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I understand that all the excitement is about the web and mobile applications. I'm sure if I were 22 again, that's what I would be excited about. Building the very large jGuru.com server 10 years ago pretty much not knocked the excitement out of it for me. Next.
SometimesAnyway, there are also sometimes very good reasons not to build web-based applications. Aside from the difficulty of building rich clients beyond some gee-whiz JavaScript, the first thing I have to do with a web application is come up with a Web server somewhere (and pay for it plus bandwidth). This exposes me to security issues and I have to figure out how to get two computers to communicate with protocols instead of using method calls. It's just one more thing to break and I need to have an active network connection.
I'm sure all of the 22-year-old "VPs of engineering" lurking in the coffee shops in the mission district of San Francisco think I'm just an old guy. It's true. I'm old, but that doesn't mean that I want to use crappy interfaces.really glad people are out there building cool mobile applications and web applications, but please don't deny me the right to use desktop applications and to build myself. So here is what I want: Oracle should fork off the applications framework, clean it up, and ship it as a separate product. The NetBeans IDE is already just an application that sits on top of this framework.
In closing, let me thank Geertjan Wielenga for giving the NetBeans workshop (an excellent instructor and nice guy) and Andreas Stefik for helping explain more about the NetBeans platform via his SodBeans IDE for the visually impaired