Tuesday Jul 21, 2009


Student Views and Reviews recently caught up with Ramin Mohammadi, developer of the Caesar Photobook Mobile application, and one of the student winners of the JavaFX Coding Challenge. Ramin began using JavaFX in February, and taught himself the programming language using freely available resources on the Internet to include the JavaFX.com Web site, and the free 15-week Java Passion JavaFX course among others.
Ramin Mohammadi
Ramin Mohammadi
In our interview, Ramin noted there were many useful aspects to using JavaFX in developing his mobile application, but really appreciated the fact that the development process for creating a mobile application “didn't differ in almost any way with, for instance, the process of developing a web application using JavaFX.”

Ramin commented,“I experienced all the ease of development with JavaFX when developing this application, and when comparing this with the development using JavaME, I can truly state that I never could have accomplished this result with only the use of JavaME in combination with the LWUIToolkit.”

Ramin also pointed out that JavaFX makes Caesar Photobook Mobile easier to use by handling the screen transitions with animations. Additionally, because Ramin developed the application with JavaFX he was also able to design the UI in Illustrator and use the Production Suite Plugin to create a customized and completely new UI for the application that could fill all the user's needs.

As part of Ramin's internship at Caesar Groep he was asked to evaluate both JavaFX and Flex and ultimately concluded: “In my opinion, JavaFX is doing some really good work.” He stated that JavaFX was better than Flex because of the ease of development, short learning curve, ability to easily deploy applications to different platforms, the possibility of using other Java families, and finally, because of the work-flow supporting tools available in JavaFX, such as the Production Suite Plugin.

The complete interview with Ramin can be found here.

Wednesday Jul 08, 2009

Attention students in Europe!  The Sun HPC Software Programming Challenge has just recently begun and there is a top prize of a Toshiba OpenSolaris laptop up for grabs! Students may work in teams of up to three members, with all members on the winning team receiving a laptop as well as a travel allowance to attend the Sun HPC Software Workshop in Germany.  Second- and third-place winners will receive new iPods.

The Sun HPC Software Programming Challenge 2009 looks to promote Sun HPC Software, Developer Edition 1.0 for OpenSolaris amongst students by giving them an opportunity to compete in the design and implementation of the most scalable and best-performing implementation of a common parallel algorithm. 

The Sun HPC Software, Developer Edition 1.0 for OpenSolaris combines virtualization technology with a high performance computing platform.  The software includes the tools and technologies that enable you to develop, test, and deploy high performance computing applications. 

The package includes Sun Studio 12 u1 together with Sun Grid Engine 6.2u3 on top of an OpenSolaris 2009.06 installation and is all freely available for download. 

The winner will be determined by linking a special benchmarking application to your library and letting it run on a previously unknown SGE cluster installation.  See the contest guidelines for more information.

The Sun HPC Software Programming Challenge is open to students at any degree level in any discipline who are legal residents of any of the European countries listed in the rules. So check it out and pass the information along to all your (student) friends! The deadline for the contest is August 10.

Tuesday Jul 07, 2009

Gary Serda, Sun's fantastic OSUM leader, posted a blog for young students that I wanted to share here. The Institute for the Future recently launched the Digital Open, which is an innovation expo for global youth. The Digital Open is a both a community and a competition (with prizes) for youth age 17 and younger that launched April 15 and ends August 15. 

The contest challenges youth around the world "to demonstrate how they are using technology that will change the world -- or just make life a little easier or more fun." Students have the opportunity to share their projects and experiences through several mediums including photos, text, or videos.

The Digital Open is all about free and open technology.  Therefore, all submissions must make use of existing free and open platforms and/or licensing under one of the Digital Open-approved licenses.  For more information watch the video below and check out this site.

There are a bunch of cool prizes up for grabs including a PeeCee Mini Laptop running OpenSolaris as well as a video camera, a solar-powered flashlight, and other cool stuff. 

Projects may be submitted in a wide variety of areas including:

  • Software
  • Hardware
  • Environment
  • Media
  • Community

And while many of you reading this blog are older than 17 that doesn't mean you can't participate in some capacity -- so please get out and encourage the youth in your community to take part!  Be a resource for youth as they explore their creativity! Often the lessons gained through teaching are far more valuable than any others.

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Friday Jun 12, 2009

Hey students -- there is a new contest under way where you can win $500 cash or a $25 gift certificate just by blogging about JavaFX 1.2!  

Here's the deal -- download the newest JavaFX 1.2 and write a blog about your experience with it, a tech tip, a code sample or more for a chance to win $500!  There are 10 $500 cash prizes up for grabs as well as fifty $25 Amazon gift certificates! Sounds like a great deal to me.  The entries will be judged by a panel of experts based on equally weighted judging criteria that can be found here.  

So, what do you have to do to enter?

