Outline of Goals

So here I want to explain what I am trying to accomplish with this blog - aside from the general statement of learning the NetBeans Platform API's. I want to get to a very cool (fancy pants?) desktop application that includes geospatial rendering (probably using the NASA World Wind Java SDK) and also tie this together via layers to media types such as images, sound and video (JMF). Sounds very fancy pants-ish, unfortunately I can be a slow learner. Therefore, before I get into any of those advanced topics, I intend to create a very simplistic Swing application and port that to the NetBeans platform. This way, I can do all my learning on a worthless app before moving onto something more useful.

Part of this learning journey will be my discovery of new features to add to my application while reading the excellent Definitive Guide to NetBeans Platform by Heiko Bock. No disrespect to Geertjan's book Rich Client Programming, I just find the other book more suited to my learning style. I own both books and highly recommend both of them. So, just to let you know, I am not completely clueless about the platform development concepts. I have researched the uses of Lookups outside NetBeans, and have implemented the pattern discussed in Fabrizio Giudici's excellent article on NetBeans design idioms (check out his Blue Marine product for an excellent platform application example). Still, this series should hopefully provide a detailed account of the learning curve I follow to get to the final destination.

I don't have a lot of time to learn these things outside of work, so why in the world am I bothering to write a blog about it? The answer is because I believe this will help me to actually get something done - I can imagine that a large group of people are waiting with excitement to hear my next topic. Also, since I tend to forget everything previous to the last 24 hours, I can document my learning as well as help my retention by writing it down.

In the next post, I will begin developing/showing the Swing app which will get ported to the platform. I am checking out the capability to do syntax highlighting for my code to make it more readable. Even blogging is new to me and requires a bit of learning - I am a social software misfit. Until next time....

A side note: I just have to say how happy I am that football is again starting. Go Bears!!! Even though I live in Colorado, I grew up in Chicago (Chicago Ridge), and will always be a Bear fan. Since Chicago Ridge is a SW suburb, I am also a White Sox fan. Any offended Cubs fans can follow this path or this path away from my Blog.