INDUSTRY

Complete Translations Available For: Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese and Traditional Chinese Other Language Contributions In Progress, Including: Albanian, Azerbaijani, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish and Swedish: Sun Microsystems, the creator of Java technology, the Solaris Operating System and the world's leading contributor of open source code, along with the worldwide NetBeans open source community announced the availability of the NetBeans 5.5 Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese and Traditional Chinese. In addition, the NetBeans Translation Project has received numerous other language contributions including: Albanian, Azerbaijani, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish and Swedish. A number of these language translations are the result of interest from Java User Groups around the world. The recent release of the NetBeans 5.5 IDE in Brazilian Portuguese is a testament to the efforts of NetBeans community members and Java technology developers who collaborated through the NetBeans Translation Project to help localize the IDE for their fellow developers. Michel Graciano, a software developer of KSI Solucoes em Informatica and member of SouJava, a large Brazilian Java User Group, was the project lead for the Brazilian Portuguese translation. "The NetBeans IDE is my main development environment. I saw several problems with new Java software programmers not knowing English well enough to use it and noticed that having a really good internationalized platform is also important. Since I am a Swing developer, the experience gained with internationalization features in a big project is also really important for my career. Besides, it is a good way to spread NetBeans software within Brazil, where many government organizations and universities require building applications with open source, localized software. In the end, it makes a new Java technology programmer's life easier," said Michel Graciano. "Community participation is fundamental for the success of an open source project like NetBeans. The translations done by co-developers are perfect examples of the community taking co-responsibility for the success of the project. While customizing the code for their own needs, companies and developers are helping to create a much better product that will benefit a much larger community. By supporting initiatives like those and also by involving lead community members with the NetBeans Dream Team Program, we are focusing our efforts to empower the NetBeans community. That will be our measure of success," said Bruno Souza, NetBeans Community Manager at Sun. NetBeans 5.5 IDE in Traditional Chinese was done completely by Chin-Lung (James) Yu of Taiwan, who is currently a PhD student in the Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA. "I started programming in Java software in 1997 and won the second place JavaCup programming competition in Taiwan. In Taiwan, many Java software learners and developers still feel more comfortable working with a Chinese-based IDE. For these people, there seems to be a barrier to accept the English-based IDE. I hadn't taken NetBeans software seriously until I saw the NetBeans 5.5 IDE, which was so attractive to me, so I started working with it and translating it to Traditional Chinese," said Chin-Lung (James) Yu. Sun also continues participation in the NetBeans Translation Project through the Japanese and Simplified Chinese versions. A number of other localization projects are currently under way and the Translation Project (its Wen site) is the location where community members can help with localizing all or different parts of the NetBeans IDE. The NetBeans IDE continues to gain tremendous adoption across the globe. Sun is sponsoring the NetBeans Day World Tour to bring NetBeans software content and information to developers locally. The NetBeans Day World Tour kicked off in May 2006 and will continue its trek across the continents until it wraps up in San Francisco at the JavaOne Conference 2007 in May. Upcoming stops include Hyderabad, India,Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia , London and Paris. For a full list of NetBeans events visit: its Web site.