NetBeans Platform

Save yourself a lot of time and energy in rich-client application development- reuse features from the IDE's core by basing your application on the free NetBeans Platform.

Developing applications on top of the NetBeans Platform means you are developing on top of the NetBeans IDE's core. The NetBeans Platform is a generic desktop application, and most desktop applications have common requirements - menus, document management, settings and so forth.

NetBeans Platform was designed to let you develop your own applications on the NetBeans IDE's engine.

Instead of writing the same code over and over again, write modules to implement what you need, bundle them up with the NetBeans Platform, and you have a beautiful, branded, cross-platform application.

NetBeans-based applications are write-once, run-anywhere. You get prebuilt components for free and you solve common problems by reusing, mixing and matching them. Use the platform and the modules you develop as the basis for multiple applications that share common logic. The NetBeans Platform is a solid foundation and set of standards for clear design.

Here are some key features of "NetBeans Platform":

￭ User interface management: Windows, menus, toolbars and other presentation components are provided by the Platform. Developers write actions and components that the system will manage - saving time, and producing cleaner, more bug-free code.

￭ Data and presentation management: The NetBeans Platform contains a rich toolset for presentating data to the user and manipulating that data.

￭ Setting management: Saving and restoring settings - even complex business objects - is safe, simple, transparent and often automatic

￭ Graphical Editing: Creating drag and drop, graphical views of data is a snap with the graph library

￭ The Editor: Available as an extension to the Platform, applications built on NetBeans can use the NetBeans Editor, a powerful and extensible toolset for building custom editors.

￭ The Wizard framework: A toolset for easily building extensible, user-friendly Wizards to guide users through more complex tasks.

￭ Storage management: An abstraction of file-based data access. "Files" in the NetBeans paradigm may be local files, or exist remotely, for example, on an FTP server, CVS repository, in an XML file or in a database. Where this data is stored is completely transparent to other modules that work with this data.

￭ A huge selection of additional components: such as versioning support, specialized editors, specialized UI components, remote data access via FTP and other transports, and convenient ways to work with a variety of Java and internet technologies are available as plugins any application can use.

￭ Internet-based update delivery: NetBeans-based applications can use Java Web Start technology to deliver custom sets of modules based on a user's role, for complex applications. And a Web Start enabled application is always up-to-date and combines the advantages of centralized management and deployment with the advantages of a rich client user experience. For non-WebStart applications, an optional component is the AutoUpdate module, which downloads updates or new functionality via the web.