Phantom Reference

I can kill but I ain't a killer

Sun Tech Days 2008 - NetBeans Pod

I gave some cool demos today in the NetBeans pod in Sun Tech Days that happened in Hyderabad. The crowd were enthusiastic most of the time and a little obnoxious some times. Obnoxious to the point of looking under your desk for any goodie. Overall it was a very good response. I started showing some Web Stack demos on 1/08 and showed them how NetBeans can be used for PHP and Ruby development.

The questions from the group can be mostly classified under SOA capabilities, Mobile development and performance. Almost everybody asked me to compare NetBeans IDE with Eclipse IDE. After repeating again and again for some 55 times I conceded by saying 'Choose the IDE that fits your requirement. Never get influenced by the NetBeans site or the evangelists'. That said, guys grow up. Use NetBeans IDE. It rocks like nobody's business. This one particular person got curious when I showed him some PHP demos. He wanted to know if there are any cake like framework support. After seeing the demo, I believe, he went back happy. I know he already made a decision. Because there are not much of open source PHP IDEs available today.

The part of the day I liked was when I got to talk about Solaris specific features that NetBeans boasts off like the DTrace plug-in. I showed the crowd how they can trace packages loaded by any Java application using this plug-in. Many were interested and wanted to use but they have no option to try it out, since they develop applications on Windows. Again, grow up guys. It was overall an exciting experience to talk with the students and the community and find out what they are looking for in an IDE.

I happened to be in the same pod (NetBeans) for last year's Tech Days. I still remember not many guys were impressed with NetBeans. This time, NetBeans really came around with its 6.0 release, which some students claim is best suited for their needs than any other similar development tool. End of the day, when I was loosing my air, Roumen came and bailed me out. Tomorrow it is going to be another day but I won't compare NetBeans with Eclipse.

( Feb 27 2008, 05:32:54 AM PST ) Permalink