NetBeans Platform Testimonials

• James Gosling - the father of Java technology

  After [Sandip Chitale's] talk I went back to my office and tried building a module: Worked totally smoothly... Took less than a minute to get 'hello world' to work. Great job folks! What makes it especially cool to me is that I tried this exercise a couple of years ago and banged my head against NB3.6 for quite a while before giving up. It was a really obscure process, especially since I wanted to do it without asking for help (asking The Gods for help seemed like cheating) What a difference!

• Emilian Bold - NetBeans Platform Consultant

  I've used the NetBeans IDE and developed on top of the NetBeans Platform ever since the 3.6 release. It always looked like the only Rich Client Platform one could use since it is pure Java and has a really nice design, API and vibrant community.

The new 5+ release brings huge improvements, especially in the Platform development area. We are really getting spoon-fed now. No more careful reading of documents to understand an API. Just fire up a wizard and there you are ! It's getting quite fun to develop on top of the Platform.

• Tom Wheeler - Object Computing Inc.

  Although I am an Eclipse user, I prefer NetBeans Platform over Eclipse RCP because Eclipse uses SWT, which is a native library with a different API than Swing. While SWT implementations are available for many systems, others, most notably Silicon Graphics IRIX, OpenVMS and Tru64 UNIX, don't exist. Those systems may be uncommon these days, but they're still used in engineering, medical and scientific environments -- the same places that tend to use custom Java applications. Even on supported architectures like Linux and Mac OS X, SWT performance lags behind the Win32 SWT implementation.

SWT has finally added the ability to embed Swing components inside SWT, but only on certain platforms and even then only under Java 5, further hindering efforts to reuse existing components. Conversely, the NetBeans platform is written entirely in Java and it works consistently
everywhere I've ever tried it.

So the single biggest advantage to the NB platorm versus the Eclipse RCP in my mind is that the NB platform is pure Java. You can easily reuse existing AWT/Swing code and it runs anywhere that Java runs.

• Sandip Chitale

  The new support for module development in NetBeans IDE 5.0 makes it very easy to get started with module development. The new tutorials also provide great help to the developers starting on NetBeans module development. The new NetBeans module development support is another great resource for module developers.

• Masoud Kalali - computer software engineering student

  One day I thought, "Let's try the NetBeans Platform and evaluate it by creating a Swing client." So I started reading documents and looking at the IDE source code, which is a great source for learning the Platform. After some time, I decided to build my first really working module -- a module that would let me test the NetBeans Platform in a real-life situation and bring some fun and usability to the community. So I decided to write the GMail Checker to let users see the total count of their new e-mails and their subject lines, from inside NetBeans IDE. It is a small piece of software and I made it alone. ;-) My biggest resource was the NetBeans Platform tutorials and documentation and IDE source code which is my best and unlimited learning resource.