Toni Epple's Blog

This week I participated for the first time as a trainer at a 2-day “NetBeans Platform Certified Training” at the University of Würzburg. It was a great experience. Although we had already moved to a larger room we didn’t have enough places for everyone who wanted to attend. We only had place for about 45 students. David Strupl, the technical lead of JavaFX support for NetBeans and Geertjan Wielenga did the main part of the course. I did a session on the second day about “Porting Swing applications to the NetBeans Platform” (slides).

Davids and Geertjans presentations were great. I especially liked how Geertjan explained the term platform as opposed to a set of libraries, which really makes it easy to grasp the concepts. David did an excellent session about lookup, pointing out that ServiceLoader functionality is just one of the many uses of this great library. He illustrated this by showing the Projects API, where the base interface only has two methods: getProjectDirectory() and getLookup(). The developers of the API provide only the real least common denominator, while giving a standard way to expose the capabilities of Project implementations.

There were two days packed with presentations and a workshop. Students were really eager to get started coding, and it was fun to see them starting NetBeans whenever David or Geertjan did a demo during their presentations. I did mine on porting applications for the first time, and I think it fits quite well. I talked about my experience with the platform for commercial application development, and added a little porting guide with a demo. I’ll talk about this topic in Poland at the NetBeans days in Poznan and Gdansk, and I’ll try to focus even more how standard swing solution relate to their NetBeans counterparts, and where the difference is.

From the questions asked afterwards, I really had the impression that students walked away with a good idea of what’s in the platform, and how it works. Depending on doing additional project work after the course, students become certified associates, engineers or comitters. I had a look at the students assignments for the certificates. Some of them are really great, and I’m looking forward to see them in action.

Thanks to everyone who attended and especially to Pavel for organizing this!

If you want this training to come to your university, contact Sun via the training web page ( http://edu.netbeans.org/courses/nbplatform-certified-training/ )