BANGALORE, INDIA: What are the IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) available for application development in the Open Source world? Here Open Source does not mean PHP only, nor does it mean Ruby or Java. Open Source here means all of them Java, Ruby, PHP, C, C++ and what not.

Typically, there is an IDE for each language and/or technology. But IDEs like Eclipse and NetBeans have changed the game. From within the same IDE, you can develop, run, debug and deploy applications written in different technologies, languages or frameworks. PCQLinux live CD for developers bundles the full featured NetBeans IDE 6.5.

You can boot off the live CD, fire the IDE, create a new project in one of your preferred languages/frameworks and do what you do the best write code. The IDE assists you in the rest. Depending on the language and framework you use, NetBeans may facilitate your development efforts via RAD (Rapid Application Development) - quick drag-n-drop, build and run.

NetBeans makes it a breeze to write code for the latest in the Web 2.0 technology. To showcase the same, in this article we write a small web client in Java for Twitter. Twitter (www.twitter.com) is a popular micro blogging and social networking service. Twitter is used to share short information, in real time, with people you know or with the world.

The web client will use REST to show the direct messages sent to a (or your) Twitter account. Rest stands for Representational State Transfer and can be thought of a simplified form of web services (based on SOAP protocol). An introduction to REST can be found in the article 'SOAP and the REST' found at the URL http://pcquest.

Get, set and go
Boot off the live CD. While booting the live CD will prompt you to accept the NetBeans license. Press to read through the license. Once read, press Y and ENTER to accept the license. To login, click on 'pcqlinux' and type in the password pass@word1.

To launch NetBeans, click on Applications>Prog ramming>NetBeans IDE 6.5. Next, create a new project in Netbeans. Click on File>New Project. Select 'Java Web' in the Categories pane and then select 'Web Application' in the Project pane. Click on 'Next'. For the Project Name, type in TwitterClient. Click on 'Next'. In 'Server and Settings', select 'Personal GlassFish V3' for Server and click on 'Next'. For the Frameworks, select 'Visual Web JavaServer Faces' and click on 'Finish'. This will show up a page called Page1.jsp, in the middle pane, with tabs for design, JSP markup code and Java code

You can create new projects in Netbeans and select amongst a list of open source programming languages and frameworks. Whats more, NetBeans allows you to write desktop, web and mobile applications making it a one stop IDE and RAD tool.