Thanks for the great Apache NetBeans year!

[Geertjan Wielenga <ge...@apache.org>]

Hi all,

We've had a really excellent year, many thanks to each and every one of you.

The highlight undoubtedly was the fact that we became a top level Apache
project. That was an amazing achievement given the scale and complexity of
our project.

Also, a very significant highlight is our quarterly release cycle that has
set us up for steady progress over the years ahead, many thanks to Neil C
Smith for driving this.

Note that there is a completely new NetBeans book set to be released soon,
many thanks to John Kostaras for getting this done:

https://www.apress.com/gp/book/9781484253694

As well as a room at FOSDEM in Brussels in February where NetBeans will be
well represented, please consider joining us, it's a free event, and an
opportunity to meet NetBeans (and many other) developers from around the
world:

https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/track/free_tools_and_editors/

Kind regards and onwards to another great Apache NetBeans year in 2020!

Geertjan
Apache PMC Chair
on behalf of the Apache NetBeans PMC

Re: Thanks for the great Apache NetBeans year!

[Owen Thomas <ow...@gmail.com>]

I'm often seen writing gushing homilies about Netbeans at about this time
of year, so it would be remiss of me not to sing its praises this year.

For more than 11 years, I've been putting together an implementation in
Java SE of something I patented in 2008, and although there was and still
is a learning curve involved with my work I have found Netbeans to be a
constantly good development environment. I am currently using NetBeans
version 11.0 to develop my applications over Java 8 (perhaps reasonable
caution has given way somewhat to a touch of laziness), but each release of
NetBeans has seen constant improvement. In my work, the core application
logic and extensions to PC devices are written using NetBeans; I have had
to opt of Android Studio to develop an extension for the Android phone.

NetBeans doesn't appear to cast moral aspersions over the fact that I use
Ant. I like that too because I don't use any third party libraries and
hence don't need Maven or Gradle or any other build tool to manage
dependencies. I like the addition of implicit types in the newer releases
of Java, so I may move my applications to Java 10 or later very shortly,
and I feel that I am going to have to eventually fully embrace lambdas at
some point too.

I think my work might be somewhat unique in that in much of it deals with
extensions to the Thread. I use the current thread (the extension to the
current thread) in my code. This way appears to do the job, and I feel that
things might be a bit complicated if I was to start using parallel streams.
But anyway, these things in time will reveal themselves to me.

May NetBeans continue to improve in 2020.

  Owen.

-- 
I'll cut your code at an intensity and from a place of my own choosing.
Clique Space(TM). Anima ex machina.