This is a step-by-step example-driven tutorial designed to be worked through chapter-wise. You'll be learning with the help of example code and screenshots that will ensure easier understanding. At the end, you will have developed a complete application on top of the NetBeans Platform. This book is written for developers who are comfortable with Java and Swing and who would like to use a framework as the basis of their Swing application. Zero knowledge of the NetBeans Platform is assumed. The reader is typically a developer (or a group of developers) wanting to create large, distributed, flexible Swing applications. The development team is typically large and distributed and members need to work independently on distinct parts of the application. The end user of the application typically needs to have the ability to install additional features at runtime, after the application has already been installed, without reinstalling the application.