Netbeans 5.5 brightens Java mobile apps with SVG graphics

ONE OF the many good memories left by the Sun Tech days in BA city -about which we first reported last week- was the Netbeans 'Mobility Pack' demo by Czech guru Petr Suchomel, done on Netbeans 5.5 'RC2' at the time.

The good news is that Sun quietly released version 5.5 of Netbeans earlier this week, which you can get over here. One of the main selling points of Netbeans 5.5 coupled with the Mobility Pack is support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). After years of testing, the open SVG format seems to be mature enough by now to take off on mobile devices.

SVG graphics in Netbeans 5.5 - showed at Sun Tech Days 06 down under

Mr Suchomel started his demo showing off the basics of Mobility pack and its "Visual Mobile Designer" which allows a "drag and drop" approach to programming using the "workflow view", where you design the screens and GUI, and the designer creates the code for you. Of course, you can switch to the source code editor and tweak or modify it as well. One outstanding feature is the ability to associate snippets of code with certain "abilities" of a given 'platform configuration', so when you modify the target mobile phone, the code is enabled or disabled depending on the configuration or abilities of the target device. Different 'emulator platforms' are provided by the phone manufacturers, allowing programmers to test different functions without having to keep around one physical unit of each model.

Petr Suchomel shows the live application he just created on Netbeans
running on his Sony Ericsson phone

By the time Mr. Suchomel's demo was half way through, he dropped different SVG vector graphics into his project, linked code here and there and bang he first tested it on the 'emulator' on the PC then before people was able to close their jaws, he transferred the application over Bluetooth to his Sony Ericsson K800 and there it was... the live running Java ME application deployed to the mobile. He won a round of applause from the audience. Of course, it was a simple four-buttons, four-clicks menu application leading to different SVG animations, but I don't remember another demo with such level of drag-and-drop simplicity since around 1994 when IBMer David Barnes did the legendary "NT-vs-OS/2 shootout" presentation during which he assembled a graphical OS/2 application with drag and drop simplicity and DDE support using the now long forgotten "Parts" IDE from Digitalk/Parcplace, all in about five minutes.

The Netbeans 5.5 and Mobility Pack in 'flow view'
Welcome to Drag-and-Drop programming

The SVG opportunity

The SVG format is similar to Adobecromedia 's proprietary Flash, it sports pattern fills, gradients, anti-aliased rendering, text and animations. On the other hand, unlike Flash, SVG is a W3C recommendation and is XML-based. The Firefox web browser supports SVG so it's only natural to see SVG moving over to mobile phones, where perhaps it'll be even more useful than on desktops due to the low display resolutions and the limited bandwidth. The Firefox browser supports SVG, and I remember first writing about SVG a year ago at the time of the SeaMonkey 1.0 alpha release over here.

The presenter explaining Java "ME" or 'Micro Edition' for mobiles and what it offers

In short, having SVG support in an open source and easy to use Java IDE like Netbeans will likely only accelerate SVG use on mobiles. Newbies on the Mobility Pack can check the 'Quick Start Guide' over here, and also take a look at the 'SVG Tutorial' on the site over there. Judging by the amazing drag-and-drop demo of the new Netbeans 5.5 given on the Sun tech days, I'd expect SVG to become ubiquitous soon.

The event was well guarded, but you could see that
people outside were kinda sad without the SVG knowledge

But don't take my word for it, I was only a spectator in Mr. Suchomel's amazing live demo. I suggest that anyone interested in mobile java development downloads NB 5.5 with the mobile add-on and gives it a try while you await for the Netbeans world tour to hit a location near you to see the same demo in person -for readers in Blighty that will be March 2007-.

Netbeans 5.5 is a ~ 40MB download and the Mobility pack is on average around 25MB big. The IDE is available with installers for Windows, Linux, Mac OS-X, and Solaris, the latter both in x86 and Sparc flavours.µ

See Also
Past, present and future of SVG support in Mozilla and Firefox
Sun really selling Netbeans to Java developers
Sketsa, a cross-platform SVG vector graphics editor written in Java
Java install on Linux is pants
Java works on Vista
LG's Java 2.0 phones should make folks at Motorola nervous
Java 6 beta shows maturity