NetBeans 10.0 is the second release through Apache, the first being NetBeans 9. The group responsible for moving NetBeans out of Oracle’s shadow and into a position where NetBeans stands on its own has been hard at work. This second release adds new features as well as continuing the work of removing/replacing the older Oracle licensing and any non-open-source code that needs to be replaced. A complete “What’s New” page is here, and you can download NetBeans 10 here, but the key new features for the impatient are support for Java 11, support for PHP 7.2, and inclusion of JUnit 5.

At the same time I stepped up to NetBeans 10 I rolled back to Java 8. Because I use JavaFX in many of my personal applications, when I tried to move forward into Oracle’s Java 11, the JavaFX libraries were of course gone from Java. Trying to add them back in via OpenJFX became such a problem that I made the decision to revert all my changes and go back to Java 8. Unfortunately, Oracle’s Java 8 open support ends January 1 2019, and I’ve never a decent version of OpenJava work for me (at least on Linux), so I went looking for an alternative to Oracle and found Amazon’s Corretto Release.

I have moved back to Java 8 build 192 using Amazon’s Corretto Java. Amazon’s Corretto is their version of OpenJDK, which they are building and hardening for AWS usage. Amazon has stated that they will support their version of Java 8 until 2023. They plan on releasing their version of OpenJDK 11 (Java 11) sometime in February. When that takes place I’ll try this movement into Java 11 again. But until then I’m back to using Java 8. The way things are going with Java I may never move beyond Java 8. I’m already quite happy with Google Go, and with Go 1.11.4 I’ve begun to go in interesting directions, such as generating Web Assembly directly from Go and having it execute in a web page. I now spend far more time writing in Go than in Java. I wonder what will happen in 2019…

For those of you who develop in Java on macOS and want to use NetBeans 10 as a regular macOS applications (i.e. startable via LaunchPad), I’ve written a modest Bash shell script that will take the NetBeans zip file and create a compliant Mac application from it underneath ~/Applications. It’s checked into Github here. You use it just once to install the zip. I used it to install NetBeans 10. Because NetBeans 10 is installed into ~/Applications you don’t have to execute the Bash script as root via sudo.

RC1 downloads as a zip file, which I was able to unzip onto my MBP. That leaves the complete application sitting in a netbeans folder. Step into netbeans/bin and execute the netbeans shell script to bring up Netbeans 9. No problems, no issues. I like the fact it doesn’t require an installer and frankly hope they keep it this way. It even found my older Netbeans 8.2 installation configuration and, miracle of miracles, found and loaded my Darcula (that’s spelled correctly, by the way) LAF plugin. Darcula is working just fine as you can see in the screen shot. All of this is working with Java 10.0.1. The project loaded above builds and executes just fine under Java 10.

I said earlier that Netbeans 9 has been a long time coming. That’s because it was originally slated to be released the same time Java 9 was released back in September 2017. Here we are mid-2018, a good nine months after the initially planned release date. I know a lot of effort went in to making this happen, what with the shift out from Oracle and to Apache, which required additional effort to remove all copyright notices from all the source files (I was a lurker to the ongoing process). They finally finished to the point where they are releasing a near-final Netbeans 9. Of course, if you were following along, you could pull a copy of the Netbeans source and build it yourself, which I did a number of times just to observe the progress. Netbeans 9 is now reaching an official release point.

I’m very happy to see Netbeans at this stage, and I know it will be officially released Real Soon Now. What will transpire after the official Netbeans 9 release is anyone’s guess. Once again Oracle has roiled the community with its change to how their Java is licensed and paid for; they want business use to be subscription based. Although individual seats appear low cost, multiply that across a large enterprise and the costs literally add up very quickly. The only way out would be open source Java, specifically OpenJDK, which I took a look at when I installed Linux Mint 19. Linux Mint 19 comes with OpenJDK 10. I’ve already found dissatisfaction with OpenJDK 10; JavaFX is a separate package, openjfx, and even though I installed that via apt, my pre-built JavaFX applications still fail to run because of issues with JavaFX under OpenJDK/OpenJFX. No, I won’t install Oracle Java on Linux Mint 19. I have, instead, installed Google’s Go. For UI work I’ll look at Javascript/Typescript tied to a Go HTTP RESTful framework. That’s an outgrowth of my work with Go on the Raspberry Pi, which I’ve written about elsewhere.

