Log Management Technology on the NetBeans Platform

Below follows an interview with Raffael about NetGuardians and its usage of the NetBeans Platform as the framework of their application.

What does NetGuardians do?

NetGuardians SA is a multi-award winning IT business software company founded in 2007 by Joël Winteregg and Raffael Maio, two former researchers from the University of Applied Sciences in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland.

By using a bottom-up approach to achieve top-down objectives, NetGuardians helps medium-sized businesses to improve operational efficiency and maintain service levels by providing IT Administrators and Security Officers with powerful, yet practical solutions.

This philosophy is epitomized by the NG-Screener: a Security Information and Events Management (SIEM) appliance that collects, stores and analyzes the vast amount of heterogeneous log data generated within an organization. Real Time monitoring and Forensic investigative tools enable in-depth troubleshooting and precise trend and statistical analysis to provide a comprehensive overview of an IT infrastructure.

Some screenshots:

As experts in Log Management technology, NetGuardians actively participates in the ongoing standardization group (open group) to implement an industry-wide standard for log data language and formatting.

What are the specific challenges of the kinds of applications you create?

The challenges are multiple, in fact.

• First of all, as a software engineer, most of the time you are not good in art skills (graphics). Thus, you need to build something on an existing platform that looks user-friendly (our first version was 100% Swing and had no drag and drop windows, no minimize, maximize screen, etc). Consequently, our first app was usable but not really user friendly.


• Secondly, building an easy-to-use solution in a complex environment is quite tricky. The combination of "dynamic screens" (drill down into data, plot charts, add filter, etc.) that are fluid and not static is quite challenging.


• Another challenging part is the aspect of a multi-user/mutli-action application that is quite hard to handle with a pure 100% Swing app.

How was the NetBeans Platform chosen and why?

When we decided to change from our Swing application to use a framework, we had basically two choices: NetBeans Platform and Eclipse RCP.

To be honest, at that time I was mainly developing in Eclipse IDE. Therefore, my first choice was naturally Eclipse. However, after several discussion with our R&D team, we noticed that the good thing with the NetBeans Platform is the possibility of reusing our Swing components. At that time, SWT had some issues with memory and we did not want to rebuild all our Swing components in SWT. Therefore, we chose the NetBeans Platform instead.