An Overview of Netbeans
On February 28th, 2008, I held the fourth Sun Tech Talk of the year at Virginia Tech (and first this semester!). The topic was the Netbeans IDE and I would be delivering the talk. I'll admit that I was a little nervous to step up in front of an audience, but to combat my anxiety I decided to dedicate more time to learning about all of the features Netbeans offers. And in the end, I think that the work culminated in a great talk.
Instead of focusing on only several of its cool features, I decided to gear the talk more as an introduction to Netbeans for my audience. I started off by introducing Netbeans to a mainly Eclipse-using audience, highlighted many of the features unique to Netbeans, demoed a piece of software I had written, and provided free installation DVDs to get them all started.
The program that I showed off during the talk was a fairly simple model-view-controller program that controlled adding classes into a course catalog. I used the GUI builder to build the front-end GUI that could add a new class with specified title, number, department, instructor, etc. The GUI also displayed all current classes in the catalog and updated when a new class was added. I also created a back-end database table with relevant columns in which to store the class records. To tie the two together I built an intermediate Java class that loaded from and added to the database and that also helped in the display of the classes. It was a fairly simple program and I intended it to show the broad scope that Netbeans can handle of some of the features of the code editor.
Overall, the talk went very well. About 25 people showed up to the presentation, which was great considering it was the Thursday before Spring Break. The audience required a little winning over, after all most of them came from an Eclipse background. But as the features began to pile up, there was no ignoring Netbeans. My goal was not to make them all go out and un-install Eclipse and solely use Netbeans (a goal which would be misguided at best). Instead, I sought to show them that YES Netbeans is an enterprise-level IDE that competes with the likes of Eclipse and Visual Studio and NO I'm not asking you to make it your only IDE. I tried to show them how they can work Netbeans into many different types of projects so that they can try it for themselves and see what they like best. I think that particular message resonated very strongly and led many of the students to give it a try.
A link to my presentation:
VT Netbeans Presentation
Instead of focusing on only several of its cool features, I decided to gear the talk more as an introduction to Netbeans for my audience. I started off by introducing Netbeans to a mainly Eclipse-using audience, highlighted many of the features unique to Netbeans, demoed a piece of software I had written, and provided free installation DVDs to get them all started.
The program that I showed off during the talk was a fairly simple model-view-controller program that controlled adding classes into a course catalog. I used the GUI builder to build the front-end GUI that could add a new class with specified title, number, department, instructor, etc. The GUI also displayed all current classes in the catalog and updated when a new class was added. I also created a back-end database table with relevant columns in which to store the class records. To tie the two together I built an intermediate Java class that loaded from and added to the database and that also helped in the display of the classes. It was a fairly simple program and I intended it to show the broad scope that Netbeans can handle of some of the features of the code editor.
Overall, the talk went very well. About 25 people showed up to the presentation, which was great considering it was the Thursday before Spring Break. The audience required a little winning over, after all most of them came from an Eclipse background. But as the features began to pile up, there was no ignoring Netbeans. My goal was not to make them all go out and un-install Eclipse and solely use Netbeans (a goal which would be misguided at best). Instead, I sought to show them that YES Netbeans is an enterprise-level IDE that competes with the likes of Eclipse and Visual Studio and NO I'm not asking you to make it your only IDE. I tried to show them how they can work Netbeans into many different types of projects so that they can try it for themselves and see what they like best. I think that particular message resonated very strongly and led many of the students to give it a try.
A link to my presentation:
VT Netbeans Presentation
