An overview of the NetBeans talk

Yesterday we had the long-announced talk on the NetBeans IDE. If you missed it, you can watch the recording that should appear on the site of the Silicon Hill audiovisual center.

Program

• What NetBeans is (custom look and feel demo)
• The RCP platform
• IDE features
• A Matisse example
• CVS support
• I win a T-shirt
• A demo of creating a plug-in (module) for the IDE
• J2ME support
• A NetBeans 5.5 demo
• Questions from the audience

Impressions

What surprised me most was how many people at the talk said they used NetBeans. Judging roughly by the show of hands, it was 50% NetBeans, 45% Eclipse, and 5% the rest of the world, with IDEA the least represented. I put that breakdown down to the audience, who were mostly students, or so it seemed to me. Overall, attendance was unexpectedly high, and room K9 was completely full. As someone who’s used NetBeans, I found the second half of the talk much more interesting.

Interesting details

• The first Czech Java User Group meeting is planned for the end of June at the Czech Technical University. Maybe a magician will even show up
• The university will use NetBeans as its main IDE for teaching Java.
• Sun really has no plans for SWT design support in the GUI designer.
• The plan is eventually to bring all of Sun’s IDEs into NetBeans as optional modules.

Related links

• Talk on NetBeans 5.0 at the Czech Technical University (recap)