Rich Unger is currently on the NetBeans Governance Board and has been a contributor to NetBeans for several years. He was honored at this year's NetBeans Software Day for his valuable contribution to the NetBeans platform.

In this interview Rich talks about NetBeans 5.0, NetBeans Profiler and the changing Java IDE market. He shares his views on plugin development for the NetBeans platform and on Eclipse. He also elaborates on why he thinks the field is wide open for client frameworks for desktop java apps and how it could come down to Swing vs SWT.

Rich Unger >> Hi there! I'm a developer on the V-Builder team at Nuance Communications. Nuance is in the business of network-based speech recognition. For example, when you call American Airlines, and the machine on the other end says What is your destination city? and you can speak the name of any city they fly to, you're talking to our technology.

V-Builder is our development tool for creating these types of speech applications. It allows you to model graphically conversations between humans and computers, and generate VoiceXML to implement the call flow. It is implemented on top of the NetBeans platform, and you can see a screenshot at http://platform.netbeans.org

IndicThreads >> NetBeans IDE recently jumped from version 4.1 to 5.0. So what's special about 5.0 that warranted the jump?

Rich Unger >> Well, from my perspective, the completely revamped support for module development alone is worthy of a major version number increment. I've been writing modules on top of the platform since NetBeans 3.3, and it's never been particularly easy until now. It was always a lot of hacked up build scripts, difficult to test, difficult to debug, and difficult to deploy.

"The completely revamped support for NetBeans module development, alone is worthy of a major version number increment..."

Rich Unger accepting his award from James Gosling

Up until 4.0, I actually preferred Eclipse for developing NetBeans modules. In 4.0, the NetBeans IDE finally became better for developing NetBeans platform modules. But, even then, it was not nearly as easy as it should have been. I packaged up a modified version of the netbeans.org build files (which are quite complex), and called it the 'cluster build harness'. This allowed folks to build applications on the platform (like V-Builder), but it was not officially supported.

In 5.0, Jesse Glick et. al. took the idea of the cluster build harness, and reworked it so it could have first-class support in the IDE. Then they just kept adding features and wizards until creating, debugging, testing, branding, and shipping modules could all be done in a ridiculously simple fashion.

"Matisse GUI builder works the way you always thought GUI builders should..."

Other than the module development support, major new features in 5.0 include:

• Matisse: The dead-simple GUI builder that really works the way you always thought GUI builders should.
• New CVS Support: A completely revamped approach to the source control UI. I'm told that a subversion version of this will be alpha or beta when 5.0 is released. I'm hoping for ClearCase, myself, though no word on that yet. For now, I'm stuck with the old source control module.
• JSF and Struts Support
• Developer collaboration modules: I haven't tried these out yet, but the demos I've seen are very encouraging. There's a guy on my team who lives in Hawaii, and this ought to make codewalks much easier.
• JFluid Profiler: I'd have to put this as a close second to module development support in my personal list. A long time ago, debuggers were things that were hard to configure, and so there was this hurdle you had to overcome in the severity of a bug before you went through the effort of using a debugger. I think that's where profiling is now, and I think the JFluid profiler will knock down such barriers. We won't think twice about profiling our applications. It will be as natural as debugging, and a whole new class of software errors will become a whole lot easier to address.