Today, I downloaded and tested NetBeans 6 Preview release (M9). It seems to be stable enough for production work as well. We were waiting for some stable release of Net Beans IDE version 6 for quite some time. This was since we had decided to use unified EL in new version of our web application framework 'netForce'. Tomcat 5.x does not support unified EL; and NetBeans 5.x does not support Tomcat 6. So we had no option but to wait for the release of version of NetBeans IDE that can support Tomcat 6. NetBeans 6 is scheduled to be released in last quarter of 2007 but the preview release seems to be stable and promising enough to encourage us to use this IDE for active development of new version of our applications. Kudos to the NetBeans team. We are also impressed with other overall improvements in IDE. Most of our work is done using NetBeans IDE. The only exception being reporting, for which we have to use Eclipse since we are using BIRT reporting engine. BIRT being an open source software, I wonder if someday we will have a NetBeans module providing support for BIRT.

A while back I was looking for a JavaScript library that can make writing javascript easy for our web applications. One of my goals was to find something that does its job unobtrusively. It was important since I believe that even if the browser can not support javascript, our application should be able to provide basic functionality to the user using plain vanilla HTML interface. All our requirements were fulfilled in jQuery. It's small, fast and let's you do things in less lines of codes. jQuery is all about finding stuff and doing things. For example it let's you find all the <a> tags that have class attribute value of popup. Then you can attach events to show them in popup!  The good thing is that in case the browser does not support javascript your link tag will show up as plain vanilla link tag. So users will be able to at least browse to the page pointed by the link.

So if you are looking for a great javascript library, go for jQuery. It's at jQuery.com

For me, I confess I have fallen i love with jQuery.

Sun's new Ajax framework jMaki is so cool that it lets you mix and match the various javascript libraries available. For example, you can use one dojo widget and another custom widget.

maki, means wrapping things and guess what we did next - wrapped it up in our web application framework 'netForce' as a plug-in. We are still exploring how jMaki can hep us use various ajax components and technologies in unified and simple way.

While jMaki is cool enough and it is very easy to add widgets to your jsp page or web application, I think for web based products one should try to find a common javascript library that can do most of the stuff needed. Dojo is supposed to offer all that we may need in a very clean way. Let's wait to get it mature enough.

This is the first entry of this blog and I thought telling you all about the hats I wear. Yes I changed my designation on this blog as cEo which emphasizes 'E'  which represents much more than Executive as Zaidsoft is small technology focused firm so here everyone wears as many hats as possible. Me too!

So for me E means in some sense 'Everything' at least by the kind of work i have to do.

Life in small technology companies is quite different from those bigwigs where everyone is in charge of something very specific. So if someone asks the CEO about something technology related the obvious answer you may expect will be that "Please contact Mr. A as I think I am not the right person to talk about this". Well, if you ask me the same sort of question, you can pretty much expect me to answer it right away without delegating it to someone else.

So then sometimes I think, the work culture of small firms makes them more agile towards addressing customer needs and so it appears better if you put CEO like cEo.