  1. Download JavaFX 1.2 here
  2. Play around with the new features in JavaFX 1.2
  3. Write and post a blog anywhere about your experience with the new JavaFX 1.2
  4. Complete the submission form

That's it!  There are some guidelines and rules you will want to make sure you read which can be found here.

So get going!  The contest is now open and runs through July 3rd, with winners to be announced the week of July 31.  

Tuesday Sep 02, 2008


We just announced a new student contest...

Use MySQL database and GlassFish application server to develop a web application and write a review for...
  • A chance to win a grand prize of $500 in Visa debit card, and
  • Five chances to win a prize of $250 in Visa debit card
Sun Student Contest
Simply:
1. Download MySQL 5.1 Community Edition and GlassFish v2 Update Release 2 (UR2).
2. Develop a cool web application using the combination.
3. Create a project of your application at java.net.
4. Write a review of these products and post it in your blog.
5. Submit your java.net project's URL and your review's URL.
6. Do it before October 22, 2008.

The Sun Student Reviews site has all the details, so does the contest page.

And here is a nice flier for you to pass around. Hang them on your bulletin boards, email it to your friends, the more the merrier...

We will be posting updates and responses to your questions in this site, so continue to check it out.

Good luck and have fun!

Tuesday Jul 01, 2008


The wait is over...

First of all, thanks to all the participants. It was a great contest with plenty of good submissions. In fact, it was so close that the judges awarded more second prize winners than originally announced in the contest. Good for you!

Another interesting contest with great prizes will be announced soon. Stay tuned, and check this blog frequently.

And FINALLY... here goes the list!!!
General Students Category

Grand Prize Winner: Ritwik Ghosal, Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata, India. (review)

Second Prize Winners (alphabetically sorted by last name):
1. Carrie Arnold, Ball State university, USA. (review)
2. Blake Deville, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA. (review)
3. Rohan Dhruva, Sardar Patel Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India. (review)
4. Jay Mahadeokar, SRKNEC College, Nagpur, India. (review)
5. Andreas Nilsson, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. (review)
6. Varun Nischal, JIIT University, Noida, India. (review)
7. Saptarshi Purkayastha, Patkar-Varde College, India. (review)

Ritwik Ghosal
Ritwik Ghosal
Campus Ambassadors Category

Grand Prize Winner: Ashwin Bhat, National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, India. (review)

Second Prize Winners (alphabetically sorted by last name):
1. Souvik Das Gupta, UIET, Punjab University, Chandigarh, India. (review)
2. Jonas Dias, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (review)
3. Ajay Kumar, IIITM, Kerala, India. (review)
4. Agraj Mangal, University of Delhi, India. (review)
5. Silveira Neto, Federal University of Ceará, Brazil. (review)
6. Zhiqi Tao, University of Melbourne, Australia. (review)

Ashwin Bhat
Ashwin Bhat
The two grand prize winners each get $250 in Visa Debit Cards, and all the second prize winners in both categories each get $100 in Visa Debit Cards.

Look out for email communications from us with regards to the prize shipment.

Congratulations!!!

Wednesday Jun 18, 2008


Souvik Das Gupta, Sun Campus Ambassador at UIET, Punjab University, Chandigarh, India, presented a detailed getting started guide with OpenSolaris 2008.05 and VMware Fusion. He found the new OpenSolaris 2008.05 very simple and easy to use. Check out Souvik's submission here.
Souvik DasGupta
Souvik DasGupta
Rohan Dhruva
Rohan Dhruva
Rohan Dhruva from Sardar Patel Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India, had a detailed OpenSolaris review where he covered the download, first boot, desktop, installer, network configurations, desktop effects, package manager, multimedia, drivers and tips of new users. Check out Rohan's review here.

Ritwik Ghosal from Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata, India, had experimented with many aspects of OpenSolaris in his seven part review. In this post, Ritwik summarized his findings vis-a-vis various Linux distributions as well as presented his requests for enhancements.
Ritwik Ghosal
Ritwik Ghosal


Varun Nischal from JIIT University, Noida, India, had a series of NetBeans-related submissons ranging from tips on passing arguments using IDE, specific feature comparisons of NetBeans with .Net, MySQL database management with NetBeans, to the latest status and workaround of  the bug he found. His submissions are nicely indexed here. Varun submitted a review of OpenSolaris as well.
Varun Nischal
Varun Nischal
Saptarshi Purkayastha
Saptarshi Purkayastha
Saptarshi Purkayastha from Patkar-Varde College, India, had a feature by feature comparison between NetBeans 6.1 and Visual Studio 2008. While he liked the performance improvement in NetBeans 6.1 (and noticed slowing down of Visual Studio over the years), Saptarshi highlighted the scope of improvement for NetBeans in the Subversion area in his second submission for the contest.

