Rich Client Programming: Plugging into the NetBeans Platform

Forewordby Jan Chalupa

I started using NetBeans Developer 2.0 in the late 1990s, but I didn’t care about its internals until I joined Sun and the NetBeans team in 2000 to work on NetBeans 3.0. I was coming from the world of Win 32 APIs, MFC, and COM, was moderately familiar with Java libraries and Swing, read the “Gang of Four” bible and all kinds of other books on design patterns and object-oriented programming. In many aspects, what I found in the NetBeans APIs didn’t resemble anything I was used to. “What kind of pattern is this Cookie thing?” I wondered. “Why is the class that represents a simple view or window called TopComponent?” “What is the difference among FileObjects, DataObjects, and Nodes?” “SplittedPanel? Doesn’t sound like correct ...