Netbeans Day (Monday, May 15, 2006)

I'm going to the free Netbeans day that Sun is holding right before JavaOne.
I've been telling people for about a year now that Java on the client is going to be a big deal in 2007.

No, really. I mean it.

In the long term, two things are happening. Clients, including cell-phones, are getting more and more powerful. And, at the operating system level, things are fracturing– there's more Apple and more Linux on the desktop (and a ton of different versions of Windows, from 98 to XP and beyond). Cell-phones are equally fractured. And in the "early adopter" and "power user" crowds, things are far more heterogenous than in general.

Which means that some sort of generic client-side programming layer (e.g. a VM that runs on all these platforms) is, potentially, a compelling thing. When you add in the Java-based clients will be able to share some code with servers written in Java, it becomes easy to guess that Java on the client is headed for an upswing.

I also think that the "Generic Client Side Application" model that both Eclipse (as in, Eclipse RCP) and Netbeans have taken is absolutely the correct way to go about this. It's a long term strategy, but building a robust container model for the client-side is definitely an enabler.

Which is why I've been so interested in reading what's going on with Netbeans. And why I'm going to the free Netbeans day that Sun is holding right before JavaOne.