An article in Javalobby reports on the adoption by NASA of the NetBeans Platform. Geertijan Wielenga writes about the experiences of Sun Senior Staff Engineer Tim Boudreau in training NASA staffers on the use of the NetBeans platform.

Boudreau says his work chiefly concerned assisting NASA personnel "strip down" the elements of the Matisse GUI builder in NetBeans IDE that a non-programmer would not require in designing a screen and mapping components to the measurement inputs that will require monitoring in the post-spaceshuttle era.

Boudreau said, "NASA needs a designer environment which is simple enough for a non-programmer hardware engineer to use when designing a Swing GUI to show these various measurements. There are many similar systems that are part of launching a spacecraft that are all in need of human monitoring when the very complex process of preparing a spacecraft for launch is taking place."

Among the changes Boudreau reports having made to make Matisse more easily customizable are creating the ability to globally hide the additional custom property editors that allow you to bind property values to values from other components. In the form editor, he notes, everything has a custom editor, where you can choose 'get it from the component' or 'get it from custom code'. Those features are too complicated for a non-programmer, nor are they useful to a non-programmer. "It is not the job of a hardware engineer to write the logic of the system. We also suppressed a couple of property categories such as those relating to beans binding, since these don't make sense in this context," Boudreau maintained.

Boudreau conceded that these "improvements" were really more tweaks than anything else, adding that NASA has its own project template and that they're reusing the NetBeans built-in support for Java projects. He adds that some custom actions for the project which will find the screen class within the project and run it in a test environment with simulated data were also written.

He further explained that NASA's user interface is very visual, noting as an example that an operator monitoring the fueling of a spacecraft, will actually see a picture of a tank and a pipe leading to a spacecraft that looks like the real thing and shows measurements at the same time

According to Boudreau, NASA was able to incorporate its own Swing components into Matisse in such a way that these Swing components could be used to model their launch procedures and other similar scenarios. He explained that involved some custom property editors and resulted in a new tutorial fell out of this process: Integrated Property Editors in NetBeans.

At this point Wielenga directed questions to Tom Wheeler, a member of the NetBeans community and a participant in the NASA project, who said the NASA personnel raised many of the same questions he had about NetBeans when he began working with it five years ago. This made him prepared from the outset to address their concerns.

Boudreau said his approach with NASA personnel was similar to the approach he has taken with other concerns he consulted with on NetBeans, which involves spending three days doing the standard training, and then another two days focusing on the things they were likely to need: specifically, the functionality they were likely to implement. He said this involves sketching the architecture of what they are building and then making sure they know and understand what they need to use. This consulting is all part of Sun's strategy for making money on open source, he said.

The next steps are up to NASA, Boudreau concluded, pointing out that, equipped as they are now with the tools they need, the next steps are to finish creating the components they will use, get them all embedded into modules so they are automatically installed into the Matisse GUI builder's palette, and then start using it in production.

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