The best way to improve what you do is to find someone who will do it for you better than you could have done yourself. I've seen this principle in action over and over again. For example, it was fine designing the NetBeans IDE and NetBeans Platform on my own. Now, however, it is much better, since there are far more talented developers designing the various individual parts together. Similarly, I was OK writing documentation for the NetBeans Platform, but it is much better to have a group of enthusiastic people who produce tons of interesting tutorials and blogs on topics that I would never have thought up myself. Along the same lines, it was entertaining to contribute to a book about the NetBeans Platform. However, it is an order of magnitude better to see this one by Heiko! It is richer and more interesting. Plus, it covers topics that I never dreamed of covering myself.
My first encounter with this book dates back to 2007 when Heiko finished his German version. I was asked to review the book's content. However, as my German reading abilities are close to zero, my goal was more to read the sample Java code and ensure that correct patterns were used and described. It quickly became easy to see that everything was more than OK. Not only that, I could immediately see that the topics were extraordinary and that they brought new ideas into the NetBeans Platform world.
I am glad that Heiko's interesting insights are now available to a broader audience. Thank you Heiko! Thank you too, dear English translators!
One of the wonderful things about the NetBeans Platform is that it is impossible to run out of new things to do with it. For me, it has been an inexhaustible source of inspiration—and that is still true ten years after I first started working with it!
I have coauthored two books on the NetBeans Platform in the past, and when we were finishing up, there were always things we wished we had more time or space to cover. So there can never be enough books about it—every author has a different perspective on the topic.
To Heiko I offer my heartfelt thanks for shining his unique insight on the NetBeans Platform; to you, dear reader, I wish you happy coding and joy in learning to love a framework that I have helped to build, and that has been a labor of love for many years.
What I like most about this book is the number of interesting side roads you will find yourself traveling as Heiko takes you by the hand and helps you explore the NetBeans Platform. Many of the topics addressed here have not been addressed anywhere else—from persistence, to the Task List API, to the integration of JDK 6 features into NetBeans Platform applications. You will have a very hard time avoiding learning many new things here, regardless of the amount of experience and skills you bring to the table.
Over the past two or three years, the NetBeans Platform has seen a continual surge in popularity in companies around the world. This is in part because of its modular architecture, in combination with its reliance on the standard Swing UI toolkit. But, certainly, the growing adoption of the NetBeans Platform can also be attributed to the enthusiasm of its users. Without them, the book you're now holding would certainly not have come to be. In fact, a small army from the NetBeans Platform community translated this book from scratch in the space of a single month. As one of them, I can say that I have learned an unlikely amount of details about the NetBeans Platform—details I would never otherwise have learned about. Many thanks to Heiko for this great book and for all the work that went into it, as well as all the work that went into updating it to 6.5!
Jim Freeman, the book's editor in Prague, deserves high praise for his editing skills, as well as for his sage advice and encouragement to me personally, and for his living room and cups of hot coffee every morning for the duration of the translation project. Many thanks also to Michaela Freeman for being so supportive, too. Also, much gratitude to the team at Apress for their close cooperation and precision work throughout: Steve Anglin, Grace Wong, Douglas Sulenta, and Damon Larson. On a personal note, based on the experiences of the past months, Jim Freeman and Damon Larson are really very highly recommended technical editors indeed.
Finally, to the translators, who tirelessly slaved on their assigned chapters, I express my warm gratitude: Zane Cahill, Stefan Alexander Flemming, Matthias Holzinger, Peti Horozoglu, Martin Klähn, Pavel Kotlov, Christian Pervoelz, Christian Enrique Portilla Pauca, Sven Reimers, Johannes Strassmayr, and Fionn Ziegler.
Some of the translators share their experiences translating the book and learning about the NetBeans Platform in the following paragraphs.
Having been a developer of NetBeans Platform applications for the last eight years, I am always on the lookout for more and better documentation. And then Heiko published his book! Without any high expectations, I started reading it to write a review, and was astonished by the wealth of information Heiko managed to cover. So, always looking for ways to contribute to the NetBeans Platform, I volunteered to take part in the translation project to make all this available to a much broader audience.
