Geek 2.0

Netbeans Software Day jumpstarted the JavaONE conference this year. More than 800 attendees gathered in a hotel one block away the Moscone Convention Center. Very impressive for a Sunday afternoon …
Beside traditional demos and social drink event, we had great keynote speakers : James Gosling, Jonathan Schwartz and Tim Bray amongst others.
Netbeans 4.x rocks and future versions will continue to improve the tool. Competition is good, Netbeans is the prove of that. Netbeans would have not evolve so good and so fast without the pressure put by IBM’s Eclipse.
New stuffs to follow in upcoming versions : Matisse, a next-gen GUI builder with powerful Layout Manager. Probably nothing new in the GUI world here, Matisse is largely inspired from Mac OS development tool (Builder), itself inherited from the NeXt era. Nothing new in GUI world but revolutionary in Java GUI world, the demo are very impressive ! No firm date announced yet, stay tuned for more.
Another welcome addition is the developer collaboration tool : allowing developers to collaboratively and remotely chat and modify code. This feature has its root in Java Studio Enterprise and is now backported and opensourced for the Netbeans community !
Based on Netbeans 4.1 : Java Studio Creator 2 was demonstrated in early access version. Beside the fact that it now build on top of Netbeans 4.1, it brings some interesting new features like CSS support, theme-able interfaces, JSR-168 portlet support, file upload facility and a brand new JSF components library, etc …
Netbeans is about community, don’t miss the occasion to be part of it.