DbWrench, which is database design and synchronization software, is clearly an application created on top of the NetBeans Platform:

And, someone out there is making money on the NetBeans Platform in this case, since purchasing this application will cost you $145, while a trial version is also available.

Quite a lot of work seems to have gone into this application, primarily in the porting from a previous incarnation (shown here):

Must be nice, as a developer of this application, to suddenly have a free docking framework out of the box. :-)

Note: Nowhere on the DbWrench website will you see a reference to the NetBeans Platform. Nothing wrong with that. But it clearly means that it's hard to make an estimate about the actual popularity of the NetBeans Platform. However, from the screenshots page one can safely conclude that the NetBeans Platform is broadly adopted across all sectors developing industrial software applications.

Many thanks to Andrea Cisternino for identifying this application as yet another NetBeans Platform application! Others out there? Let me know!

Yesterday morning the USERS mailing list of GlassFish had a thread asking How to start and run GlassFishV3 without Netbeans... so, Alexis wrote and posted a quick Survival Guide on using GlassFish without an IDE .

From question to documentation in a few hours: self-publishing, no webmaster to contact, all links to online documentation... and no lawyer to check with :-)

Indeed.COM shows a spike in the number of GlassFish-related jobs around end of January (snapshot, live); the date roughly coincides with the reassuring noises from Oracle on CiC. The absolute job numbers are still small, but I expect them to continue to grow, specially as we release our detailed Roadmap.

In other good adoption indicators:
• Mail traffic at USERS@GlassFish ; see MarkMail
• Google Trends (snapshot, live).

And, before you ask; the roadmap is very close...

First step to integrating OpenOffice into the NetBeans Platform (yes, trying that again) is to get it working outside of the NetBeans Platform.

I started by downloading NetBeans IDE 6.5, installed the OpenOffice.org API plugin, then moved the OfficeBean sample from the OpenOffice SDK into the OpenOffice Client project type which I then opened in a NetBeans IDE 6.9 development build:

Running it, I see this:

The next step is to open OpenOffice via the OfficeBean into a NetBeans Platform TopComponent. This blog entry will probably be very useful.

Our friend Felipe Gaúcho died of a heart attack this last Friday . Felipe was one of the founders of CEJUG, the Ceará JUG, and created the Premio Universitario Java. You probably know Felipe from his active blog where he covered many topics - his last post was just Thursday.

I last saw Felipe during JavaOne - full of enthusiasm as always - and we had exchanged email this Tuesday; we will all miss him sorely. Many other people also had the luck to work with him - see the notes from Hildeberto, PeterP, Claudio and Kevin.

My condolences to Felipe's family. If you knew Felipe, please consider leaving a comment in the CEJUG Notice.

If you've been looking through the last few development builds of the upcoming NetBeans IDE 6.9, this'll not be news to you:

Yes, you'll be able to use the IDE to generate the installers of your NetBeans Platform applications.

After making a selection in the above dialog, you'll right-click on the application's project node in the Projects window and then choose this menu item:

And then, after a few moments, you'll have a new installer ready to be distributed to your end users:

The installer is created on the same infrastructure as the installer used by NetBeans IDE, so you'll not be surprised at the result:

In the end, your users will have your application installed via this installer generated by NetBeans IDE.

The one remaining question I have is to what extent the installer can be customized—can the icon be changed, can the text be modified, can additional panels be added to the generated installer? Hoping to find out soon.

The breadth and depth of the community is nicely illustrated by the variety of recent GlassFish-related blog posts. First, long time GlassFish supporter Masoud has a very detailed (it's actually a chapter of a book) OpenMQ from A to Z entry. On the operations side, Byron has a set of two posts on How to Run GlassFish V3 as a Service on Linux Ubuntu/Debian and a follow-up on using a non-root Service (see also thisGentoo variation by Jason), while Felipe's on provisioning GlassFish v3 resources with asadmin.

In the "nice words" category, Juliano has a nicely written "Java Enterprise Development - 2010 style" piece and Maksim says "GlassFish is becoming new de facto standard in Java applications. Development with new GlassFish v3 server and Eclipse now is really fast and comfortable. Server starts within a second, JEE6 is fully supported and hot code replacement works as it should.".

On the Java EE 6 and web tier side we have Bobby sharing a tool for exploring the platform, Aleksey discussing a "Grizzly 2.0: simple authentication example", while Justin puts GlassFish embedded to work with Wicket. Rene has a two-part article on running a Java EE 6 Client Application with Netbeans 6.8 and GlassFish V3 - Part 1: Creating a Basic Application and Part 2: Enhancing and Deploying the Application while Jacob goes through the simple setup to have GlassFish and Intellij 9 work together.

