Hi, I was away when you first posted this, but a late reply from my own perspective ...
On Tue, 27 May 2025 at 20:27, Tim Mullé <tmu...@gmail.com> wrote: > It’s been a while since I was on this mailing list so I am curious if > NetBeans Platform Applications are still being developed in 2024/2025? There are definitely still a bunch of existing platform applications in active development on top of recent platform releases. I have a number of LinkedIn alerts on jobs mentioning the platform (out of curiosity), and I'm also listed as a source of commercial support on https://netbeans.apache.org/front/main/help/commercial-support/ (which generally just leads to off-list requests for free help! :-) ). You've got big companies like Siemens, Airbus, Experian, Frequentis, etc. developing things. Then there's a bunch of smaller companies, individuals, and researchers building things. The one thing I do find increasingly frustrating is the lack of investment in the upstream maintenance effort for the platform from them, particularly those larger companies. This is, in my own opinion, something that has to change if the platform is to remain sustainable. > I know everything today is ‘web’ centric and mobile apps, etc. for most > casual users and possibly corporate as well. > > I know my company I work at we still have a hand made Swing Based IDE-looking > application that is 10+ years old and we still maintain it. There is a place for web tech based tools, but also definitely still a place for desktop based tools. If your choice of toolkit is Java and Swing, then for all but the simplest application, I think the platform is a no-brainer. Of course, there are other options out there too. We were recently talking on the NetBeans Slack about Eclipse / SWT initiative 31 - https://github.com/swt-initiative31 It's interesting to see that they're currently investigating both Swing (with FlatLaf) and Skia backends for SWT. Some concerns that might be useful for us to consider ourselves in there, and also how they're engaging commercial users of their platform in the effort to modernize it. Anyway, to answer some of your specifics! ... > 1. Do you create NB Platform applications for your projects, company, etc? Well, my own long term, open source project is the hybrid visual live programming IDE - PraxisLIVE - www.praxislive.org I'm currently working on a number of things at Codelerity based on the PraxisCORE runtime without its creative coding aspects. They're not released as yet. At least one is platform based, the others will use web technologies of some sort, possibly bridging Java and Tauri (because shipping a JDK and all of Electron is madness! :-) ) They're all linked by an interest in Moldable Development as it relates to Java. I also occasionally provide help for other platform projects via Codelerity. > 2. Do you use Ant or Maven based development? Now, Maven. I recently migrated PraxisLIVE from Ant to Maven. It has quite a complex build, given it has to embed another tool and a bunch of other things. It was actually a lot easier to migrate than I feared. The current build owes a debt of thanks to both Gephi and JJazzLab. I would definitely take a look at both to see how their builds are configured. I also replaced a number of things the NetBeans Maven plugin does with the use of common Maven plugins like the Assembly plugin. At some point I'd like to find some time to try and get the default platform archetype into a better starting point. https://github.com/gephi/gephi https://github.com/jjazzboss/JJazzLab https://github.com/praxis-live/praxis-live > 3. If Maven, how do you find all the required dependencies you need for > things like Project Api, IDE stuff, etc. Ant version of NB dev has the nice > table you can just check libraries and it figures things out for you and > pulls the correct dependencies. Maven doesn’t have that in the UI for NB dev > (at least not that I’ve seen). I’ve had to do A LOT of trial and error > hunting down libraries and looking at old/outdated tutorials or piece > together blog posts across the years. Key thing is to take a look at the cluster POMs - https://central.sonatype.com/artifact/org.netbeans.cluster/platform/overview You can use them as a dependency, possibly excluding things you don't want, but as I already had a predefined module list I ended up copy pasting what I needed from them. Hope all that's at least somewhat useful. Best wishes, Neil --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@netbeans.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@netbeans.apache.org For further information about the NetBeans mailing lists, visit: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NETBEANS/Mailing+lists
