Free online 15-week JavaFX class

This actually sounds very interesting. I'm almost tempted to take it. If you're looking at developing RIAs, it might be worth your time to really explore JavaFX this way. I like that they make you do homework :) Having been a mentor numerous times, I know the value of regular accountability to help you actually *do* something...

http://www.netbeans.org/servlets/NewsItemView?newsItemID=1333

Building a Flickr Slideshow with PHP and NetBeans

A nice demo showing off some of the features of the new PHP editor in NetBeans 6.5. Justin's the same guy who'll be doing the talk at the MySQL Conference on building a Twitter/PHP/MySQL/Yahoo UI app in NetBeans.

http://www.netbeans.org/kb/docs/php/flickr-screencast.html

NetBeans and MySQL Workbench are winners at Developer.com

Wow, big wins for NetBeans (best IDE, best Java tool, best development utility (profiler), best mobility tool, best open source product) and MySQL Workbench (best database tool). This is particularly impressive for MySQL Workbench given that it's quite new. Congratulations!

http://www.developer.com/java/other/article.php/3795991

Twitter overload - help!

This keeps happening - the community I need to stay engaged with keeps jumping on new forms of communication, and if you want to stay in tune, you need to jump on too.

This first happened with blogging, and then with Facebook. These I actually don't mind. I like writing and reading blogs, and Google Reader has made it fairly easy for me to quickly digest what's going on.

Facebook is nice because I keep in touch with friends. It's not so much about work but about getting a little more connected, particularly to old friends who I don't see much any more.

But this Twitter thing - I really don't like it. Sorry. I subscribe to someone's Twitter feed because I value their thoughts, but then it's serious drinking from a firehose. Many of these Thought Leaders are just constantly (I mean constantly, like I don't know how they get any work done) pushing stuff onto Twitter, and my head just spins. I just un-followed Tim O'Reilly, I just couldn't take it any more. I tried Guy Kawasaki for less than a day - that was mind numbing.

The problem is, these guys aren't blogging any more. Tim Bray has gone almost completely radio silent on his blog. Now Brian Aker's going to do the same thing. I never hear anything from James Governor's blog any more, but his Twitter feed is really overwhelming, and I had to sign off. It's a bummer, I really like what these guys have to say, but I just can't take it.

Those of you who follow people on Twitter, how do you do it? How do you process all this information, get the gold, and get on with your life? I am at a loss...

There's something else - blogs can have a Quality that Twitter doesn't. A good blog has me laughing or nodding my head or both, and when I'm done reading it, I have this quiet smile and a feeling of gratitude, like I just received something both entertaining and valuable. 150-character blaps on Twitter just don't have the same feel, sorry. So I miss that and am saddened that people are moving off of the blog format.

Posted via email from David Van Couvering's Posterous

Tweethusiasm for PHP SQL completion

We had discussions about the value of doing SQL completion in PHP. The argument was that developers normally just write and test their queries in a "real" SQL editor (which comes with completion already), and then cut-and-paste into their PHP code. So why do all the work to do completion in the PHP editor? I even asked my Dear Readers for their thoughts on this. It was generally positive, so we're plugging ahead.

But the comments and tweets I've seen since Petr blogged about SQL completion in PHP are very encouraging that we're on the right path...

Here are some sample tweets - I love the "scribbling on the wall" nature of tweets. It's almost like being in a bathroom stall :)

PHP support in NetBeans keeps getting better - SQL code completion is tight http://is.gd/c00a

netbeans con soporte para SQL http://tinyurl.com/5maj6y

trying out NetBeans. Nice fieatures and "Now with PHP support!" If MySQL code completion works as claimed, I'll be overcome with giddiness

I'm not much of a twitterer myself, but I've found that listening in on RSS feeds for Twitter Search has been very useful in sensing the pulse of the community...

