Cool NetBeans Plugin

Last week at AJUG's Devnexus conference Venkat Subramanium made an interesting point about IDEs.

He asked how many of the people in attendance used Eclipse. Unsurprisingly almost everyone raised a hand.

Then he asked how many of us would use it if it cost $500. Almost all of the hands dropped, including mine.

I downloaded NetBeans and IntelliJ.

I had used NetBeans for a while before. One thing I liked was its themes. I like light text on a dark background.

I found this theme, Aloha, and installed it. Pretty nice.

jRecruiter presentation at AJUG

Gunnar Hillert gave an excellent presentation on his jRecruiter project at AJUG last night.

I will soon be downloading jRecruiter to check it out in more depth. Gunnar mentioned that the Maven build is a little wonky at the moment. He said he would fix it in the next week or two.

He has a lot of really cool stuff in the app:

• Struts 2.1, which I have not used. I spent years using the Struts 1.* releases, but have been in the JSF camp for a while now.
• Twitter integration, which I've wanting to check out.
• GZip and minification.

Check out the project or his blog for a complete list.

Terracotta at July's AJUG

Last Tuesday's AJUG (that's the Atlanta Java User's Group) presentation by Kunal Bhasin, a field engineer at Terracotta, ruled.  First of all, Kunal did a bang up job of fielding a ton of questions, and most of crowd stayed around an extra half hour for his presentation.  Second, Terracotta has a seriously cool app.  

I've attend AJUG regularly (meaning most of them) for the past few years.  Burr Sutter who runs AJUG and is the product manager for JBoss ESB does a great job with the speakers, but there have been a few that really stand out.  I got introduced to both Hibernate and Spring (although I had read about Hibernate previously) a few years back at AJUG meetings, and on both occasions got the feeling that those technologies were not only worth using but would be really big.  I got a similar impression about Terracotta; although, its nothing like either Hibernate or Spring.  Its actually pretty invisible to developers, which is the point.

In a nutshell (echoes of O'Reilly?) Terracotta's server(s) controls the objects for numerous JVMs allowing applications from each to access the same instances without any special apis.   I'm sure there's plenty of information on their site, and if you are an architect or have had to worry about clustering, caching or scaling then check it out.  They have separate sites for the commercial and open source versions (a lot like JBoss.com and JBoss.org - is this going to be the standard for oss business models now?)

Bill Sengstacken, who is in marketing, is going to post a video, and there should be a link on the AJUG site at some point.