The group behind the release of Netbeans 9 is to be commended for their hard work and dedication. They did a superb job from what I’ve been able to see so far. For those that intend to continue working with Java, have been waiting for Netbeans 9, and plan to move to Java 11, Netbeans 9 is an excellent tool.

This morning I woke up still thinking in Java and wondering why I have to live with the positively ancient and hideous Metal Look-and-Feel (LaF). Turns out I don’t have to. As you can see above, I’ve managed to turn on the Windows 8.1 LaF on my simple test framework, with just a few extra lines of code. And I’ve re-discovered it’s portable across all the environments I want to run this on (at least, the ones I care about), primarily Windows 7 and 8 and various Linux distributions and desktops. But first, the code. This is a modification to the source file TabbedTables.java, first seen in the prior post.

private static void createGUI() {try {// Set system Java L&F (Windows for Windows, Gnome for Linux...)//UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName());}catch (UnsupportedLookAndFeelException |ClassNotFoundException |InstantiationException |IllegalAccessException exception) {// silently handle exception}JTabbedPane tabbedPane = new JTabbedPane();ImageIcon icon = createImageIcon("images/image.gif");tabbedPane.addTab("Tab 1", icon, makeTable(), "Sample 1");tabbedPane.setTabComponentAt(0, new CloseTabControl(tabbedPane));tabbedPane.setMnemonicAt(0, KeyEvent.VK_1);tabbedPane.addTab("Tab 2", icon, makeTable(), "Sample 2");tabbedPane.setTabComponentAt(1, new CloseTabControl(tabbedPane));tabbedPane.setMnemonicAt(1, KeyEvent.VK_2);JFrame frame = new JFrame("Test tabs and tables");frame.setContentPane(tabbedPane);frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);frame.setSize(800, 600);frame.setVisible(true);}

Lines 2 through 13 are the new lines added. If you’re lazy and don’t care about defensive programming practices then you can toss the try/catch block and just copy lines 5 and 6 and be done with it. But I prefer to write a little more robustly if possible, so that try/catch block is a very small price to pay. I believe in quality code, especially in the final shipping product. In the process of adding this code block, I also removed a line of code; JFrame.setDefaultLookAndFeelDecorated(false);  . This line is no longer needed.

This code block also illustrates an interesting feature of NetBeans 8. The catch block (lines 8 through 13) is a multiple exception catch block that was introduced in Java 7. In earlier versions of Java you needed to write separate catch blocks for every exception, an onerous task, even if you had an IDE that would automatically assist you in creating them all. Once written you had all those individual catch blocks to maintain into the future. It’s no wonder that a lot of Java programmers eschewed writing try/catch unless it was absolutely necessary (as in, javac refused to compile the code). While this doesn’t remove all the pain, multiple exception catch makes it a lot easier to write, and in particular, easier to read in the future.

How does NetBeans 8 fit into this? I was given a recommendation by the NetBeans 8 IDE, and when I selected that from its dialog, it automatically reformatted the code for me. This is one key reason why a good IDE like NetBeans or IntelliJ IDE are at times vital to fast and accurate Java programming. Those tools support you in writing up-to-date compliant code, and teach you a few things along the way.

Here’s a few screen captures of the exact same code running on Linux. Both were running in VMware. The top screen capture is CentOS 6.5 (equivalent to RHEL 6.5) running Gnome 2, and the bottom is Linux Mint 15 running its Cinnamon desktop. Of note are the tabs. They don’t look quite right, and that’s because of the “hand-drawn” close button icon. I need to dig a little deeper and learn how to use a given LaF icon, using the “hand drawn” version when I can’t find it. That will make the tabs look a lot better. But for the time being, this is Good Enough.

NOTE: All my Linux installations (hardware and virtual) are now running Java 8. Even my little Raspberry Pi.