Benefits of the NetBeans PlatformFaster time to market The NetBeans platform provides the services common to desktop applications, such as window and menu management, settings storage, and so forth. So, to write an application that uses it, these tedious aspects of writing an application come for free. The result is that developers get to concentrate on the business logic that implements what the application is actually supposed to do, rather than spend time rewriting what almost every application needs.Accessibility and user interface consistency Another benefit from such an architecture is UI consistency and accessability. Usability is a requirement of anyone building software intended for a commercial audience or wide deployment. By using the NetBeans runtime to build such applications, time is not wasted reinventing the wheel. With a minimum of effort, an application based on the NetBeans Platform can conform to the award-winning Java Look and Feel guidelines, which were designed specifically for consistency, accessability and usability. Users of applications based on the NetBeans Platform get a comfortable, familiar interface.And since the basic logic required for any desktop application is handled by the Platform, the resulting applications are more robust and require less testing than an application entirely coded by hand would - further reducing time-to-market. Accessibility is becoming more and more important to those building applications which need to be accessable to the disabled. Since the user interface is written using Java Swing, accessibility is built in from the ground up. The NetBeans IDE is compliant with Section 508, the United States Government's regulations on accessibility. With minimal effort, applications built on the Platform are as well. Faster turnaround time and better customer experience An application built on NetBeans consists of the Platform and custom modules that implement the functionality specific to that application. NetBeans also offers a technology called AutoUpdate: New or updated modules can be downloaded and updated from right within the application.A vendor building on NetBeans does not have to release an entire new version of a product just to do an update, and force all their customers to download it. And updates can be done incrementally, asynchronously. The teams working on different sets of functionality can deliver to customers when that functionality is ready. Releases do not have to be done in lock-step, with finished functionality not delivered to customers because other components are not yet finished. Cross platform compatibility Because the NetBeans Platform is based on standards and reusable components, pure Java applications based on it will work on any platform that supports Java 2 Standard Edition, including Windows, Linux, Mac OS-X, Solaris, HPUX, OpenVMS, OS/2 and others. The world of software is constantly changing. A way to be sure that what you write today will stand the test of time is to use standards and write cross-platform applications. That is what the NetBeans Platform is for.
Applications based on the NetBeans Platform need require no proprietary binary libraries
or components - just a Java 2 runtime environment on the target platform.
Reuse of existing components If you are building an application that is, for example, also a development tool, you will be able to reuse many of the modules that are part of the NetBeans IDE. And for cases where that is not possible, it is still quite likely that there are modules which do something similar to what you need to do, which you can use as the basis for your own code.Open-source means security The source code to the platform is available to you under an open-source license, to do with as you see fit, under its terms. Even if the NetBeans project disappeared tomorrow (it won't!), you have the source code to your application - all of it. And if you need to modify the platform to suit your needs (you probably won't), you have that freedom to.
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