Adam Myatt spills the (Net)beans about some planned DB features

Adam Myatt's uncovered some stuff from our team wiki and our mailing list that I wasn't prepared to talk about publicly (well, more publicly) yet because it hasn't been built yet. You know, I'll believe it when I see it.

But, yes, there is a new New Connection dialog planned with a Test Connection feature. It will also have a "Automatically Reconnect on NB Restart" checkbox that I know I will love to have.

Note that what he's showing is a wireframe/mockup and not the actual dialog. Point taken about the current dialog being too wide, we'll see what we can do about that.

And yes, we are looking at making a help plugin with full MySQL docs and also making MySQL documentation available in code completion for MySQL functions (to start, maybe keywords later), both in the PHP editor and the SQL editor. If we get this to work, it will be very cool

Amazon SimpleDB - Now With Select

Amazon SimpleDB now has support for a SQL-like language for queries. Modified to support multi-valued attributes.

...the following query returns all the items which have the values 'Book' and 'Hardcover' in keyword:

select * from my domain where every(keyword) in ('Book', 'Paperback')

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/12/simpledb---now-with-select.html

Calendar date picker in NetBeans data entry

You may or may not know that you can edit result sets executed from a SQL editor in NetBeans.

Now available in the nightly builds, when editing a date field, just click on the drop-down arrow and you get a nice date picker. This is so much nicer than trying to enter in the date by hand.

All this cool data entry functionality is coming from Ahimanikya Satapathy's team in Bangalore. They are a completely separate team here at Sun - they don't even have the same VP as we do. His team is part of the group that delivers Sun's Java CAPS (Composite Application Platform Suite). This suite provides SOA and data integration services for Sun customers. It's been great working with them, a win-win for both of us.

Next up from them, import/export to/from CSV and XML. Stay tuned...

This just in - all schemas visible in NetBeans DB Explorer

In a way, it's embarassing we didn't always do this, but now you can see all the schemas in your database from your connection. Your default schema is in bold. Available in the nightly builds.

This isn't quite working yet for MySQL, but should be fixed in the next few days... We'll also be fixing the dialog for creating a new connection so you don't have to specify the schema any more, we'll just use the default given by the database. If you want to switch your default, just right-click on a schema and say "Set As Default" That'll be nice...

Petr Pisl shows off SQL Code Completion

Petr does a nice job of demonstrating this feature in action. The comments are pretty enthusiastic, which is quite encouraging (I like this one: "My god, this is genius, I would have never thought about something like this."). Cool.

http://blogs.sun.com/netbeansphp/entry/sql_code_completion_in_the

Connecting to a MySQL Database - NetBeans IDE 6.5 Tutorial

A nice tutorial showing you the basics of how to set up a MySQL connection and work with a MySQL database using NetBeans 6.5

http://www.netbeans.org/kb/docs/ide/mysql.html

Clustering Glassfish in Under 10 minutes

Having worked on previous incarnations of Glassfish clustering, I can tell you this is no easy feat. Watch the video, it will only take you 10 minutes :)

Here's a summary of the timing

• Download: 2 minutes and 30 seconds. I cover this time by describing bringing up a slide and describing the clustering architecture
• Installation and cluster setup: 4 minutes, 30 seconds.
• Verifying and testing cluster by deploying a sample application: 3 minutes

http://blogs.sun.com/jclingan/entry/glassfish_clustering_in_under_10

Marking all places where your function returns: NetBeans PHP

Petr Pisl is presently posting a PHP picture a day - how's that for alliteration. I like this one - place your cursor on the function keyword and all places where you return from the function are highlighted. I can imagine that being very useful...

http://blogs.sun.com/netbeansphp/entry/marking_returns

Another article on exporting to CSV

Funny that I'm seeing so many of these. We will be providing this as part of the next release of NetBeans. We'll also be supporting export to XML, import from CSV and also import from another table.

