcome in Asia, where over 42 percent of world Internet users are located.  Though some think...

I have to defend myself. I have received a lot of comments in response to my recent essay about use of AWT Dispatch Thread. Especially this one: Why was the event display thread used for non-painting computation in the first place? It's Swing 101 to not have long delays on the EDT...it's covered in any book on Swing as well. made me feel retarded for a while. But I am not bad (Swing) programmer. Thus I started to seek deeply in my soul and I have an explanation why some think we are doing things in wrong way, while we don't: It is because of DCI's specifics!

--JaroslavTulach 20:42, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

I have to defend myself. I have received a lot of comments in response to my recent essay about use of AWT Dispatch Thread. Especially this one: Why was the event display thread used for non-painting computation in the first place? It's Swing 101 to not have long delays on the EDT...it's covered in any book on Swing as well. made me feel retarded for a while. But I am not bad (Swing) programmer. Thus I started to seek deeply in my soul and I have an explanation why some think we are doing things in wrong way, while we don't: It is because of DCI's specifics!

--JaroslavTulach 20:42, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

URSUS is a NetBeans Platform application for bioclimatic design and energy consumption optimization in town planning. URSUS lets the designer create a residential area composed of a perimeter, plots, streets, and buildings. The streets divide the perimeter surface into different plots where the user can drag and drop buildings.

The program calculates heating and refrigeration demands in different ways, while taking account of factors such as shade, enclosure characteristics, and solar gains. The designer estimates how to distribute the different elements in the best way in order to reduce energy consumption.

The application is being developed by GEE (Grupo de energía y edificiación) at the Universidad de Zaragoza in Spain.

Some intentions are documented here.

The netbeans.org site is going to be migrated into kenai.com infrastructure during next week

• NetBeans.org 2009 Site Migration FAQs

The final version of Ubuntu 9.10 is here at last.  The new system has improved graphics drivers along with DeviceKit and udev for the hardware interface instead of HAL.  For a full walkthrough of the features, check out this guided tour of Ubutnu 9.10 "Karmic Koala."  Who knew Koalas believed in Karma?

In today's software markets, open source technologies are giving commercial products some stiff competition.  Enterprise Service Busses are no exception.  Don Rippert, the chief technology officer at Accenture says, "ESBs are software products that allow you to create a business process with web services running on different platforms."  Rippert believes an ESB is essential for...

In the beginning of your work on the NetBeans Platform, you'll have one module in your application. That's not a modular application! In the screencast, you learn how & why you can modulerize a single module into multiple loosely coupled modules. List in Express Request?:  No ...

Kaizen Integrated Tactical Technologies (KITT) is the result of a Saab Systems Grintek (SSG) South Africa (SA) Research and Development (R&D) programme to cater for the requirements of a modern tactical Command, Control, Communication & Information (C3I) environment for the South African National Defence Force (SANDF). KITT is part of the long-term SSG strategy for the development of a common application development platform for current and future projects.

The above is info that is publicly available at kitt.co.za.

Like what Northrop Grumman, Boeing, ND SatCom, and many others provide, SSG has a centralized platform, called KORE, where the NetBeans Platform plays a central role. On top of KORE, various applications are created.

Here are the two current products:

• Tactical Geographical Information System (TGIS). Based on a C3I system product developed for the South African Navy (SAN) for an Operational Boat Squadron (OBS) base camp. The TGIS component has now been ported onto the KITT platform as a NetBeans module.

  

  The TGIS can be used in the following environments:

  • Situational Awareness on a tactical level for peacekeeping missions.
  • Real-time Common Operating Picture (COP) of ground, maritime and air platforms.
  • Military operations other than conventional warfare.

• Symmetry. A generic analysis tool for determining interoperability between nodes on a tactical network. The focus of the tool is currently to determine the level of semantic interoperability between consort systems on different network nodes implementing the Link-ZA standard. Link-ZA is the tactical data link standard that forms a part of the CNIS. This product allows for an NxN comparison of all defence platforms making use of Link-ZA.

  

Now have a look at the future projects and read about the various new features and applications that are being planned.

