JavaFX
JavaFX developers kept the
adoption
momentum rolling this week, starting with Carl Dea who wrapped up his
proof of concept series and encouraged
developers to try JavaFX by saying, “it’s not every day that you
can start from the beginning to learn a soon-to-be popular language.”
Nik Silver, who recently created a JavaFX applet for The Guardian,
described
JavaFX as “kind of a cross between Javascript and Java, and,
against the odds, manages to combine good elements of both with a bit
of extra magic thrown in,” pointing out that JavaFX “allows you
to integrate Java easily.” Finally, blogger John O’Conner discussed
the advantages of mixins in JavaFX 1.2, over “duck typing” used
in other languages saying the mixins feature “is truly a mixture of
both abstract class and interface features.”

NetBeans
NetBeans users were quick to
praise the
IDE this week with blogger Jack Warnes saying
“NetBeans is a great development environment,” pointing out that
“it can be used for a wide variety of programming languages.” The
blogger at CodeWeblog.com said
“NetBeans is a good choice” for developing applications because
it has strong functions, and noted that NetBeans is “a lot better
than the powerful Eclipse.” Blogger Benny from The Computeress
recommended
NetBeans because of how easily it “can take scripts from one
language and put them into a project with another,” and said “I
would surely recommend NetBeans.” Finally, Nate Burchell stated
that “NetBeans has been invaluable as I have been learning the Java
language and syntax,” noting that “it will alert you when you
have made a syntax error.”

OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris bloggers generously
shared
helpful tips they discovered while working in the OS this week. A
blogger from Relevance Found posted
two quick installation and setup hints that described how to set up
VNC using the built-in OpenSolaris VNC server and how to set up CIFS
file sharing with a built-in OpenSolaris CIFS server. Blogger Simon
recorded
all the steps needed to completely restore the OpenSolaris NAS by
setting up a mirrored ZFS root boot pool, while a blogger from
Morph3ous’s Weblog described
how to use OpenSolaris and ZFS to build an energy-efficient NAS.

OpenOffice
Enthusiastic OpenOffice users
continued
to praise the office suite this week, with a blogger at Open-tube
describing
OpenOffice’s Writer as “one of the best open source word processors
available today,” noting that “it is a fine replacement for
Microsoft Word.” Felicia Williams from No Job for Mom! raved
about how easy the office suite was to use, saying “anyone
currently using Word or Excel should be able to transition from
Microsoft to OpenOffice easily.” Finally, a blogger at Unixmen
described
OpenOffice as “the leading open-source open software suite,”
which he made even better with the help of freely available
extensions.