So while we wait for the GlassFish roadmap, we've seen one of the busiest month ever for February on the user mailing list and this recent message from the GlassFish Product Management "GlassFish, and by extension, Metro, are strategic Oracle products". Exciting times ahead!

Looking forward to a trip to Belgrade next week, together with Toni, where the local NetBeans group will be porting Neuroph to the NetBeans Platform. Here's their page:

URL: http://www.netbeans-serbia.org/

Note: We'll be delivering a NetBeans Platform Certified Training there, i.e., at the University of Belgrade. Have you had a look at our large library of NetBeans Platform training slides? You're free to use them yourself to deliver trainings, either for fun or for profit.

"Semtinel is a thesaurus analysis software that provides various visualisation and analysis techniques to supervise and enhance the quality of your thesaurus. Thus, the main users are thesaurus developers and developers of applications that use a thesaurus internally."

The above is a direct quote from http://www.semtinel.org.

And here's a screenshot of Semtinel Workbench, indicating that we're dealing with yet another application on the NetBeans Platform:

The application originates from the University of Mannheim, in Germany. In fact, you can do your thesis there (with prior NetBeans Platform experience being listed as "great") by working on this application. Here's another description of the software, together with an indication as to the reason why the NetBeans Platform was chosen:

"With our Semtinel software, we analyse the results of automatic indexing systems that map documents to appropriate thesaurus terms. For demonstration purposes, we need a simple implementation of an automatic indexing system integrated in Semtinel. The system should be somewhat modular, so that further improvements like different stemmers can easily be integrated."

Hurray again for the NetBeans Platform.

RaPSor is a simulator of radio propagation channels, based on more than 10 years of research. It is used both in research and for educational purpose at the University of Poitiers in France. Go to the RaPSor site on SourceForge and you will learn that one of RaPSor's main advantages is "its extensibility, allowing anyone to add new geometric primitives, new simulation algorithms, new usage of simulation results, or new kinds of antennas".

Here are some screenshots I took after installing this cool application and opening one of the "scene" files (an XML format) included in the download:

With the mouse, I was able to move around the scene, which is available in 2D, as well as 3D format:

And why was the NetBeans Platform chosen as the starting point of this application? The PDF available on the SourceForge site is quite explicit:

"RaPSor ought to be an extensible, modular, and open-source tool. For portability, we chose the Java programing language, leading to an application running on many architectures and systems, like Unix, Linux, Windows or MacOs. In order to concentrate developers efforts on the business work, we first chose a Rich Client Platform (a.k.a. RCP). Due to the educational aspects of this project, we chose to work with NetBeans RCP, since our students have some courses with it.

Such a platform provides all the redundant programming tools and methods that any developer should write in their application, such as the file and window management, connecting actions to menu items, toolbars... NetBeans RCP comes with many functionalities and provides a reliable and flexible application architecture. Its modularity allows to select the functionalities a developer wants to keep and allows even the users to add or remove new or unnecessary tools. Moreover, users can write new tools, or plugins, using either the NetBeans IDE or another IDE, adding the new tools later into RaPSor."

The NetBeans Lookup API, which enables modules to be decoupled from each other, is also referred to repeatedly in the document. You can read the whole PDF by clicking here (or, if the PDF moves sometime in the future, just go to the RaPSor site on SourceForge).

PLASMID is a tool for designing plasmid microarrays by using existing mixed microarray data or using virtual microarray data. PLASMID combines clustering methods, probe ranking methods, and stepwise discriminant analysis to aid in the design of optimized, mixed-plasmid microarrays. These microarrays can be used subsequently for classification and comparative genetics of plasmids.

The above information I copied from the page where you can freely download PLASMID, which is a Swing application based on the NetBeans Platform. The page claims that the application currently supports Windows only, but it seems to work fine on Ubuntu too, based on these screenshots I took after downloading the application and following the startup scenario:

First, open the sample dataset file:

Then, process the file via a wizard in the application:

Finally, view (and save) the result:

More about the application can be read in "A Java-based tool for the design of classification microarrays". Why was the NetBeans Platform used as the basis of this application, according to this document? Well, here you go:

"The NetBeans platform was chosen for development because addition of new functions is easily implemented. Also, many of the tasks common to desktop applications are provided by NetBeans. These include user interface management (e.g., menus and toolbars), user settings management, storage management (saving and loading any kind of data), window management, and wizard framework (supporting step-by-step dialogs). Each function is implemented as a NetBeans module and can be installed or removed easily without affecting existing functions. Java is a platform-independent programming language, so although PLASMID has been developed using the Windows operating system, it will be relatively easy to adapt it to other operating systems. We intend to extend PLASMID to both the Linux and Mac OS X operating systems. In addition to Java, PLASMID uses code written using the C++ programming language. C++ is needed for computationally intensive tasks that require greater speed and efficiency. The use of two different programming languages is transparent to the user."

