Some Musings About This Year & Next

Oracle's pending purchase of Sun seems appropriate in the sense that it seems to add to the year end anxiety. Oracle will, I imagine, be able to alleviate the EEC's concern over MySql and will eventually see the EEC approve the deal. But developers have their concerns about where that will leave Netbeans, the free and open source Java IDE and rich client platform. Hopefully, Oracle will fully embrace Netbeans and provide the assets that are needed to move Netbeans along. And there is much to do.

Recently released Netbeans v6.8 has lots of new features. It is very good but at times it is too memory hungry and brings my HP laptop (Vista OS with 2 gigs of memory) to its knees. The project scanning/indexing issue seems to have reappeared in this release for who knows why. Current support for Groovy and Grails, which I believe will see a tremendous growth in the coming year, is nowhere near where it could be. Intellij Idea, for example, really shines here and sets the bar that Netbeans will have to aim for in the coming year if it wants to attract and keep Groovy and Grails developers. The Zend framework needs to be among the PHP frameworks that are supported and Wicket support needs to be folded into Netbeans.

Wicket has seen much improvement in 2009 and I am confident that it will continue to do so in 2010. Its developers are top-notch and its developer community is alive and well. Hopefully, the new year will see improved support for Java EE/EJB along the same lines that Wicket currently has for Spring.

Cloud computing became a reality in 2009 and should see healthy adoption in 2010.

Apparently the Intype editor project isn't dead after all and its developers seem to have a renewed determination towards putting out a new release. For all of us who have wished for a TextMate like editor for Windows, well we seem to be a few steps closer to that end.

In the few remaining days of 2009 I will place my custom Wicket component on Project Kenai which will serve as the subject for numerous future articles. I am very excited about this. I was going to postpone putting the project on Kenai because it needs some minor refactoring and there is one api that I haven't even touched on yet. After some thought, though, I decided that it was more important to get it out there, that the remaining tasks should be visible and hopefully will attract developers' input and contributions to the project.

And, finally, a voice on the radio just told me that this was the most dangerous time of the year for people to experience heart problems. I imagine this year will be even more severe than most due to the state of the economy and the prospect of a long and protracted recovery. Hopefully, those who found themselves struggling in 2009 will see better things coming their way during the coming year.

A very happy holiday and new year to you all.

Jeff