| <html> |
| <head> |
| <title>Interview with NetBeans Community Award 2006 Winner Ramón Ramos</title> |
| <meta name="description" content="Interview with NetBeans Community Award 2006 Winner Ramón Ramos"> |
| <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> |
| <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../../../netbeans.css"> |
| <meta name="Author" content="Ruth Kusterer"> |
| </head> |
| |
| <body> |
| <h1>Interview with NetBeans Community Award 2006 Winner Ramón Ramos</h1> |
| |
| <p><TABLE><tr> |
| <td><a href="http://www.jroller.com/page/ramlog"><img |
| src="../../../images_www/articles/interviews/ramon-ramos.png" class="align-right"/></a></td> |
| <td width="10"> </td> |
| <td><p>Ramón Ramos lives and studies in Germany and is a long-time fan of NetBeans IDE. |
| He uses the NetBeans platform for student projects and is an enthusiastic Module developer |
| and <a href="http://www.jroller.com/page/ramlog">blogger</a>.</p></td> |
| </tr> |
| </TABLE></P> |
| |
| <h3>Ramón, you just won the community award 2006 for your contributions, what was your |
| first reaction? </h3> |
| |
| <p>I read about my nomination in Roman's web log. That was good news. |
| Then I thought, wow, can I win? To be honest, I really wanted to be among the winners. |
| And when I later saw luminaries like Wade Chandler and Tom Wheeler |
| being nominated, too, I thought, uh-oh, this is going to be tough... |
| |
| <p>When I heard my fellow community members had elected me |
| one of the winners, that really made my day. Thank you!</p> |
| |
| <h3>How long have you been using the NetBeans IDE? What got you hooked?</h3> |
| |
| <p>I used NetBeans for the first time at a student job. |
| I think it was about 2001, there was a |
| Forte 1.0 Release Candidate and I think there also was a NetBeans release at the |
| same time, I'm not sure anymore. Later I got a new job where I worked from home |
| a lot. During that time, I didn't use NetBeans, until |
| late in 2005, when I finally bought myself a new PC and I chose to base one of my |
| student projects on the NetBeans platform. |
| This way I gained experience und got hooked. |
| |
| <h3>Tell us about the plug-ins you wrote!</h3> |
| |
| <p>I have written a couple of small plug-ins: |
| My first module was <a href="http://www.jroller.com/page/ramlog/20060227">Web Search</a>, a plug-in |
| for searching a word or phrase selected in the Editor in a web search engine. |
| I also wrote a <a href="http://www.jroller.com/page/ramlog/20060430">Jode/Jad Decompiler integration module</a>, |
| and a simple <a href="http://www.jroller.com/page/ramlog/20060402">local history module</a>, |
| and some more. |
| |
| <p>Apart from that, I updated the old |
| <a href="http://www.jroller.com/page/ramlog/20060410">AspectJ module for NetBeans 5.0</a>. |
| AspectJ is an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect-oriented_programming">aspect-oriented</a> |
| extension to the Java programming language. |
| |
| You can expect the now renamed AspectJ open-source project on sourceforge |
| (<a href="http://aspectj-netbeans.sourceforge.net/">http://aspectj-netbeans.sourceforge.net/</a>) |
| to become active again soon. |
| This will give all the other interested community members the opportunity to contribute again |
| to this project and improve AspectJ support in NetBeans. |
| |
| <p>All of these modules can be installed from my update center: |
| http://people.freenet.de/ramon.ramos/nb/updates.xml</p> |
| |
| |
| <h3>Where do you get ideas for new plug-ins?</h3> |
| |
| |
| <p>NetBeans gave me the opportunity to develop something that is useful for people. |
| Since I learned Java some years ago, I wanted to program something useful in |
| Java — but I couldn't think of anything that had not been done before. </p> |
| |
| <p>So when I came back to NetBeans, I also began to read related web sites, |
| mailing list posts, etc. This is how I found out some things that NetBeans was lacking but |
| which seemed pretty easy to implement. Those things were |
| useful and I really wondered why they weren’t already there. So over the |
| holidays, I just went and implemented them. I was glad to see |
| there were some features I could contribute to NetBeans.</p> |
| |
| <p>Then, there are some <a href="http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t17999">(now old) feature wishlists for NetBeans</a> |
| that I used as additional source of inspiration. I also took a look at the features in other IDEs to see what |
| they have that can be ported. I am also keeping track of feature |
| requests in mailing lists, and so on.</p> |
| |
| <h3>What are your resources? </h3> |
| |
| <p> |
| At first, I went through the <a href="http://platform.netbeans.org/tutorials/">tutorials</a>. |
| They are really nice. Other resources are the <a href="http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/NetBeansDeveloperFAQ">Developers FAQ</a>, |
| the <a href="https://netbeans.org/download/dev/javadoc/">API documentation</a> and javadocs, and then of course the |
| <a href="https://netbeans.org/community/lists/">mailing lists</a> |
| with their incredibly helpful communities. Now and then, |
| I also take a look at the NetBeans sources themselves. |
| |
| |
| <h3>Which IDE features help you most?</h3> |
| |
| <p>Easy answer: The module development wizards. They are very well done and I'm looking forward |
| to seeing more of that. Way to go!</P> |
| |
| <h3>If you could improve one thing about NetBeans, what would that be?</h3> |
| |
| <p>I'd like to see more tutorials that focus on letting people enhance NetBeans itself. </p> |
| |
| |
| <h3>Which tutorial would you like to read next?</h3> |
| |
| <p>I would like to read a very fat book about platform development. |
| |
| <h3>Ramón, thanks for the interview!</h3> |
| </body> |
| </html> |
| |
| |
| |