Why is Netbeans So Successful

The Netbeans does not require any introduction at all. It is one of the best IDE. Many times I think upon this question "Why is Netbeans so successful?". I have now found out the answer to this question.
    The answer is very simple. To produce a quality product, you need to hear end user's feedback and implement them since the product is being developed for them. The product becomes useless if end users opinions and feedback are not listened and left unimplemented.
      Netbeans development team does the same. Every time when a new version of Netbeans is ready for release, a program called as NetCAT is conducted for all the developers (End users) to provide feedback , find bugs and to decide whether the product is ready for release or not.
      Recently Netbeans 7.1 was released and I participated in NetCAT 7.1 program. I am really glad that they listened my views and the bugs found by me were fixed. Here is the screen shot of the mail I received from Netbeans :

I had also participated in the previous NetCAT program and in that program too they listened my views. So I just want to say that Netbeans does listen our views to make a quality product and thats what makes it a successful IDE.

First NetCAT introductory chat

The NetCAT 7.1 has already started. There was an introductory skype chat for the new NetCAT participants. The meet was scheduled on 9/9/2011. I did attend the meet and I am glad to share my experience about it. If you have missed the introductory chat, don't worry. I will share the link of the chat transcript.

The meeting began at 11.30 pm (IST) and ended around 1:00 am. Many NetCAT participants joined the meet irrespective of their optimum timing as time zone differed around the globe. Around 25 NetCAT participants joined this meet. The meeting was headed by Jiri Kovalsky, NetBeans Community Manager. He is a member of NetBeans Quality Engineering (QE) team who is responsible for quality of NetBeans Debugger.  Marian Mirilovic, NetBeans Quality Engineering manager  was also present for throwing light on various important things about NetCAT and also for clearing doubts.

 So in this blog, I am sharing the brief information about the discussion of the meet. The whole chat transcript is present here : Introductory Chat Transcript

The agenda of the meet was :

1. Invitation, agenda, chat rules

2. NetCAT basics

3. Program schedule

4. Roles, expectations

5. Others: tribes, terms, CAT points

1. Invitation, agenda, chat rules   

     All the participants were invited and added to the skype meet. The rules were very simple. :D The chat was being moderated by jiri kovalsky to avoid the chaos and we were told to ask questions (if we had) immediately after the topic so that no question is left unanswered and to make chat productive.

 2. NetCAT basics : 

NetCAT stands for NetBeans Community Acceptance Testing - a program whose purpose is to get NetBeans community test NetBeans IDE and accept the new release. So actually the NetCAT is nothing else than a Beta testing program and it has become a very important part of stabilization phase. 

Importance of NetCAT : 

• NetCAT participants use bleeding edge development builds on the real-world projects in unique configurations and setups which cannot be simulated on any cost.

• providing early feedback often gives enough time to fix discovered defects prior to the final release. And it's not only about submitting bugs - many NetCAT participants also help with debugging and verification of fixes, review of documentation or even certification of milestone builds like Beta, RC or FCS!

Benifits of NetCAT :

•  NetCAT is mostly about communication. For this there is mailing list (netcat@netbeans.org) or web forum.With these channels we can discuss discovered problems with other NetCAT colleagues, ask for support (votes or reproduction), argue about priority, help each other, share knowledge etc. We can also use Wiki pages and as NetCAT participants do not have to pass through CAPTCHA verification!
• Another benefit is that we can file exception reports as bugs from the NetBeans IDE directly to Bugzilla! 
• Jiri kovalsky writes weekly status reports on Tuesdays summarizing important achievements. So your achievement gets recognition in whole world. :)

3. Program Schedule :

NetCAT program typically takes 3 months .

• First of all, Beta version of Netbeans 7.1 will be stabilized, which is planned for the end of September.Testing of NB 7.1 Beta,  will start from next week.

• Around Beta release NetCAT Tribes i.e. small teams covering certain functionalities will be created to participate in certification of milestone builds.
• After Beta, docs team will have all tutorials for 7.1 ready, requiring your review so this will be a chance to earn some CAT points. ;)
• Certification of 7.1 RC is scheduled to start on October 20. 

4. Roles and Expectaions :

• There are already over 100 subscribers on the netcat@netbeans.org list. Among this, majority is of NetCAT participants and the rest are NetBeans engineers: QE, developers, writers and few managers. 
• Click responsibilities of QE engineers to have a look at there responsibility. This is the team responsible for giving primary support - answer your questions, navigate you in Bugzilla etc.