Hurray, yet another NetBeans Platform application!

After watching the movie above (which is only a few days old), you'll be interested in a look at the related site (http://gephi.org/):

Swing and the NetBeans Platform in action, pretty cool. It seems to be in a similar domain to Maltego, the intelligence gathering application from South Africa, which is also a NetBeans Platform application! Since it's a NetBeans Platform application, Gephi is pluggable and has a very cool developers page that provides all the info you need, including API details and tutorials.

In other news. I was visiting family in South Africa last week and this is one very short video that I made while there: http://blip.tv/file/3279679.

GWT 2.0.2 has been released and is available for download here:

http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/download.html

This was a minor release that includes the following fixes:

• Standard.css missing new layout styles (#4429)
• Using a PopupPanel in Internet Explorer without a history IFrame throws a NullPointerException (#4584)

GWT 2.0.3 has been released and is available for download here:

http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/download.html

This was a minor release that includes the following fixes:

• Using a PopupPanel in Internet Explorer without a history IFrame throws a NullPointerException (#4584)
• Opera support for History is not working (#3956)

I mentioned the NetBeans Platform CRUD sample will be a standard part of NetBeans IDE 6.9 here on NetBeans Zone recently. It is now also available as a Maven-based sample:

You need to install a recent development build of the 6.9 "Web" or "All" distribution. I think this sample would be even better if it were to be part of the "Java SE" distribution.

The next NetBeans Platform application to take a look at is Outlook ES Interface Tester, which is an internal quality assurance application to test healthcare devices at B. Braun, a healthcare provider:

Internal testing tools are ideal to create on top of the NetBeans Platform, since you're not so interested in working on windowing systems and other typical GUI features... rather you're simply interested in visualizing your test results in a pluggable GUI that provides basic features such as menus and window systems out of the box.

Read the whole (brand new) interview on NetBeans Zone about this application to learn how enterprises can benefit in basing their testing tools on the NetBeans Platform.

Spring Roo webinar: Join us on 31 March for a free Spring Roo webinar with Ben Alex. With three separate events to suit European, Asia-Pacific and American timezones, this is a great way to discover Roo and ask live Q&A. Details here.

We're pleased to announce that Spring Roo 1.0.2.RELEASE is now available.

Spring Roo is a next-generation rapid application development tool for Java developers. With Roo you can easily build full Java applications in minutes. Watch our five minute video to quickly discover how easy it is use Roo.

The 1.0.2.RELEASE contains over 40 fixes and minor enhancements since the 1.0.1 release. Existing Roo users can simply start using this new version without needing to make any changes to their project.

This is the last release planned for the 1.0.x series. Our attention is now shifting to Roo 1.1.0, with its highly requested database reverse engineering and JSPX modularity features. We plan to release Roo 1.1.0.M1 in March 2010.

To download this new version, or learn more about Roo, please visit:

http://www.springsource.org/roo

We hope you that enjoy using this new release.

PS: Don't forget we have 20 kangaroos available for the first people who share Roo with the world via a user group or conference! You're sure to have as much fun with these little ones (photographed to the right) as you do with the software!

The next NetBeans Platform application to be aware of is ObjectsX. It is used to create Java applications, via the maintenance of catalogues that provide access and data presentation, report generation, and a design environment.

One use case of this application is the generation of passports and visa documents, as shown here for FSUE SRI (Federal State Unitary Enterprise Scientific Research Institute) Voskhod, in Russia:

Do you know of other NetBeans Platform applications? We're trying to identify as many as possible for the NetBeans Platform Showcase, so please let us know (via leaving a comment at the end of this blog entry, for example) about other applications that use the NetBeans Platform as a starting point.

We're pleased to an announce the release of Spring Security 3.0.2.

This is a minor bugfix release. Please see the changelog for a list of issues which have been addressed.

Download | Changelog | Reference Manual | FAQ

I mentioned the new cool tools for OSGi developers on DZone recently. But today, in today's development build for NetBeans IDE 6.9, there's even more. Two new samples, demonstrating OSGi integration with NetBeans IDE

Upon deployment of these samples, you have a new rich-client application that uses the NetBeans Swing components (such as TopComponent and BeanTreeView) to display the running OSGi bundles and NetBeans modules:

The tutorial referred to above is this one.