Dennis was the most influential one among all computer and/or software engineers of our time. His C payed the way to all modern languages like Java and C++. Unix is still the case study for system programming.

Steve showed us that miracles are possible. His creativity is a good example of how technology mixes with art in modern times. Another good example is James Camaron and his film Avatar.

Long live the legacies of these most remarkable icons of our time !

This is my new home in this wonderful world called blog-o-sphere. I hope to keep you updated on the happenings in (read: inside my head) and around me !! stay tuned….

Go here (www.netbeans.org) to download.

Here is a full listing of new features.

To update the issue please click here.

For those who are new, XML Multiview is a nice feature in NetBeans that helps to create a fantastic and easy to use XML Editor based on any DTD or XSD. Many of the existing NetBeans modules such as Java EE use this API extensively. (for example, web.xml editor). Also this API is used in many NetBeans platform based application as well.

One funny thing that found out today is this : How to find out MAC address on Solaris. I was too, surprised to see why ‘ifconfig -a’ prints mac address only if run as root … interesting..

One thing that made everyone of us curious about the college campus was the rail track right in between the campus as shown here.

We (a group of seven Sun Engineers) reached the campus one day before the event. The day started early which protected us from the direct contact of the radiant Sun. We divided the event into three parellel tracks – Java ME, Java FX and OpenSolaris and occupied the computer labs as per the plan. Myself, Varun and Amit covered Java ME, Glashfish and MySQL. Lawrence and Blesson covered Java FX and Gowtham and Nirmal covered OpenSolaris.

There was a tremendous interest towards Java ME in the students who where mostly in third year of their engineering course. I see many students already wrote few small Java ME programs and have them on their cellphones. The questions they asked showed that they were learning and writing programs since long time and gathered sufficient knowledge and skill.

My session was on Java ME with a demo. Slides here and I happen to get the "Hello Mobile World" program written (on NetBeans 6.5 IDE) , tested (using Nokia S60 emulator) and transfered to my cellphone and ran it live! Also, I was able to hook up the client-server tutorial on NetBeans Mobility learning trail.

This report do not contain photos from the event, since I forgot to carry the camera to the event

On the second day I manned the ‘Connected Developer’ booth with Ashwin and John (http://kenai.com). Most of the visitors were students. Apart from the typical questions that I get all the time when I meet students (number one is ‘How Sun Makes money out of opensource software’ ), there were many technical questions on NetBeans and project kenai. Few students were interested in VirtualBox, and I showed them a live demo of Virtual Box running on my laptop. On NetBeans, many students were asking about Server integration for web projects, frameworks such as Hibernate and struts, profiling a web application and questions like ‘does NetBeans have a cool HTML editor just like the dreamweaver ? why NetBeans does not support SWT, whats the advantage of NetBeans over eclipse, how can I migrate NetBeans 3.x application into the latest one and where to look for help on this, can I do ‘this’ in JavaFX, how can I get started with JavaFX and few more questions that I cannot remember now…

Many students were intersted in writing plugins for NetBeans IDE, using VirtualBox, getting started with JavaFX, Project Kenai, Zimbly, OpenSolaris Project looking glass and some more ..

Overall it was a great experience to meet many students and ofcourse, my blog readers ..

snaps from the event… first my session on NetBeans platform development :

second the fun event in the evening to unwind…