Sun is really selling Netbeans to Java developers

Today was the first out of three days that the conference lasts, and I was very surprised at how nice an event Sun was able to pack. The Netbeans World Tour is totally free and will hit a location near you, if it hasn't already. The event started in Seattle, then moved to China, now hits Buenos Aires, and then will move to Seoul next week, Prague on the second week of November, and then move to Atlanta by January. India, Malaysia, will follow, and those of you in Blighty might want to start booking your assistance by now, as it'll hit London on March 16th. The long World Tour will end by May 16th in Mexico City.

Smiling faces greet us at the entrance

It was really nice to see the folks at Sun not forget those of us at this remote location that is the so-called ' Southern Cone'. The location couldn't be better, the Hilton, and everything was top notch, from booking online at the Sun web page to the reception with orange-dressed Sun babes, continuing with the facilities, with a great medium sized auditoriums, and little 'cubicles' of sorts with power and ethernet -yes, good old wired networking- internet connectivity.

The Java programmers descend on the Netbeans World Tour

In fact, I'm sending this article to the wires from the event itself. I saw a Sun employee apparently typing and browsing on the move, so chances are there was Wi-Fi as well. I didn't bother to ask about Wi-Fi or bother with the hassle because the ethernet arrangement was more than enough and it's something that others should definitely copy!.

A packed auditorium follows the Netbeans presentation

Now the important stuff: the event was packed. On the day before it, it was impossible to register yourself from the web page as the status shown was "booked". The sessions started with Roman Strobl from Sun's Netbeans group with an introductory speech about Netbeans, what it is, it's advantages -compared to Eclipse- and where it's going in the near future.

Little cubicles with wired ethernet internet access for anyone to use
Thumbs up

He did a pretty impressive demo -the demo was very impressive, and the tool is very impressive- of Matisse, the GUI builder in Netbeans 5.x, which allows you to create GUI desktop java applications with drag-and-drop simplicity, and avoiding the usual pitfals of other development tools which can create GUIs easily, but those GUIs end up looking ugly, misaligned or just don't respond to resizing etc as developers and users expect those to do.

Roman Strobl telling the audience about Netbeans

Roman Strobl is a very good presenter, injecting humor in his speech from the very start. He told the audience that if anybody felt asleep, he was going to hit them with some netbeans rubber balls he had on stage. It was not needed, trust me. Another impressive Netbeans feature showed by Roman was the internationalization support, allowing the programmer, from the same project, to design multi-language applications with point-and-click ease, redesigning and for instance changing the width of entry fields and dialogues in each different language, and saving it all as part of the same project, creating a multi-language application from the go, no need to do separate builds or versions.

Strobl is a great presenter, and it was a fun start

The latest version of Netbeans is 5.0 but they showed 5.5, currently at "Release Candidate 2" level, which you can download over here. Version 6.0, according to the presenters, will bring an overhaul of the editor, and also include visual data binding -it was one of the questions of the audience-.

Roman polled the audience during his whole presentation, for instance on the issue of version control software. An informal "raise your hand" type of poll showed that about 50% in the audience used CVS while the other half already opted for Subversion. This was a surprise to the presenter, who said that in other locations CVS still has a higher share, but "subversion is growing all the time". Both are open source applications, it should be noted. Roman also mentioned that Netbeans supports commercial version control systems.

Coffee break: food for the stomach, a good complement
to the food for thought served before

Also noteworthy was the demo of Netbeans' refactoring support, and a brief demo of the "Netbeans BlueJ edition", a stripped down version of the IDE aimed at IT students and beginner programmers. BlueJ was developed at the University of Kent, UK, and Deakin University, Australia, so that newbies can make their first steps with the language. Then came Sang Shin, with a much boring demo of building server-side, J2EE services with Netbeans. Don't get me wrong, Netbeans makes it super-easy to create web services, or to turn any existing code into a web service, in the "hello world" example, as easy as adding a "@webservice" statement at the beggining of the code.

The first two of today, were very good presentations, and overall this is a superb marketing effort to sell the Netbeans goods to the local geeks. Coming next will be a presentation about bulding "mobile" applications titled "is that the Enterprise in your pocket?", so stay tuned.

The perfect venue: the Buenos Aires Hilton

My hat's off to the company, the Netbeans World tour is, judging by what I saw here today, an overwhelming success. The only question I have for Sun is: can you guys please host one of these every month? µ

See Also
Netbeans 'BlueJ edition' for education
Netbeans project home page
GUI building in Netbeans 5.x Matisse
Netbeans 6.0 milestones
Introducing Subversion
Get ready for subversion's reign, the CVS killer