NetBeans Day Part 2

More NetBeans Day Coverage!

camping the rare WiFi Spawn

Richo came out to talk about their NB based development for the embedded Java in their CDC copier products.

Next was a demo of the new profiler for the Mobility pack. It looks pretty much like the standard profiler, it just connects into the emulator.

The Netbeans J2EE1.5 5 Vista stuff was next. The whole “mobility + enterprise was a strange mix for a track. Anyway, a couple of cool things here:

First was the Project Tango (now known as WSIT… though I don’t know why. Maybe Wsii?) Anyway, this is basically a supported, known-good interoperability implementation of the WS-* set. Netbeans has a great editor form for basically setting up all the WSDL settings for Reliable Messaging, Secure Conversation, Transactions etc. It looks really slick, but more on that later, when I cover the Tango tech session.

Next up was the new products from the Netbeans XML group. This is all still considered part of “Enterprise Pack”. Anyway, there is a pretty nice graphical schema editor. I am a little mixed on it, because it uses a “show you the instance document structure” motif, rather than a more “UML class diagram” motif. Given that most people are going to be piping that through some kind of mapper anyway, I think having the UML-ish view is preferable. It also comes with a nice little search function that lets you search within a schema based on the context used. Again, funny they get that in the XSD support before the Java support.

Longer term goals for the Enterprise Pack is to include more stuff for project management and governance, documentation and all the other… stuff… you have to do to run your project.

They also demoed the new integration of the SeeBeyond (now Sun) BPEL engine. It is pretty much what you would expect. Flow chart, xml, round trip, yadda yadda. I still don’t “get” BPEL. Moving on..

Gosling comes out and talks. He talks up the Netbeans+BlueJ stuff, which is great. If you haven’t seen BlueJ, you should check it out. It is an educational focused IDE with rather limited features but a very much “start from UML and patterns” action, which is good.

He then pitches the Savaje cell phone. This is the first JSR-209 CDC phone — basically a cell phone with Swing and all the other parts of J2SE you really might want. Its pretty cool, and they have dev kits available on their site.