Netbeans Platform: Good, Bad and Ugly

-

The Good


The Netbeans Platform is incredibly simple to get started with. There are extensive tutorial based guides to get you started, like this tutorial about creating a CRUD application with zero code, or making a paint app, and videos too, not to mention Geertjan's Blog which goes into many advanced examples. If you're using the Netbeans IDE you also get a huge assortment of wizards to help you along with various annotation-based integrations. The wizards have excellent ANT support and pretty good Maven support as well. There are many advanced features in the box from window management, plugins, configurable key-bindings and an auto-update framework.

The Bad

When you want to do something advanced which isn't covered by a tutorial, you quickly need to roll up your sleeves and dig into the source code. For example, if you choose to migrate from the default ANT build to Maven, this guide is lacking if you aren't very familiar with Maven. Or even if you used the built in Maven wizard, there is no documentation that you need to run with the deployment profile to build the installers (if you're stuck on this one, it's "mvn package -P deployment"). Another big pain point for me was trying to create actions at runtime with localization which also showed up in menu's, this took lots of research before eventually creating a custom service, and they still didn't work for all cases. Even integrating my build with Jenkins was a headache.

The Ugly

When you're finished with your application, you still have a Java application. No matter how convenient and productive the language is there is still a strong bias against Java on the Desktop, and that bias doesn't seem to be going away (maybe JavaFX with native bundling will help sway people). Until it's easier to bundle your Netbeans Platform application with a native look and feel that bias isn't going anywhere.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

OpenSCAD linear extrude that interpolates between two shapes

-
Image
Full source code is available for this thing on thingiverse . OpenSCAD has proven to be an easy to use and flexible tool, but at times I'm left scratching my head to figure out ways around its limitations. In this case I had two squares with rounded corners, their sizes and the corner radius for both squares are configurable. Now I wanted a square tube to join these two pieces together. My hope was that I could get it close enough with some fancy parameters piped into the OpenSCAD linear_extrude function. It seemed possible since there are some pretty fancy parameters regarding rotations and twists. After checking out the documentation it didn't look like there was anything that would be close. For this project I found a module by Felipe C. da S. Sanches to create squares with rounded corners . I'm sure there are many like it, but this was the first one I found and it worked as advertised. So made a little module using this which wraps around a rectangle for ...
Read more

Taking Stuff Apart: Realistic Modulette-8

-
Image
When I saw this fine piece of electronics at the landfill I knew it was special. Not only did it have a plethora of nice looking knobs and various shiny areas, but it also had a wooden enclosure. Although stamped steel cases are nice, its a little impersonal, not like this finely crafted device. I had already thrown it in the trunk before I even noticed - the thing was an 8-track player. Click below for more pictures.
Read more

XCode4: UITabBarController with UINavigationController using Interface Builder

-
Image
If this helped you, please consider downloading my FREE  iPhone app " Hydrate Yourself "and leaving a review. There are a  whole   bunch  of  tutorials  to create a Navigation Controller inside a TabBarController with XCode3.  But there are a number of small changes in XCode4 which can trip up someone not familiar with them.  So this guide is essentially an updated version of those other guides, designed to create the same simple demo using the new tool. 1. Create a new Project We are going to start with a Tab Bar Application, so go ahead and create a new project as usual. I'm calling mine Navigation Tab Bar. 2. Select the Tab Bar Click MainWindow.xib and you should see the integrated Interface Builder. On the left is a section called Objects, select the Tab Bar Controller. 3. Add the Navigation Controller On the right side of your screen click the Utilities box. This is new in XCode4 and should look familiar if you've been...
Read more