 Expectations from NetCAT Participants:

• To file good bug reports which means to describe in detail what's wrong (including error messages) ideally with steps to reproduce, include screenshots if appropriate, attach possible exceptions or full thread dumps  if IDE is deadlocked. Also specify your working environment: NetBeans build number, version of JDK and operating system.
• To stay active, if asked for a feedback respond, if asked to provide more informations in BugZIlla please respond 

5. Others : tribes, terms, CAT points

The various Terms used during this program :

• ” FCS" is a First Customer Ship i.e. first publicly released build that passed final certification. 
• "RC" is a Release Candidate i.e. build that can potentially become FCS if its follow-up testing does not discover any showstopper. Typically first two RCs contain some P1 bugs and RC3 or RC4 get eventually released as FCS.
• "HR" stands for High Resistance mode i.e. phase of stabilization when P3 bugs are no longer being fixed and only P1 or P2 bug fix integrations are allowed.
•  "CF" abbreviation means Code Freeze i.e. point of time when codebase is considered frozen unless showstopper (P1) is found and must be fixed.
•   "Waiving" means deferring a P2 bug fix. This step is taken for P2 bugs that are serious but that cannot be easily fixed, their fix is impractical, dangerous or not easily verifiable and it simply needs more time. Such bug is waived (gets 7.1_WAIVER_APPROVED keyword) and is no longer considered as potential showstopper for the release.

NetCAT specific terms : 

• "tribes" are small teams (up to 5 members) of NetCAT participants with interest in particular feature. Their main goal is to help NetBeans QE during certifications by testing the feature in milestone candidate builds according to official test specifications. Then tribes give either Go or NoGo verdicts and release is either approved or postponed.
• Then tribes give either Go or NoGo verdicts and release is either approved or postponed.
• "CAT points" are something like virtual coins that all NetCAT participants unknowingly :) collect throughout the program depending on their activity. 
• • A bug report is worth 4 CAT points.
  • RFE is for 2.
  • one e-mail adds you 1 CAT point.
  • Most valuable are tutorial reviews (5 CAT points).
  • participation in certifications (5 CAT points per each Go/NoGo verdict)
  • surveys (5 or even 10 CAT points).
  • You can also earn extra points for something exceptional of course. 
   In the end, all points are totalled, all participants sorted and given number of best participants rewarded. See Activity comparison fromNetCAT 7.0

Then there was question answer round where doubts were asked by participants and solved by the experts. :) The detailed question and answers are available in the Chat Transcript.

So friends this was the discussion in the meet. I hope I have covered each and every point that was discussed in the meet. This would be helpful for all the newcomers of the netCAT who missed the meet.

Converting Win7 to MAC OS X Lion

Hi friends,
We all are familiar with MAC OS X lion's lovely appearance and its features. But we cannot have MAC in  our Intel/AMD pcs. MAC OS requires its own hardware. So In order to enjoy MAC's appearance, one thing can be done. We can install mac's theme on win7 which will make win7 look like MAC. :)

I have converted my win7 to mac. Here's the screenshot :

This theme will transform win7 entirely to MAC Lion including boot screen, welcome screen, icons, and much more. You will feel as if you are using MAC :)

You can download this transformation pack here : MAC Lion OS X transformation pack .

CAUTION :
Before installing this pack, make sure to create a restore point. It may happen that after installing this pack, your pc may hang or create some other issues and make win7 unstable. For me, this pack was installed successfully without any problem. But sometimes it may happen that its unstable due to some other needs and requirements. So Install at your own risk.

I would appreciate comments after you have successfully installed  this theme. Enjoy transforming.. :)

Response To My Bugs

Whenever a new version of Netbeans is released, the new release contains the enhanced features and bugs resolution. So the new Netbeans 7.0 contains new features and bug resolution. In my earlier post, Experience about NetCAT 7.0 , I have told you about my contributions and bugs i filed.

           So in this post, i would like to share that the bugs filed by users are heard and worked upon. When the bugs are resolved, the reporter of the bug is notified after the final release. Here is the screen shot of the mail sent. It really feels good to have the problem resolved. :)

NetCAT 7.0 Experience

 NetCAT 7.0 Experience was the most wonderful experience I ever had. I came to know about this program through NUG nagpur. When I first heard about this program, I was very excited to be a part of this program. I always used netbeans for developing programs. Netbeans is one of the best Editors for making applications easily. I was excited to know what Netbeans team do to make such a great product. So all this excitement pulled me towards NetCAT.

