Dopo Sang Shin, pubblicata oggi la seconda, spero di una lunga serie, intervista targata JUG Sicilia: Roman Strobl

Roman Strobl è NetBeans evangelist presso Sun Microsystems. Co-fondatore di Czech JUG ed autore di un frequentatissimo blog. Fa parte del team di sviluppo di NetBeans ed è famoso in tutto il mondo per i suoi talk.

Di seguito il testo integrale dell'intervista:
Mario:
Hi Roman,
first of all: have you ever been to Sicily?
Roman:
Unfortunately I haven't been to Sicily but would love to come! I have
visited Italy many times though. So I am hoping I will come to Sicily
soon.

Mario:
What do you think about JUGs?
Roman:
JUGs are very cool. They represent the real Java community -
developers come, listen to presentations, discuss Java topics and most
important of all they have fun together. As you probably know I am the
co-founder of Czech JUG and I think that the JUG movement is quite
unique - many JUG leaders I know are very passionate about Java and I
also like the spirit of many Java communities I visited - it's mostly
about sharing knowledge, helping others out and making Java stronger
at the same time. Not all JUGs are as active as they could be - the
JUG leaders organize them mostly in their free time. I have visited
many JUGs in past several years as an evangelist - I always enjoy
working with other JUGs because people behind them are passionate
about what they do.

Mario:
Tell me about your experience at JavaONE 2008. What do you think about
that event?
Roman:
My Java One 2008 experience was more about meeting people than about
going to presentations. Of course I saw some very cool talks -- the
keynote demos were interesting even though some of them crashed. The
best session I saw was the JavaPosse BOF, that was really a lot of
fun. Other than that Java One was quite vibrant, and although there
were not many big announcements this year (except for the Consumer
JRE), I had a lot of fun meeting with various Java luminaries and
various friends from different countries. I guess the experience is
different depending on what your interests are - in my case meeting
people was more importnant than learning (I can do that at home), but
I am sure many developers appreciated the learing opportunities - the
program was full of interesting talks.

Mario:
...and now let's talk about NetBeans. Any revelations about next
release? What's the roadmap for NB 6.2?
Roman:
There will be no NetBeans 6.2. Really :) The next release for NetBeans
will be 6.5. We are still working on the plan for 6.5 but some things
are quite clear now - there will be a final version of PHP support
delivered as a special PHP IDE. We also plan to include Groovy support
in the base distribution. We will continue to work on the MySQL
integration and continue to improve performance of NetBeans (it's
already pretty good with 6.1 but why not to make it even better). You
can expect NetBeans to continue to improve the editing experience both
for Java and for many scripting languages (mainly Ruby, JavaScript,
PHP and Groovy). There may be also new support for Python/Jython
coming, but it's too early to say that. We will also include the
JavaScript debugger which is now available on the update center. There
will be more other features for sure, and some of those that I listed
may not make it - as I said the plan is not final yet so we will know
more in a month or so.

Mario:
What are, by your opinion, points of strenghtness of NetBeans that
could persuade an Eclipse user to switch to NetBeans IDE?
Roman:
There are many strenghts of NetBeans. Actually my job is really easy
these days, it is mostly enough to show various features of NetBeans
and current Eclipse users are always surprised and want to give
NetBeans a try. A lot of our users appreciate the ¨out of the box¨
experience - you don't need to hunt for different plug-ins to get
started. NetBeans is easier to use for beginners. We provide support
for desktop, web, enterprise and mobile development - it is all well
integrated together. Everything is available for free - you don't need
to buy expensive plug-ins or pay for different distributions.
Depending on what you work on, we have probably the best GUI builder
out there, easy to use profiler, complete Java EE 5 support, free SOA
tooling, UML, the best Ruby IDE out there (based on many reviews and
blogs), NetBeans is a Swing-based platform. NetBeans is for many
people easier to use, comes bundled with the application server, we
also have very good database support including new integration for
MySQL. Did I mention NetBeans also has a very cool JavaScript editor
and visual JSF tooling? There is so much available - if you are an
Eclipse user you need to do yourself a favor and give NetBeans a try!
Our community has grown by approx. 900% in last 3.5 years, there is
clear confidence that NetBeans user community is growing fast.

Mario:
How many developers are working on the NB project? What's your role in
the team? How the work is organized?
Roman:
I don't know the exact numbers of NetBeans contributers and it's
actually pretty hard to estimate the total number. We have many
contributors from various groups at Sun and also many contributions
from the community. The team of people who work only on NetBeans
consists of several hundreds of Sun employees. But of course this is
not all - as I mentioned we have many contributions outside of Sun as
well. A lot of the planning and organization happens on
wiki.netbeans.org and the future plans are influenced by disussions on
the mailing lists. As for my role - my role on the NetBeans team is
the role of an evangelist - which means I promote NetBeans by
travelling around the globe and delivering NetBeans presentations as
well as by recording screencasts or writing different articles or blog
entries about NetBeans.

Mario:
What's your "background"? Your studies, job experiences, how did you
approached to Sun and NB project team?
Roman:
I have studied computer science at Czech technical university and
already during my studies I worked in a startup where I focused on web
application development, e-security and IP telephony. I started at Sun
as a tester and thanks to my popular blog I became an evangelist (once
my blog became more popular than our CEO's blog Sun realized I could
do more than QA)... and I've been enjoying that job ever since. It's a
lot of fun to travel around the globe and speak about NetBeans at
various conferences!