The NetBeans Team is pleased to announce the return of its two community testing programs, NetCAT and NetFIX, for the NetBeans IDE 6.9 release cycle. NetBeans 6.9 feature highlights include in short: NetBeans Platform OSGi interoperability Many enhancements in Editor Improved Java FX tooling Java EE 6 improvements Better PHP, Ruby & C/C++ support and much more... To help test NetBeans 6.9 development builds, report bugs and RFEs, sign up for NetCAT, our popular beta testing program. As a NetCAT participant, you provide feedback to our development team and therefore influence the stability and performance of the NetBeans IDE. The requirement is simple: if you can spare a minimum of four hours a week for the next three months, then sign up! That's not all. Our NetFIX program is looking for experienced Java developers who enjoy contributing code. Participating in NetFIX is an opportunity to have your name included in the NetBeans source code repository. For former NetCAT participants, NetFIX is also an ideal next step in contributing to the NetBeans project since you learn about NetBeans APIs in the process. So sign up today and join fellow community developers to help grow a more robust NetBeans IDE! At the end of the NetBeans 6.9 cycle, top participants in both programs receive community recognition as well as gifts from the NetBeans team. If you have any questions about either of the two programs, please contact NetBeans Community Manager Jiri Kovalsky.

Netbiscuits is the mobile publishing platform that enables eBay and many other major brands for the mobile Web. As a cloud-based software service it allows you to take advantage of its advanced technology to set up your own mobile Web projects and services. To support mobile web developers using the NetBeans IDE, we created JAM, a plug-in that facilitates coding for Netbiscuits. If you want to learn more about JAM for Netbiscuits please register for our upcoming webinar. Netbiscuits provides a 30 day free trial. After this period you can upgrade to a free of charge Developer Edition that allows you to set up an unlimited number of mobile websites. The Netbiscuits platform enables you to create and deliver web content and services easily and efficiently for any mobile device. It allows you to exploit the rich internet capabilities of high-end mobile phones like the iPhone, Android or BlackBerry devices, and also guarantees optimized delivery to the less expensive but highly popular web-enabled mass market feature phones as well.

This document is a quick demonstration of how to create a simple NetBeans Platform application. You will use Maven archetypes to create the NetBeans Platform application and module. You will use the Swing UI toolkit and "Matisse" GUI Builder to create a window component in the module.

How to develop rich user interfaces that also work on Java ME based touch screen devices -- using SVG UI widgets.

This tutorial shows how to use NetBeans IDE 6.7/6.8 to work with Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) to generate Java classes based on XML documents.

Every NetBeans user is an evangelist! Download a copy of our latest datasheet for NetBeans IDE 6.8 and use it to help spread awareness and encourage adoption of your favorite IDE. The NetBeans IDE Datasheet is a handy reference guide for giving others information about the tool. With its concise summary of product highlights, we highly recommend it for company or university presentations, user group meetings, conferences and more. Visit the NetBeans Evangelism Presentations page for additional resources. Download the NetBeans IDE 6.8 Datasheet

Get a preview of the new hints in the Java Editor for NetBeans IDE 6.9.

Patients receive the right medication, at the right dosage and at the right time with BBraun's Outlook Safety Infusion System, built on the NetBeans Platform

An interview with Lalit Pant, the creator of Kojo, a computer learning environment for children, based on Scala and built on the NetBeans Platform.

Read this article on how to develop Mobile Websites with NetBeans IDE and Netbiscuits.

Looking for new contributors and fresh perspectives for your open source software project? Through the Google Summer of Code™ program, we fund students worldwide to work with mentors from the FLOSS community on a three month coding project. Over the past five years, we've successfully paired nearly 3,400 students "with more than 3,000 mentors from backgrounds spanning industry to academia, with some spectacular results: more than 8 million lines of source code produced and over $20M in funding in support of open source development. We're particularly excited by the social ties our students form through the course of the program. We've connected people in more than 100 countries, and hope to bring people from even more places into the Google Summer of Code community this year. We're looking forward to our sixth year and welcoming another group of 1,000 student developers to the program.

We're now accepting applications from open source projects who wish to act as mentoring organizations. We'll be taking mentoring organization applications until Friday, March 12th at 23:00 UTC. Our list of approved organizations will be published on the 2010 Google Summer of Code site on March 18th. Interested students will then have several days to discuss their ideas with the accepted organizations before student applications open on March 29th.

Check out our Frequently Asked Questions page for more details and a preview of the application. And remember, if you have any questions, you can always find us in the Google Summer of Code Discussion group or in #gsoc on Freenode. Best of luck to all of our applicants!

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

The Eclipse Foundation today announced new initiatives to support the ongoing growth of the Eclipse Mylyn ecosystem. The open source Mylyn project is a widely extended framework for integrating task and application lifecycle management (ALM) tools with the Eclipse IDE. The project will create new sub-projects representing key IDE/ALM integration categories. New projects include: the "Tasks" project for integrating task and change management; "SCM" for integrating source code management; "Build" for integrating build management and continuous integration; and "Review" for collaborative code review. The new sub-project leadership will support a broader range of leading Agile vendors contributing to the ongoing evolution of Mylyn.

The Eclipse Foundation and Eclipse member companies are pleased to announce the spring 2010 training class series. The training is an excellent opportunity for software developers and architects to learn more about Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP), Equinox & OSGi and Modeling technologies. Eclipse experts will lead the sessions, providing practical experience through classroom instruction and hands-on labs. Virtual and on-site classes have been scheduled in several countries from April 12 to May 28, 2010. Students who register at least 3 weeks in advance will receive a 10% discount on the registration price.

The fourth alpha of Python 2.7 is now available for download.

A release candidate of Python 3.1.2 is now available for download.

Next week several Googlers will be attending and presenting at the 41st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2010). From March 10-13, Leslie Hawthorn and Cat Allman from the Open Source Programs Office will be in Milwaukee, WI, USA to talk about Google’s open source student programs, Google Summer of Code™ and the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. Check out Google’s vendor session on Friday to hear more from Leslie and Cat. Leslie will also be speaking at a roundtable and panel discussion with Hal Abelson from the Google App Inventor team at the Humanitarian FOSS Symposium on Wednesday.

If you are interested in learning more about Google’s activities in computer science education, make sure to attend some of the talks we have scheduled or drop by the Google booth!

By Ellen Ko, Open Source Team