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NetBeans 6 5 Explore Practically

Following the NetBeans session on 24th January, we also conducted a small lab session the same day, where we provided the students with a lab and allowed them to explore the various features of NetBeans.

As the tech session conducted that day was an introductory session on NetBeans, we didn’t stress much on a specific project or language at the lab. Instead we allowed students to download NetBeans 6.5 from our local Sun Server and install it on the system. We also allowed them to configure Cygwin by providing them with a copy of Cygwin tools.

Besides this, they also tried a few C, C++ and Java programs depending on their interest. After the lab session, the students were confident that they could install NetBeans at their systems at home and start working with it. Besides this we also put up step-by-step guides for the students to install NetBeans 6.5 and configure C, C++ and PHP in NetBeans, just in case somebody has any problem installing it.

Available link for download

NetBeans 6 9 The JavaFX Composer Rocks

NetBeans 6.9 has finally been released a few days back, June 15th 2010 to be exact. It was a very special release in the NetBeans community as this was the first major revision after Oracles acquisition of Sun Microsystems this January. Check out the release notes at http://netbeans.org/community/releases/69/relnotes.html.

Along with NetBeans, a minor revision of GlassFish, GlassFish 3.0.1 has also been released. The minor revision contains several bug fixes and the GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 3.0.1 has been integrated with NetBeans 6.9.

There are several new features which been added to NetBeans this time, like the support for Zend Framework on PHP, Ruby on Rails 3.0 Beta support, Spring Framework 3.0, JavaFX SDK 1.3, CSS Refactoring and Code Completion, support for JDK 7 and several other features. The complete feature enhancement list is available at http://wiki.netbeans.org/NewAndNoteworthy69.

But personally, I felt the best feature addition to NetBeans this time was the JavaFX Composer. For people who are new to JavaFX, it is a Java platform for creating and delivering Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that can run across a wide variety of connected devices like computers (as browser-based and desktop applications), mobile phones, TV set-top boxes, gaming consoles and Blu-ray players.

The JavaFX Composer is a visual layout tool similar to Project Matisse for Swing. Initially released as a plugin for NetBeans 6.8, it has now been completely incorporated into NetBeans 6.9. The primary features of the JavaFX Composer are -

• Visual editor for a form-like UI using components
• Dynamic design editing based on states
• Data access to Web Services, databases and local storage
• Support for JavaFX binding
• Simple animation editor
• Multi-screen-size editing

Create a new JavaFX project using the JavaFX Composer by navigating to File, New Project and choosing a JavaFX Desktop Business Application or a JavaFX Mobile Business Application under the JavaFX category depending on the requirement. Give a project name and the UI editor opens for creating the UI from the JavaFX components.

Drag and drop components from the palette and create the user-interface as you want. Heres a small echo application which echoes what has been typed in the text-box. To be honest, this is my first application in JavaFX and I could finish it by typing only a single line of code and that too a JOptionPane.showMessageDialog and I had help from the auto-complete feature of NetBeans for this :), rest of the work was done the JavaFX composer. That actually reflects the ease of development which the composer and NetBeans are driving. On a whole, a big thumps-up for the JavaFX composer and the entire NetBeans development team for integrating this into the IDE.

Download the project here.

If you give the JavaFX Composer a try, check out the huge arsenal of features which the palette possesses like Shapes, Effects, Charts, etc. You will definitely love them.

This blog-post was shown as a featured article on NetBeans -

Available link for download

NetBeans 6 5 Installation

Installation of NetBeans 6.5 requires Java Development Kit 5 or Java Development Kit 6 as a pre-requisite. You can download the required JDK from http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/.

The installation procedure of NetBeans is the same in Windows, Linux and Solaris. Since NetBeans is written in Java, it is platform-independent and the installation User-Interface is also same in any operating system. NetBeans 6.5 is available as binaries for all the three Operating Systems - Windows, Linux and Solaris. Download it from http://www.netbeans.org/.

Start the installation by either double-clicking the .exe file in Windows or running the .sh file in Linux and Solaris from the Terminal. This starts the GUI based installation of NetBeans 6.5. Initially it takes a few seconds to configure the installer. The best part of NetBeans is its flexibility. It allows the user to install whatever is required, instead of installing everything. There are few runtimes which are selected by default.

Click on the customize button to select the runtimes which you need. The customize button also gives brief information about each component which is being installed. Also the GlassFish app-server and the Apache Tomcat web-server can also be installed as a part of NetBeans. Accept the license agreement.

Specify the installation directory of NetBeans. Also specify the directory where JDK is installed, the JDK directory is generally recognized by the installer itself. If you customized the installer to install GlassFish v2, the installer will prompt for the required parameters for GlassFish v2. These include the directory path, the admin username and password and the 3 ports - HTTP, HTTPS and admin. All these parameters are initialized to their default values.

Similarly, if you customized the installer for GlassFish v3, specify its directory path. Also, if you customized the installer for Apache Tomcat, specify its directory path.

The installer finally gives a summary of all the components which are to be installed, if you are satisfied with the customized components, start the installation. The installation will take some time depending on your system configuration and the components which are being installed.

Once the installation is complete, the installer will prompt you for registration. It is recommended that users register as there are a lot of offers available for registered users. However the choice of registration is left to the users. That’s it, NetBeans 6.5 is up and ready to use.

Available link for download