                      The NetCAT program was coordinated by Jiri Kovalsky. He is a great coordinator and managed the entire program very well. He gives credit even for the small contribution made by the participants. Every week, jiri publishes the weekly report containing the activities of the week. It feels great to have our name mentioned in the weekly report describing the contributions made. Here is one of the status report by jiri : Status report 12 .

                    I was a part of the API support Tribe, headed by Tushar Joshi sir. Tushar sir managed the tribe well. Here we had to test the netbeans platform. The test cases were divided among all the tribe members. I tested TS_61_project  test specification & the report of the tests were TS_61 result.
                  Apart from testing the test specifications there were several other tasks which I did which includes review of documentation, verifying the fixed bugs, reporting other bugs which I encountered while developing other applications.

Bugs Filed : 

 I had filed 14 bugs in this program. Some of them were :

• Exception Thrown while closing the file
• Class Not Found Exception
• Wrong information Shown
• Slow performance while opening a file

 All the activities which were done by the participants contained some CAT points. The tasks included : emails sent over the mailing list, number of bugs filed, rfes, documentation review, completion of survey. These CAT points were earned by each of the participants. Based on these CAT points, all participants were ranked accordingly. I am glad that i was ranked 4th among all the 119 participants :) .The ranking of all the participants can be viewd here : NetCAT ranking.

            I was even nominated as the best team member by the Netbeans team for Extensive help with Java ME tutorials check for NB 7.0 

This was my first experience for the NetCAT and it was really the best experience so far. Well whatever I have achieved was not possible without the help of Tushar Joshi sir. I was totally new to this program and whenever I had doubt regarding anything, I contacted him, and sir happily guided me. With great experience in this program, i am looking forward for the next NetCAT .

NetBeans IDE 7.0 released

The NetBeans IDE is an award-winning integrated development environment available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris. It enables developers to rapidly create web, enterprise, desktop, and mobile applications using the Java platform, as well as PHP, JavaScript and Ajax, Groovy and Grails, and C/C++.

The New Version of the NetBeans is out with better efficiency and quality.
You can download your copy of NetBeans from official NetBeans site.

Some of the Interesting and new Highlighting features of NetBeans are : 

JDK 7 Project Coin support Editor enhancements: Code completion, hints WebLogic Server Streamlined and faster deployment to WebLogic New server runtime node displaying deployed applications and resources JSF integration with server libraries Oracle Database Simplified connection wizard Guided installation to JDBC driver Editing and deployment of stored procedures
GlassFish GlassFish 3.1 support Domain restart and log viewer for remote GlassFish Enable and disable deployed applications Java Maven 3 support JUnit 4.8.2 integration and various JUnit improvements Remote HTTP URLs supported for Javadoc in libraries and Java platforms New improved visual customizer for GridBagLayout Java EE Improved support for CDI, REST services and Java Persistence New support for Bean Validation Support for JSF component libraries, including bundled PrimeFaces library Improved editing for Expression Language in JSF, including code completion, refactoring and hints
Web Languages HTML5 editing support JSON formatter PHP Generate PhpDoc Rename refactoring, Safe Delete Refactoring PHP 5.3 - Support for aliases C/C++ Easy import of project from user's existing binary New Project type where user's source files are located on remote system NetBeans Platform Annotations for generating Action registrations in the layer Performance enhancements & tight integration with Profiler Additional NetBeans API changes General Word wrap in Editor Enhanced Profiler integration Less intrusive checking for external changes when switching between the IDE and other programs.  Download Link : NetBeans download page link

Connecting broadband internet in Open suse 11.3

Hi guys, The new Open Suse 11.3 is awesome. The new open suse is efficient than all its previous versions. It is faster and the new look and feel of the OS makes it more beautiful and tempting to use.

We cannot imagine our world without internet. So we all want to be connected to the world in the new Open Suse.

The steps for connecting are similar to the earlier post of Connecting broadband internet in Open Suse 10.2
But there is slight difference in 11.3.

The procedure for configuring DSL is same as it was in previous post but the software for connecting is changed. Only the name is change and the functionality is similar to the old one.
So in 11.3, instead of kinternet, we have qinternet, the tool for connecting net in open suse.

Yast software manager

 (click to enlarge the image)

All the steps to install qinternet are same as we did for kinternet.
:)

So after installing qinternet, you get the same plug icon in the system tray as it was in previous version. So there is no change in the functionality.


Cheers!!!
have fun with new Open Suse.