Student Views and Reviews: Sun on Campus

A new session of the free 15-week JavaFX Programming (with Passion!) online course will begin August 25.  This is a great course to get you introduced to the JavaFX programming language and covers GUIs, Animation, RESTful Services, and WidgetFX amongst a host of other topics. To register, all you have to do is send a blank e-mail to this alias: javafxprogramming-subscribe@googlegroups.com

The first session of the free 15-week JavaFX Programming (with Passion!) online course ended last Saturday, July 25. There were approximately 4,000 participants in this session -- amazing!

If you are not familiar with the program, click here to check it out.  The course is run similarly to a college course in which students do weekly homework after studying presentation materials and taking part in a hands-on lab.  However, unlike college this course is free and can be taken entirely online.  Students interact with each other through e-mail where they exchange information as well as ask and answer questions.

JavaFX Coding Challenge Student Winner Ramin Mohammadi took this course, so it goes to show just how much you will learn from this free program!

For more information on Java Passion check out:

• Course topics
• Course Web site
• Course FAQs
  
  

Those of you who attended JavaOne probably remember seeing Sun Campus Ambassador Denis Magda and his now-famous gloves in Java Utopia demonstrating his MinorityReport project.  Words cannot state how impressive the project is! Denis describes it best saying "we are using a pair of sensormotor-gloves with Sun SPOT on them to do different manipulations with JavaFX application remotely by hand movements."  

If you weren't able to make it to JavaOne, or missed the demo, don't worry -- it was captured in a few different places.

Here Denis demonstrates in a JavaOne Minute:

And here Denis shows JavaOne host Chris Melissinos how his project works:

As Denis has pointed out, because the project is open source, you can build your own MinorityReport! Congratulations to Denis for being one of the real stars of JavaOne 2009! 

Congratulations to Mohammed Sanaulla, Campus Ambassador of the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, whose recent blog demonstrating a JavaFX Barchart was picked up by DZone which publishes "fresh links for developers," and already has nine positive votes! His original blog post shows a sample application demonstrating BarChart3D, and was published on Monday, June 8.  Even more impressive is that Mohammed created his first JavaFX application on Saturday, June 6!  

To be submitted and featured in DZone with 100% positive votes is quite an accomplishment, and as Mohammed states, "this has encouraged me to write more!!!"

Mohammed's story is just one example of the benefits to sharing your learning experiences. I continue to ask for all of you students to send me blogs on your experiences and applications with Sun's technologies so they can be published here and in turn drive more traffic to promote your work!  

I think it is tremendously exciting and impressive that a student's work has been picked up by dzone and I want to drive more content to their site!  So please, e-mail me your product reviews, tutorials, and how-to articles at maijaliisa.burkert(at)sun.com or ping me here at OSUM so we can promote your work and drive further adoption of Sun's technologies!

Campus Ambassador Tom Mix from the University Center of FEI - Brazil was one of many students lucky enough to attend last week's JavaOne Conference in San Francisco.

Tom not only attended the event, but was a member of the Street Teams, producing JavaOne Minute videos.  Some of Tom's JavaOne Minute videos can be viewed here, with all the other JavaOne Minute videos available in the upper right-hand corner of this blog! 

Tom has also posted some photos of the event including him speaking to more than 5,000 attendees on stage, meeting Scott McNealy, and the infamous James Gosling!  It looks like Tom had a great experience at JavaOne and I suspect he has even more photos he will be posting in the coming days.

I want to hear about your student experience at JavaOne -- or if you could not attend how you attended virtually through live-streaming videos!  Please e-mail me your links/thoughts/photos etc. at maijaliisa.burkert[at]sun.com so I can share with everyone else.

I just got back from my trip to JavaOne in San Francisco and had a great time. I was able to meet many students that are both former and current Campus Ambassadors, as well as other students who are very active in the OSUM community both online and at their University. I was also able to finally meet my boss Chhandomay in person!

Many students I spoke with had traveled VERY far to come to JavaOne! I expect they were as busy as I was and will catch up on their blogs when they return home after the weekend.  I am very anxious to hear about everyone's experiences!

I mainly worked in the JavaOne Radio booth area, which was great because it afforded me the opportunity to meet all kinds of presenters at the conference who spent some time talking with us.   

We recorded SO many shows on JavaOne Radio, which is now a goldmine of information from the conference!  You can directly link to the shows right from this blog thanks to the new layout.  So give some a listen -- none is more than 20 minutes long and most are short -- about 5-10 minutes in length and let me know what your favorites are!