I recently talked to some NetBeans users who were interested in a demonstration of the features that will be part of NetBeans IDE 7.2. (See the 7.2 New and Noteworthy for the full list.)

One of the new features I demonstrated was this one. In an interface declaration, NetBeans IDE 7.2 will provide a hint, as can be seen in the sidebar below:

When the lightbulb is clicked, or Alt-Enter is pressed, this will be shown:

When the hint is invoked, the user will see this:

And then the user will be able to enter the name of a class, and the name of a package, and assuming the defaults above are taken, a class with this content will be generated:

package demo;

public class WordProcessorImpl implements WordProcessor {

    @Override
    public String process(String word) {
        throw new UnsupportedOperationException("Not supported yet.");
    }
 
}

When I demonstrated the above, the response from the audience was: "That's cool. But it would be even better if..."

• it was possible to implement an interface into an existing class.
  
  
• it was possible to select a class and specify the interfaces that it should implement.
  
  
• it was possible, in the context of a NetBeans Platform application, to specify the module where the class should be implemented.

So I created some issues:

• Implement an interface into an existing class http://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=210804
• Select class and specify interfaces to implement http://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=210805
• Allow user to select module for generating implementation http://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=210807