I have been involved with DZone for many many many years. I, quite seriously,

go back a lot of many years with DZone. At the time, Rick Ross and Matt Schmidt were the driving force behind something called Javalobby. Later, Nitin Bharti was involved too, after which I interacted mostly with James Sugrue (who I still need to have a drink with in Ireland), and later still with Mitch Pronschinske. At the time, I was one of the editors on Javalobby.



Near the start of all that, I wrote general pieces of interest in the Java software world. For example, in November 2007, I wrote a pretty

influential article on Javalobby

entitled "What's So Groovy About Groovy?"

It helped developers understand Groovy, in contrast to

things-not-Groovy. I really enjoyed the interview format, especially

interviewing multiple people, about a very clear and simple topic, e.g.,

"What is the Google Collections Library?" and Interview: Porting Open Source Java to Leopard.

I liked the approach of getting to the core players in an issue and

asking the core questions of them. The articles I wrote and discussions I started are relevant to this day, such as How do you parse HTML in Java? That's it, that's all, that's what I

wanted to do, write articles that focused on new and interesting things, right from the source, as well as gather information around an interesting theme.



Then at some point Javalobby became DZone. Fine. Instead of an editor, my role was that of moderator. There was a

dedicated subsite for NetBeans, i.e., NetBeans Zone. We, i.e., the

NetBeans community, posted about 3 or 4 brand new articles on NetBeans

Zone every week. We piped NetBeans Zone through the Welcome Screen of NetBeans and also through planetnetbeans.org. At some point, a lot of NetBeans articles were in the "Five Favorite NetBeans

Features" series, which were really helpful in getting people to understand the unique aspects of NetBeans. Quite a few of them were announcements about new

NetBeans Platform applications. Or there were announcements about

agendas for upcoming NetBeans Days. In short, there was a diverse range

of articles that all related to NetBeans, of course, always on NetBeans

Zone. Whenever there was a NetBeans Day somewhere in the world, we

talked about and promoted NetBeans Zone, etc. We, i.e., the NetBeans community, have been promoting DZone for several years now, including it in our slide decks at conferences, talking about how this is a key place where the NetBeans community shares its insights and tips and tricks and news with the world, etc.



Together with NetBeans Zone, there was also a dedicated

site for Eclipse and for JetBrains, i.e., for IntelliJ IDEA and related

JetBrains products. However, there's no point in providing links to them...

because none of these zones exist anymore. I discovered this by going tohttp://netbeans.dzone.com yesterday and finding that... it simply is no longer there .

Herewith is the correspondence with DZone that followed. It is so absurd that I shouldn't be alone in being aware of it. Also, I'm already getting e-mails from people who have articles published on NetBeans Zone, which no longer exist, and clearly whatever redirects have been set up are not working yet. Suffice to

say, I am going to do everything I can to move over to jaxenter.com. Coman

Hamilton, who runs jaxenter.com, indicated recently to me that if there were

to be enough new content on a regular basis about NetBeans on

jaxenter.com, that he'd set up a subsite dedicated to NetBeans. Since, over the years, we've been contributing 3 or 4 articles a week to DZone via NetBeans Zone, that's certainly enough content to make me think that this is the avenue we should take. Anyone that disagrees with me after

reading the correspondence below is more than welcome to say so! I

remain open to correction and admonishment. If there is anything in the

below where I have overstepped the mark or where I have said something

inappropriate, I am longing to hear about it.