If you've already read a book on the NetBeans Platform, you may ask yourself why you want to read this one. To make a long story short, it's the unique and detailed content about the basics of the NetBeans Platform that makes this book surpass the others. You will learn about creating loosely coupled modules using the Lookup API, details of the module system, and how to create your own full-scale applications based on the NetBeans Platform.
Thanks to Heiko for the effort he originally put into his book and the opportunity to be part of such an extraordinary project. We all owe Geertjan big, for being the one leading us, offering help, organizing, and pushing the translation effort.
This book is a great source of information and will hopefully be as valuable for other developers as it was for me. I'm thankful for the opportunity to contribute to this project and hope all readers will have as much fun reading as I had translating!
Confronted with the task of porting a big legacy application to the NetBeans Platform, I've read all the literature on the topic and found this particular book a great source of practical examples and well-structured information.
It was a pleasure to read this book, so I was really honored to be part of the translation team. I hope the English version will help even more people to find their way into the NetBeans Platform community.
Translating this book was an interesting process—to do a good job, I had to take into account each aspect of the NetBeans Platform, as well as Java programming in general. This book is a good source of experience for programming in Java using the NetBeans IDE and the NetBeans Platform underneath it, which together provide many tools and components for working with Java. Combined with some practice and basic Java knowledge, this book will make you a better programmer.
Translating the chapters assigned to me, I learned a great deal about actions and components for building GUIs for Java applications—I'm confident that this book is a good reference for these topics.
Many thanks to Geertjan for giving me the chance to work on this translation. It has improved my translation abilities and allowed me to learn more about the NetBeans Platform. I look forward to hearing about readers' enjoyment of this book!
I well remember the first time I read the German version of Heiko's book because it was the moment when I really started understanding the ideas behind the most common NetBeans Platform patterns. So, I'm all the more happy to have been asked to help translate a part of my favorite NetBeans book into English.
It was a great experience to work on a team that managed to translate a whole book in just one month!
The book caught my attention during the development of a product based on the NetBeans Platform. It gave me good ideas for solving many challenges and ensuring better product quality. I improved my knowledge of the NetBeans module system while translating the book. It is an honor to have been involved in the translation process.
While translating, I gained a better understanding of the window system, especially regarding the layer.xml file and its relation to the System Filesystem. Additionally, I learned a lot about defining and managing dependencies between modules with different versions, as well as integrating modules into the NetBeans Platform.
Three years ago, I started an internship in a department developing a NetBeans Platform application. Not having encountered NetBeans at all up to that point, I had to familiarize myself with both the IDE and its platform. Once I realized how easy it is to develop applications with the NetBeans IDE, I bade goodbye to my dear old friend Eclipse and welcomed the NetBeans IDE with open arms! I was later integrated into the development team and brought up to speed amazingly quickly. About a year later, Heiko published his book, and even more concepts became clear to me.
Then came the day the community effort to translate Heiko's book was announced. I volunteered my help to broaden the distribution of knowledge contained in this book to English-speaking readers and developers. After working on the chapter concerning the user interface, I realized that my understanding of the concepts conveyed had increased without my having been aware of it.
Heiko's work putting this book together helped a lot of people to develop NetBeans Platform applications, myself included. Geertjan, as manager of this project, has done tremendous work bringing this project to fruition. We owe many thanks to Heiko and Geertjan for doing what they did. I am hopeful that you as a reader can learn as much as I did when I first began digging my claws into it all. And I hope you enjoy the experience while doing so!
I had seen testimonials to this book frequently pop up on mailing lists and blogs, so when the opportunity presented itself to support a translation, I could not resist the appeal to be associated with this excellent book and a community project involving like-minded NetBeans Platform enthusiasts.
Fortunately, part of my assignment was the Visual Library API, a feature set I never had the opportunity to use before, so the task was also a great learning experience. At the outset, I thought the Visual Library API would be complex with a steep learning curve. However, Heiko shows how quick and easy it is to visualize structures, while highlighting important concepts (such as tools that give rise to contextual actions) and providing useful tips (such as exporting representations to PNG image files).
Hopefully you will enjoy the read as much as I have, and discover a great deal from the experience!