<p>Today, I would like to show you some improvements done in SQL code completion area (thanks to our colleagues from database team!).</p> <p>As you probably <a href="/netbeansphp/entry/sql_code_completion_in_the" target="_blank" title="SQL code completion in PHP editor">know</a>, there is already SQL code completion in PHP editor available - but only for <i>SELECT</i> statement. But this has changed recently, now you can enjoy this great feature for <i>INSERT</i>, <i>UPDATE</i> and <i>DELETE</i> statements as well (please note that code completion works for other SQL keywords as well, but not for the first statement in the string - you have to type <i>INSERT</i>/<i>UPDATE</i>/<i>DELETE</i> yourself).</p> <p>Let's have a look at some screenshots, first for <i>INSERT</i> statement:</p> <p><img src="/netbeansphp/resource/article_images/sql-completion-insert-1.png" alt="SQL code completion for INSERT" /></p> <p><img src="/netbeansphp/resource/article_images/sql-completion-insert-2.png" alt="SQL code completion for INSERT" /></p> <p><img src="/netbeansphp/resource/article_images/sql-completion-insert-3.png" alt="SQL code completion for INSERT" /></p> <p>Code completion for <i>UPDATE</i> statement works very similarly:</p> <p><img src="/netbeansphp/resource/article_images/sql-completion-update-1.png" alt="SQL code completion for UPDATE" /></p> <p><img src="/netbeansphp/resource/article_images/sql-completion-update-2.png" alt="SQL code completion for UPDATE" /></p> <p><img src="/netbeansphp/resource/article_images/sql-completion-update-3.png" alt="SQL code completion for UPDATE" /></p> <p>Last, but not leaset, the <i>DELETE</i> statement:</p> <p><img src="/netbeansphp/resource/article_images/sql-completion-delete-1.png" alt="SQL code completion for DELETE" /></p> <p><img src="/netbeansphp/resource/article_images/sql-completion-delete-2.png" alt="SQL code completion for DELETE" /><br /></p> <p>That's all for today, as always, please <a title="Development version of NetBeans" target="_blank" href="http://bertram.netbeans.org/hudson/job/PHP-build/lastSuccessfulBuild/">test it</a> and report all the issues or enhancements you find in <a title="NetBeans IssueZilla" target="_blank" href="http://www.netbeans.org/community/issues">NetBeans IssueZilla</a> (component <i>php</i>, subcomponent <i>editor</i>).</p> <p> </p>

1. NetBeans 6.8Beta generates Unit-Tests for EJB 3.1 with Embeddable Container code. It looks like:

    @Test

    public void testHello() throws Exception {

        System.out.println("hello");

        HelloService instance = (HelloService)javax.ejb.embeddable.EJBContainer.createEJBContainer().getContext().lookup("java:global/classes/HelloService");

        String expResult = "";

        String result = instance.hello();

        assertEquals(expResult, result);

        // TODO review the generated test code and remove the default call to fail.

        fail("The test case is a prototype.");

    }

This is a nice feature: you don't have to look-up the JNDI-name...

2. NetBeans is capable to auto-complete a bound item in the data table:

                <h:dataTable id="hugo" value="#{newTweet.messages}" var="message">

                    <h:column>

                        <h:outputText value="#{message.content}"/>  //the auto-completion works here!

                    </h:column>

                </h:dataTable>

I tested NetBeans 6.8Beta in the last few days. It is stable, fast and especially interesting for Java EE 6 projects... Especially EJB 3.1 / JPA 2.0 support and JSF 2.0 editor were improved significantly.... 

The US Department of Defence released a memo saying that they allow and encourage the use of open source software.  It took them six years to clarify this after a 2003 memorandum implied that the DoD shouldn't use open source.  Yet another example of speedy government bureaucracy.  This just in: "Will open source software in the Dept. of Defence lower taxes?"

What I've always found to be most interesting about Wicket is that it is great for Java developers: no XML configuration and no JavaScript for AJAX functionality. However, today, during TheServerSide Symposium in Prague, Czech Republic, things went a step further for me: I discovered a Java web framework without any HTML (or markup) whatsoever.The framework is called Vaadin, it is from Finland,...

And the YANPA's (Yet Another NetBeans Platform Application) just keep on coming in! I don't even need to use google to find them anymore, now they're crawling right into my inbox. For example, recently Dave Gilbert from the (awesome) JFreeChart project drew my attention to one seriously cool NetBeans Platform application, which you'll hopefully hear more about soon, once the interview with the related developers is complete.

Then, today, literally within the space of a half hour, Sven Reimers and Nicolas Dumoulin, both of whom work on YANPA's themselves, sent me e-mails (i.e., separately, unbeknown to each other, from different countries) about YANPA's they've recently come across.

So, in order of appearance in my inbox a few hours ago:

• Gephi. I never knew of this application until Nicolas from SimExplorer told me about it. (More on SimExplorer in a future blog entry.) "Gephi is an open-source software for visualizing and analyzing large networks graphs. Gephi uses a 3D render engine to display graphs in real-time and speed up the exploration."

  Here's one of several screenshots available on the related site:

  

  Now, read here about NetBeans Platform on the Gephi site. In his e-mail to me, Nicolas adds: "It's NetBeans Platform based, and it rocks!"

• Amphinicy Technologies. The next e-mail, i.e., not half an hour later, was from NetBeans Dream Team member and Duke Award Winner Sven Reimers. He writes that he "just came across two YANPA's". They're from Amphinicy Technologies, "a premium provider of complex and technologically advanced software solutions. Amphinicy’s team of experts designs advanced solutions for satellite machinery which help the satellites run in orbit and enhances their utility."

  Here are the screenshots that Sven referred me to:

  

  

Pretty cool, need to add them to the NetBeans Platform Showcase soon, which currently has 99 screenshots, over 20 more waiting to be added, and several more in the pipeline from companies that have been requested to show off their cool work on the NetBeans Platform!

More revealing statements have finally surfaced about Oracle's future plans for popular Java tools.  Oracle recently updated its FAQ on the future of Sun technologies.  Glassfish, OpenOffice, NetBeans and VirtualBox were just some of the items mentioned.  Here are some specifics on each project:NetBeans