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“Virtual globe platform Gaea+ has evolved from a specialised flood simulation visualisation tool implemented as part of a research project. Initial releases were implemented in a pure Swing, which, ...

“Virtual globe platform Gaea+ has evolved from a specialised flood simulation visualisation tool implemented as part of a research project. Initial releases were implemented in a pure Swing, which, although being a nice API, still requires a lot of work to build complex and production ready applications. In late 2009 we realised that a vast majority of time was spent on implementing generic functionalities such as portable module system and window manager, instead of working on actual problems that would push the platform to the next level.

After a thorough survey of available platforms and experimental ports of the visualisation core of Gaea+, we decided to build the next release on top of the Netbeans Rich Client Platform. Netbeans Platform provides a number of excellent common APIs extending not only the Swing but also other aspects of a modular application development. This talk will present and review some of the major benefits of Netbeans Platform with a number of used and customised API examples. The talk will also point out some of the difficulties we faced during the transition to the new platform.