Building the App

The new application-building features include:

GUI Builder

With the Matisse GUI builder that is part of NetBeans 6, you can drag and drop components into your application. Built on the GroupLayout manager, the components then auto-snap to one of several predefined distances, and you can align easily the baselines of label text and text in a field. You can also select a group of components and enclose them in a container, or "duplicate" the group, which automatically resizes the window to make room. Duplication also preserves the alignment of the components, which is handy when you're building a table of components. Other notable features included the ability to drag a component from another project without having to add it the palette first, category headers in the palette to make it easier to find things, the ability to sort the palette, plus support for interface localization and choosing the look and feel you want. (The only GUI-building feature that wasn't demonstrated was window-resizing. That's a process that can consume a lot of time--especially with a layout manager that's as tricky to use manually as Matisse. Fortunately, auto-resizing is a feature that's said to be on the table for upcoming development.)

Binding Capabilities

Next to GUI layout and resizing, wiring (connecting things together) is the most time consuming of the mechanical tasks in the GUI-building process. NetBeans 6 adds a binding tool that lets you point to things and say, "when that GUI element changes, poke the model over here, and when that value changes, update this, that, and the other gizmo". Enabling that capabability are the Binding class and the BindingGroup class. When you're doing it manually, you add a pair of entries to the Binding class, or add sets of pairs to a BindingGroup, and then invoke bind(). To get the behavior you want, you choose one of the three synchronization strategies that Binding objects implement: read once from the source object, continuous updates (one-way), or full synchronization (two-way). In addition to data converters, you can also specify validators for the full synchronization option, as depicted in the component-binding diagram:

  MODEL                    GUI
(source) --> convert --> (target) --+
    ^                               |
    +--- validate <-- convert <-----+

Action Builders

NetBeans 6 also adds dialogs for defining Actions, so you can say what is supposed to happen when a user clicks a button, selects a menu item, or issues a particular combination of keystrokes--and only say it once. In the code, actions take advantage of a new annotation: @Action. Instead of creating an Action class and wiring up the event handling, you just add the annotation. Deep under the covers, all of the infrastructure is taken care of for you.

Making it Run Right, Making it Run Fast

Building the interface is only part of the process, of course. You've still got to get the bugs out of the app, maximize performance, and make sure you don't have any memory leaks. (They're still possible, even with Java's automated garbage collector. One good way to get a memory leak is to create static variables. Long after the object has gone away, the class definition still has those static pointers hanging around, referencing objects that probably should have been discarded.)

To improve those aspects of application building, NetBeans has added or improved several key features:

Debugging

NetBeans 6 adds expression stepping, so you're not limited to debugging a line at a time. You can step over parts of a line to get to the expression you need to step into. There is also an Instances view that lets you see all instances of a particular class and identify all objects that hold a reference to a particular instance. (There is no back-in-time debugging, as yet. But as useful as that capability occasionally is, I've noticed that it also complicates the debugging interface quite a bit. So it seems wise to me that back-in-time debugging is a lower priority than some of the other features the team has implemented.)

Profiling

Profiling is now part of the base release, so you get it without having to add additional packages to NetBeans 6. The profiling demonstration showed dynamic graphs and pie charts with drill-down capabilities, in addition to the standard list display. The profiling capabilities also include integration with jmeter scripts (to create a load for a web application, for example).

Memory Leaks

The combination of profiling, the instance view, and a jmeter script makes it pretty easy to identify the source of a memory leak. With the application running under load, you watch the number of instances for each object type grow. After a while, they tend to reach a steady state, where X number of objects of a given type are sufficient to handle the incoming requests, and the instance count bounces up and down around that number. But when you have a memory leak, the instance count for the offending object will soon sort to the top of the list, and will just keep growing and growing, never diminishing.

Once you know which objects are avoiding garbage collection, you can go to the instances view to see who's holding on to the pointers that reference them. From there, you can go straight to the code to find out what changes to make.

Deployment

After you've built an application, got it running right, and got it running it fast, you still need to deliver it to your users--as well as any updates that happen to be needed from time to time.

The NetBeans demo featured a quick point-and-shoot process to enable Java Web Start for the application, but it was so quick I missed the details! But I'm sure it will come up again in one of Tuesday's sessions: "Easy Deployment is Finally Here".

Can't wait for that one. Stay tuned.

Note: I caught the session, and I'll be blogging on it later. The good news: The JRE will be a heck of a lot easier to install, you'll be able to invoke the installation operations programmatically, and JRE updates will patch the existing version instead of adding another copy. (Yay!) The bad news: Although the JRE will be way easier to install, you're still on your own when it comes to installing your application. (Java Web Start could be the ideal vehicle for that, but it's security sandbox is too limiting, especially since user-granted permissions aren't sticky--they have to be re-granted every time the user starts the app.)