Over at Geertjan’s blog, The Best Feature Of The Upcoming NetBeans IDE 5.5 is the strongest evidence I’ve seen that the mainstream Java universe is really paying attention to that lesson. Sure, over at the excellent Aquarium, you can read about how they’re slaving away in the engine room trying to make Java EE.next simpler and simpler and yet simpler. But I haven’t been convinced that they’ve got to a place yet where they’re going to win lots of converts from PHP and Rails. But this GlassFish+IDE combo is really coming along: in Geertjan’s example, he makes what looks like a basic CRUD app with no coding and no file editing. In particular, it looks like they’re getting close to Rails levels of DRY (“Don’t Repeat Yourself”). Geertjan skips lightly over the database-selection wizard; I wonder how much more than “use these tables” it needs? [Update: He follows up with the details.] And the Rails people will be asking “What is this ‘Deploy’ of which you speak?” But still, we’re in interesting territory. [Update: Not ten minutes after writing this, I ran across Java web frameworks - the Rails influence, which in turn led me to the (excellent, albeit in PDF) Java Web Frameworks Sweet Spots. Did I say “interesting territory”? Interesting times, too.] [Update: It turns out that the infrastructure Geertjan showed off was by Pavel Buzek, who writes about the process and seems like a Major Force for Good. It’s guys like him who are going to cost Berlind the price of a nice dinner.]
