NetBeans 6.8 M1 is available for download. According to the roadmap, the final release is scheduled to be released Autumn 2009.
Usually, I am pretty fast installing the absolute latest version, but this time I think I will wait at least form the M2. It has not been that long since the 6.7 and 6.7.1 releases and I am pretty satisfied. The only thing annoying me is Bug 161416. Hopefully it will be fixed in 6.8…
I wrote about JUnit Max in a previous post. In that post I commented that I was not sure if people were willing to pay $2/month for it. It turned out that I was right. Kent Beck just announced that he has deadpooled JUnit Max.
It is kind of sad that it seems impossible to sell such a great product, but I guess we have got used to that all tools are free. If I look at myself, I would rather have to pay one-time license fee for it than a $2/month subscription. Too much hassle filing expense reports every month for such a small amount.
That said, I actually never tried it since it was not available for NetBeans. Please remember us NetBeans folks next time! Maybe we are easier to get money from than the Eclipse guys… 😉
Well, this post has nothing to do with Java or agile. That is, unless you can consider a netbook to be a lightweight tool for Java development 🙂
I just finished upgrading the RAM on mine. Maybe not such a great achievement, but I sure have never had to screw the whole computer apart to be able to add a piece of RAM before. Thanks to some helpful videos on YouTube it was doable. Shame on you, Acer!
The roadmap said it should be released in June, so they just made it 🙂
Se my previous post on NetBeans 6.7 beta for what to expect from it.
The release information is available here.
I came over a cool tool called Cucumber the other day. Cucumber is a tool for Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) that focuses on the communication between stakeholders and developers. It looks kind of cool, it works with Java and is written by Aslak Hellsøy, a former colleague of mine. So I gave it a try.
First I just ran the examples in plain ruby, then I tried it with JRuby (did not get the colors to work there…) and lastly I found cuke4duke which basically is Cucumber packaged in a Jar file. It has  a maven plugin and annotation support for writing the steps defined in the features. I am definitely going to lab some more with it and see if I can apply it on a project. Me like 🙂
Aslak will present Cucumber at Öredev in November.
The keynote on the last day of JavaOne is all about toys. James Gosling presented a wide array of projects and products that have used the power of java in all sorts of ways.
I spent the rest of the day attending technical sessions. The most interesting one was an introduction to Google Guice. I am definitely going to take a closer look at that. Guice will probably form the foundation for JSR 330: Dependency Injection for Java, so it should not be too much of an effort migrating over to this standard from Guice in the future if that is desirable.
The third day of JavaOne is always kind of weird. Your are in the middle of the conference, but painfully close to the end. The pavillion closes (as I have pointed out in my evaluation forms every year!) too early! Why do they have to start packing down all the stuff at 14:00? Do they have so tight schedule at Mocsone to prepare for the Apple Developer Connection that they can’t wait a couple of hours more..?
After the Swing Rocks presentation, I spent some time on the pavillion before attending a presentation on Bean Validation (JSR 303). Validation of input has always been a pain in-the-ass so I embrace this JSR with my heart.
The night ended with a couple of parties before heading back to the hotel. Tomorrow is the last day of JavaOne 2009. I wonder if there will be a JavaOne 2010….
Day 2 at JavaOne 2009 started with a keynote given by Sony Ericsson. They talked a lot about the importance of user experience and their focus of delivering seamless service experience to the end users. The whole history of PlayNow arena was gone through on the big screen all the way from 2004 until today. Sony Ericsson wants to be seen as “The Communication Entertainment Brand”, and PlayNow arena is a part of that strategy. They also announced that applications will soon be supported by PlayNow.
All the time during the presentation, Erik Hellman coded a JavaFX application combining Google Maps and Twitter to show all the tweets submitted during the presentation in the San Francisco area. The application was finally deployed on three different phone platforms.
At the end of the keynote, Sony Ericsson announced the Sony Ericsson Content Submission submit.sonyericsson.com.
The rest of the conference day was as it normally is. Lots of great presentations. Joshua Bloch gave is inevitable Effective Java presentation. This year, it was a bit of a copy from last year’s, but his presentations are usually well worth attending.
The day ended at a party held by Adobe and SpringSource in combination. They gave a short presentation of  spring-flex before opening the bar…
At CommunityOne today, OpenSolaris 2009.06 was released. I have just installed it on my brand new Acer Inspire One. The poor litle netbook had to survive three suffering hours running Windows, but now it finally has a proper operating system 🙂
After having used NetBeans 6.7 Milestones for a while, I was very happy when the beta was released yesterday. I immediately installed it and started trying it out. The milestones had a tendency to use a LOT of cpu, but so far I have not experienced this with the beta. Maybe since I was stuck up in meetings yesterday and did not have time to code. Today will be better 🙂
Create Kenai-hosted projects from within the NetBeans IDE
Locate and open sources for Kenai-hosted projects in the IDE
Full integration with Bugzilla
Support for Web Services creation and consumption and J2EE
POM Editor and Navigator enhancements
Code coverage and Selenium support
PHPUnit output improvements
Support of popular Qt library and tools
Out-of-the-box support for Grails 1.1
Enhanced Self Diagnosis (“Profile Me Now!”)
Full support for SVG Rich Components in the Visual Mobile Designer