Monday, October 20, 2008

Happy 10th Birthday Netbeans - My Genesis with NB

Today Netbeans reaches a decade milestone and wow what a progression.

I saw netbeans long back in the year 2000 (yep Y2K) when I first saw it on java.sun.com and the Sun application Forte for java (built on NB3) rechristened as Sun One studio. That is when I first moved away from batch files, editplus/text pad and DOS editor and Forte For Java was my first Java IDDE and there was no looking back.

That was NB3.0. Then couple of years later, Sun one studio became bloated which was not to my liking. Thats when I fully transitioned into a NB user starting with NB3.5 and there has been no looking back. In my organisation I am the only one who uses NB for development. I have given a couple of plugins, developed (not marketed) one NB based application and with NB6.5 beta the progression can only be forward.

What is the next best thing after NB - the netbeans community. 90% of the time I faced problems or issues, I find answers here within the community - be it code snippets, docs, tutorials or forum threads. The rest 10% I can figure it out based on related information. After all I should be doing something.

If there is anything I miss from the later releases (NB 5 I guess) of NB it is the MDI view. Why did you guys remove it. Bring it back, Bring it back.

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