I know there are other tools out there that do this as well. If it were me, I'd much rather have a tool like NetBeans do it than write a script like this...

http://www.total-php.com/article/15/creating-a-text-or-csv-file-of-information-from-your-database/

Embedded MySQL 5.1 Webinar

Just posted on the NetBeans main page - Robin Schumacher is going to do a webinar focused on MySQL 5.1 benefits for OEMs and ISVs

http://www.netbeans.org/servlets/NewsItemView?newsItemID=1320

Nati Shalom's Blog: Latency is Everywhere and it Costs You Sales - How to Crush it - My Take

As usual, a very interesting blog from the CTO of GigaSpaces.

With the graph above we see that the IMDG [In-Memory Data Grid, which runs on top of MySQL] scales very close theoretical linear scalability. The above results were achieved with an IMDG running on 2 partitions. Better scalability can be achieved by increasing the number of partitions.

Read more about how to scale-out the data-tier in Scaling-out MySQL.

To enable this level of on-demand scalability we used our new Cloud Framework, which combines the GigaSpaces SLA-driven container as the application deployment virtualization layer, Amazon EC2 as the machine level virtualization layer, and the GigaSpaces application server as the middleware virtualization layer. This way we can provision new machines as soon as the SLA on the web-tier is breached (measuring latency, in this specific case).

http://natishalom.typepad.com/nati_shaloms_blog/2008/12/latency-is-everywhere-and-it-costs-you-sales-how-to-crush-it-my-personal-take-away.html

Amazon SimpleDB Grows Up

A nice blog from the AWS team describing what's new with SimpleDB now that it's going into public beta.

SimpleDB makes it easy to scale. You don't have to worry about creating a complex master-slave setup to support a high level of concurrent access. In fact, concurrent access is where the SimpleDB model really shines. Fire up a bunch of threads and start sending requests our way. SimpleDB can handle the load. In fact, during the private beta the developers at Pluribo scaled their application up until it was making 5600 requests per second

Some things to note:

• 60 day free trial for up to 1GB of data
• 30 day free trial of the Simple DB Explorer, including upload of MySQL data into SimpleDB
• Tools for various languages, including Java, Python, Ruby, and ActiveRecord
• Queries can include sorting on any attribute
• Coming soon: a SELECT-like API and batch loading

Looking interesting...

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/11/amazon-simpledb-grows-up.html

Export to CSV directly from MySQL - Ariejan.net

People are always asking for this feature from NetBeans. We're working on it, but in the meantime, if you're using MySQL, here is some very simple code to export to CSV. Nice!

http://ariejan.net/2008/11/27/export-csv-directly-from-mysql/

How to model gay marriage in your DB design - Things Of Interest

I love this - an analysis of how to handle gay marriage in your database model. He actually goes through fourteen different iterations of the design. Here's a comment from iteration six...

It's asinine to do it this way. However, there is a good reason why I haven't just skipped schemas schemae schemata One to Six. There are a lot of people in the world who actually think like this. This is their for-real, no-joking conception of "marriage". They do not grasp that men and women are interchangeable, as a result of which homosexual marriages create repulsive integrity problems in their heads. "But if they're both guys, which one is the wife? Does not compute!" How sad.

http://qntm.org/?gay

Zend user switching to NetBeans PHP

Roumen points us to a very interesting comment on the Zend forums

My company bought 3 3-year licenses for Zend Studio earlier this and up until a few weeks ago, there was nothing else on the market that even came close to meeting our requirements. Then Netbeans released 6.5 with PHP support. Right out of the gate, their PHP and JavaScript support is on the whole, so much better and faster than Zend's product, with so many fewer bugs, that despite the fact that we spent $1000 this year investing in Zend's product ... I am assisting my team in migrating over to use Netbeans for most of our development. There are a few things that Studio does better, but Netbeans is just a much more mature and easy to use product, even this early in their PHP support

http://blogs.sun.com/roumen/entry/is_netbeans_disrupting_the_php