Oracle are hosting a full day of activities and content for the NetBeans community.
NetBeans Day 2014 will take place right before JavaOne 2014 on Sunday 28 September at Moscone South 200. It is open and free to JavaOne attendees.
NetBeans has sometimes been overlooked in the tech press, compared to other Java IDEs. However, a number of recent polls from java.net and jaxenter.de have placed NetBeans in the top two for Java IDEs. Furthermore, in recent years there has been a consistent upward trajectory of activity and development of the tool (and plugins), both from Oracle and the wider community.
Recent versions of NetBeans have included first-class support for Java 8, best-in-class Maven support, full Java FX and Java EE 7 support and additional configurations to support technologies like HTML 5 and Javascript (including frameworks such as AngularJS) as well as PHP, Groovy and C/C++.
NetBeans Day 2014 will follow a format that eschews the traditional speaker and slides in favour of panel discussions with live demos. James Gosling will be moderating a panel on Java, Raspberry Pi and small devices. Other Java experts appearing during the day include Adam Bien, Martijn Verburg and Markus Eisele. Participating companies include VMWare, Boeing, ZeroTurnaround, JElastic, jClarity and Vaadin.
Tools and technologies will be a key theme of NetBeans Day 2014, with particular emphasis on the productivity gains made possible by native integration for Java EE and Maven that NetBeans provides out of the box. There will be further sessions on the plugin ecosystem and development of your own plugins.
A new element for 2014 is a session dedicated to educators who use NetBeans in the classroom. Panellists from universities, colleges and schools around the world will discuss topics such as using NetBeans as a first teaching IDE, and the requirements of software education in the modern environment. A new initiative to enable educators to connect and share educational content (such as lesson plans for teaching Java and using NetBeans) will also be announced.
The main tracks of JavaOne also contain additional NetBeans sessions. Full details of all sessions can be found at: https://netbeans.org/community/articles/javaone/2014/index.html
InfoQ caught up with Geertjan Wielenga, Principal Product Manager for NetBeans at Oracle, to learn a little more.
InfoQ: What would you say the main focus of NetBeans is? What makes it special?
InfoQ: Has that focus continued under Oracle's stewardship?
InfoQ: What's special about NetBeans Day?
InfoQ: Can you talk about the format for the day a bit?
with NetBeans in a series of quick demos by enthusiastic and well known Java experts. Should a speaker turn out to be less appealing than you might have thought, all you need do is hang on for about 5 minutes, and then another speaker will take over and wow you with their latest
experiments in the context of Java and NetBeans.
InfoQ: What's the best thing about NetBeans? Any final thoughts?
