Xelfi

From APIDesign

NetBeans started as Xelfi student project at faculty of mathematics at Charles University, Prague. Originally we wanted to create Delphi for XWindow system, but later we decided to switch to Java and create the first IDE for Java written in Java.

In the middle of 1995 me and eighty other students were supposed to select a final software project. There was a huge gathering where various professors presented their projects hoping to attract attention of students. There was a project to control real robot - the previous group managed to move it and even speed it up, until it hit the wall. The goal for next project was to slow it down or even stop it to avoid a crash. Nice, but a bit too hardware oriented and I was more a software guy. Then there was a project to build a database system for a hospital - nice and valuable goal to help poor patients, but I was not huge fan of SQL & co. And so on, so on. When the presentation was over, [I]] still didn't know what project to join.

However I wasn't alone. Several other guys were disappointed with the presented choices. We started to chat and agreed what we would like to do: we'd like to build an IDE - something like Delphi, but to run on Linux - e.g. for XWindow system.