Accounting Software on NetBeans

I'm Henry Arousell, product manager and co-developer of the BL Ekonomi-suite of business software here at Björn Lundén Information, Näsviken, Sweden.

On November 1 last year, we released the first of a planned five to six NetBeans Platform applications that together, via the module system, will be our next generation business software.

Software Development at Björn Lundén Information

We build software both for internal use by our organization, as well as commercially available software. Most are based on Java and all are heavily dependent on (and also to some extend contribute to) a wide variety of open source projects.

The BL Ekonomi product is a client-server solution where some parts of the client experience will be available via the web also. Having said that, however, the typical use case of for our product is not necessarily best realized via the web. We find that most people do their book keeping on their business computer and that the issue of installing a client is really a non-issue compared to the limitations of web based platforms. For example, our footprint is about the size of that of the Spotify client.

Our customers do, however, want to be able to check statuses or do other minor tasks—and for those tasks we will make web solutions available. We feel that the functionality given to us by the NetBeans Platform is a huge asset, given the problems we want to solve.

The NetBeans Platform offers a variety of features that are useful in their own right, such as the modularity, customization support (of everything from menus to installed features), to multiple window support, platform independence, and the list goes on.

NetBeans Platform Wishlist

Here are a few:

• Continue the good work of removing XML in favor of annotations.


• Better documentation of more or less hidden features.


• If JNLP/Webstart technology evolved and was mature enough to where the IDE could be distributed via JNLP (yes, I know that module/plugin support is not designed for this now) that would solve a tremendous infrastructure challenge that would make NetBeans Platform products even more appealing.

Screenshots

We think that the NetBeans Platform is a very powerful set of tools and one of these days we'll show up in Prague to drink a toast to the great engineers that continue to develop it! Until then—thank you very much!