Haystack Blog

Last weekend, Geertjan Wielenga came to Boston to hold, for the first time, the official NetBeans Platform Training Course as an IAP workshop here at MIT. It was a great three days, and as for myself, just about every single thing we were taught during the course will go straight into the software I am building for my Ph.D. project.

The NetBeans Platform, if you haven’t heard of it, is a large collection of Java APIs that work together to help you create production-grade, IDE-style desktop applications without spending years of development time re-inventing standard features such as dockable window panes, tree-views with nodes that can be opened into tabbed documents, graph views with draggable and selectable nodes, property sheets, automatic software updates, web launchers, installation packages, user-configurable menus, toolbars, and keyboard-shortcuts (or even a Ribbon!), context-sensitive actions, and much more. A major feature of the NetBeans Platform is also the module and service lookup system, which helps you plug all of these features together in a decoupled way, so that individual domain-specific features can be developed independently of each other. In fact, many companies are porting their applications to the NetBeans Platform exactly to take advantage of the module system and to disentangle their existing spaghetti code. Take a look at these screenshots to see some of the many hundreds of large-scale applications that have already been built on or ported to the NetBeans Platform.

To see what a completely bare-bones NetBeans Platform application looks like, click here and ignore all those pesky security warnings Eventually I’m going to port my existing research code into this kind of an empty shell of an application, and it should get some actual features. But for now, notice how we already have all the basic menus set up, a toolbar, a full-screen mode, and extendable options dialog with programmable keyboard shortcuts, a property sheet interface, and dockable subwindows. With a little bit of work, we can get a very professional-looking application up and running in a short amount of development time.

Read Geertjan’s blog post about last weekend’s IAP workshop here.