Interview: Intelligence Gathering Software on the NetBeans Platform

Chris Bohme is the chief software architect at Pinkmatter Solutions – a small, specialized software development company in South Africa. Pinkmatter has been working with a company called Paterva for the past few years to build Maltego - a tool for data visualization, reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. Maltego is used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, network security professionals and large corporates to discover and analyze information.

In a nutshell, how does Maltego work?

Maltego models information as entities (e.g., persons, e-mail addresses) and relationships between them. Relationships are discovered by running pluggable functions (called transforms) on the entities. For example, when running a social network transform on my e-mail address, one would discover my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.

Out of the box, Maltego ships with over 150 transforms that mainly relate to open source intelligence. However, an organization using Maltego user can easily create their own transforms that run on their internal data.

The concept of transforms makes data gathering very quick and easy which is one of the aspects that sets it apart from some of its competitors like Analyst Notebook, which has been the de-facto tool for investigation and intelligence analysis.

Why and how did you choose to use the NetBeans Platform as the basis of this application?

We have actually been using the NetBeans Platform at Pinkmatter since 2002, back in the days of NetBeans 3.2, when the NetBeans Platform was not really separate from the IDE and the only real documentation for NetBeans Platform users was the source code.

Back then Pinkmatter was building a network security management tool we called “Palantir”, which was never released but which would later form the basis framework for Maltego. (Ironically one of Maltego’s competitors is now made by a company called Palantir Tech.)

I was using Forte (Sun’s customized version of NetBeans) as my IDE for Java development and realized that I would need very similar features in Palantir – global selection management, runtime composition (i.e., modules), copy/paste/undo/redo, auto-update, property grid, window manager, system palette etc. So I began reading through the sources and building Palantir as a NetBeans module while trying to remove as much of the IDE parts as possible.

I immediately fell in love with its design and complexity (yes, complexity – no matter how long you have been using the NetBeans Platform, there is something new you can learn every day) – but there was a definite beauty to it and I knew that following its architecture guidelines would save me from the certain “spaghetti-death” to which all large UI applications I had seen thus far were doomed from the start.

What are the main advantages of the NetBeans Platform to you?

On a personal level, working with the NetBeans Platform early on in my developer career has shaped my mindset around application design. As such, the NetBeans Platform source code was one of my most influential teachers when it comes to API design and architecture of large complex applications.

I started looking for similar patterns in the frameworks I was building using other programming languages and it has helped me identify designs that are “right” and those that are “wrong”. (When it comes to API design I believe that “truth, like beauty, is not a matter of opinion” :-) )

On the level of Maltego, I think the benefits are fairly obvious – there is a platform that comes with lots “free stuff” right out of the box. And hey, the best thing is, someone else improves, fixes and supports all this free stuff while you can focus on your specific problem domain.

If I were to rephrase the question to read “what in the NetBeans Platform couldn’t I live without?” – well, it would be the features related to runtime composition. The fact that components can be registered declaratively (for example in layer files) and are added as modules that get loaded at runtime shapes the overall design and maintainability and is something a modern application cannot do without.

As Maltego matures, instead of removing the dependency on some NetBeans APIs and replacing them with our own, we tend to use more and more of what the NetBeans Platform (and even the IDE) has to offer. This is a very good indication to me that a) NetBeans Platform was the right choice to build Maltego on and b) that the evolution of the NetBeans Platform is in line with the needs of its users (well, at least for us).

Continue to part 2 of this interview...

Were there things that pleasantly surprised you while working with the NetBeans Platform?

There were many.... but let’s start with backward compatibility. A lot of the Palantir code from 2002 can still run in NetBeans 6 – that is 3 major versions and 8 years later! – not a small feat to achieve for an API designer.

As another example, for the upcoming 3.0 of Maltego we redesigned our underlying information model to allow a user to model entities with a multitude of properties. We needed to allow the user to configure these using many kinds of weird and wonderful type editors... and actually the good old PropertySheet works well for that, can be highly customized and takes up very little screen real estate.

In general I am amazed every time how efficiently NetBeans can handle so many modules (and merged layer files)!

What could be improved?

Well, I have this gripe with the wizard framework. Although sufficient for the IDE, there is a lot to be desired from wizards when used in other applications. How about re-using wizard panels for editing something in a dialog (panels as tabbed panes for example)? Or quick and dirty mechanisms to disable the Cancel button or intercept it to cancel a background thread? (I know, I know, stop complaining, Chris, and contribute something of that sort – yes... one day when Maltego has grown up and I am no longer working nights.)

But in the end I think that in spite of all the great efforts that have been made, documentation is still a limiting factor when it comes to the adoption and effective use of the NetBeans Platform. There are a number of really good books, blogs and tutorials, however, I feel there is a need for something like “An Architect’s Guide for Designing Applications for the NetBeans Platform” – something that focuses more on core design decisions that have to be made before getting started. For example, “how is your global selection management to work?” and “what mechanisms does the NetBeans Platform provide for that?”

Any tips or tricks for other NetBeans Platform developers?

• Read every book that has ever been published about the NetBeans Platform.


• Read and take note of tips published on blogs – you might not need them today but in 6 months time you will remember that there is a smart way to do something. I check planetnetbeans.org every day for interesting articles.


• Keep a copy of the NetBeans Platform sources around (you can download them in a handy ZIP file and don’t even have to do a checkout). Whenever there is something that you don’t understand or that seemingly does not work, grep the sources for the relevant classes.


• Don’t feel you have to make use of NetBeans APIs all the time. Sometimes it makes sense to just use a JTable instead of creating a Node implementation with OutlineView. As that component gets more full featured, you can always refactor it and replace it with a suitable View.


• The default lookup is your friend!

Finish this sentence: "If I had known..."

Actually, if I had known that it is possible (and easy) to replace the default implementation of ContextGlobalProvider I would have more hair left on my head! (Before I read Tim’s blog entry, activating a TopComponent would amount to changing the global selection – something that is not valid for all applications – and boy did I struggle...)

What's the future of the application?

We are close to releasing Maltego 3.0 – the next big milestone in the life of our beloved baby. This release brings many new features with it, not least of all a slick new look (thanks to some of the beautiful work done by the likes of Gunnar Reinseth, Mikael Tollefsen and Kirill Grouchnikov):

Our ultimate vision is to evolve Maltego into an autonomous information monitoring system – something like an IDS (intrusion detection system), but for information. The threats to organizations (or governments) on the internet are no longer constrained to attacks on their network infrastructure (the origin of the term IDS) but information about them, their competitors or employees floating around on the internet can seriously harm them. Think of it as a highly customizable, intelligent Google Alert, which is fed from the internet as well as private, internal databases.

Subsequent releases will bring us closer to that vision with geo-spatial data, time base analyses and live, real time data feeds.