DeveloperFAQ. Bluemarine: Swing and the NetBeans Platform in the Real World. Like most people working with Java since its early beginnings, my first experience with the technology was with (small) desktop applications: some research stuff during my doctorate and a simple control panel for a healthcare call center. It was the age of AWT, and you really couldn’t do much more. So I soon moved to the server side, where things appeared more robust and promising. They were indeed, and I stayed there for long and became a J2EE Architect. A few years later, I was attracted to the desktop again because of a rising passion for digital photography. I still encountered many problems, but just before I threw the sponge, Sun and the developer community came to the rescue with SwingLabs, java.net and new versions of NetBeans.
Now I am enjoying a (possibly) promising open-source application – blueMarine – which is based on the NetBeans Platform. In this article, I’ll tell you more about blueMarine’s story and review some of the main NetBeans extension APIs. The beginning. Layer.xml. API Index. Platform Learning Trail.