Ajay Kumar, the Sun Campus Ambassador at IIITM, Kerala, India,  gives a lot of tips and tricks for OpenSolaris installation and fixing LAN, WLAN, and sound card issues. He gives OpenSolaris a rating of 4.0 for performance, 3.5 for features, 3.5 for user interface, 5.0 for price and value of money, and a score of 4.0 overall (all ratings are out of 5.0). Ajay's OpenSolaris review is here.
Ajay Kumar
Ajay Kumar
Shiv Prakash
Shiv Prakash
Shiv Prakash from Yeshwantrao Chavan College of Engineering, Nagpur, India, has some bold predictions for OpenSolaris. :-) He goes over the download and installation process (including a tip for those with network bandwidth issues), his take on the initial look and feel as well as his suggestions for the areas of work in near future. Check out Shiv Prakash's review here.

Andreas Nilsson from Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, installed OpenSolaris 2008.05 in two different hardware -- one an older desktop with 2.53 GHz Intel Pentium 4 CPU and 512 MB RAM, and  another  newer laptop with 2 GHz Intel Core2 Duo and 3 GB RAM. Andreas is also excited about ZFS, DTrace and seamless integration of 64 and 32 bit applications in OpenSolaris. Check out Andreas' review here.
Andreas Nilsson
Andreas Nilsson

Tuesday Jun 17, 2008


Ashwin Bhat, Sun Campus Ambassador at National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, India,  has  a step by step  set-up guide for OpenSolaris users who are primarily focused on laptop/desktop usage. He not only has lots of details and screenshots but also the features he liked most and the ones he would like to see added in future OpenSolaris releases. Check out Ashwin's review here.   

In a second review, Ashwin discussed the new features in NetBeans 6.1 and what he liked.
Ashwin Bhat
Ashwin Bhat
Jonas Dias
Jonas Dias
Jonas Dias, Sun Campus Ambassador at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, put a full  SAMP platform  to work on OpenSolaris, and integrated the stack with Service Management Facility (SMF) to be self healing. Check out his step by step tutorial here, and do not miss the conversation in the comments section.

In another submission, Jonas has put together a nice tutorial on writing a Web Service using NetBeans 6.1 and using it in projects.


Zhiqi Tao, Sun Campus Ambassador at University of Melbourne, Australia, has run OpenSolaris on his ThinkPad T61 for a month, and he has shared his experiences -- both good and bad -- in his OpenSolaris review. His screen-by-screen commentary of booting into LiveCD mode, installation, post installation configurations etc. will be very handy for the first time users. Check out his little tidbits (like you gotta remember to eject the LiveCD from CDROM, there is no reminder!), what worked and what didn't out of the box, his suggestions and much more here.
Zhiqi Tao
Zhiqi Tao
Jay Mahadeokar
Jay Mahadeokar
Jay Mahadeokar from SRKNEC College, Nagpur, India, had a series of OpenSolaris posts that covered a lot of grounds ranging from OpenSolaris 2008.05 Live CD overview, how to run OpenSolaris in other operating system environments using VirtualBox, DTrace exploration, solution to a compiz hang problem, a screencast of OpenSolaris installation in a virtual drive to a comparison of OpenSolaris 2008.05 and Ubuntu 8.04. Check out Jay's OpenSolaris submissions here.

Jay also had a nice series of NetBeans reviews and tutorials. Check those out here. (Some of these NetBeans posts were submitted to an earlier contest, and those are not being considered for this contest.)

Angad Singh, Sun Campus Ambassador at JIIT University, Noida, India, submitted several tips and tricks on OpenSolaris. Here Angad describes multibooting OpenSolaris 2008.05 with SxDE, here are the tips on OpenSolaris "Reboot button," and here are some network administration scripts. His observations about lack of failsafe mode in OpenSolaris are here, and finally, here are some thoughts on OpenSolaris (at a Sun Corona Day event presentation).
Angad Singh
Angad Singh

Monday Jun 16, 2008


Kunal Modi from Fr. Conceicao Rodrigues College of Engineering, Mumbai, India, focused on the NetBeans 6.1 editor enhancements. He went over various aspects of these enhancements, and then presented a complete tutorial on how to add custom actions to the NetBeans Java Editor. Kunal made this a plug-in for NetBeans IDE. Check out his submission here.
Kunal Modi
Kunal Modi
Ransara Wijethunga
Ransara Wijethunga
Ransara Wijethunga from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, started researching for a good IDE that he can use for his mobile application development using J2ME. His research has led him to choose NetBeans 6.1, and along the way he has learned that NetBeans supports a lot of languages other than Java for development. In his submission, Ransara goes over the new and noteworthy features of NetBeans 6.1.
Samir Kumar Mishra,  Sun Campus  Ambassador  at  University College of  Engineering, Burla, India, creates a GUI-based parser using the StringTokenizer class of the java.util package, and makes it a plug-in for NetBeans 6.1. Check out his tutorial here.
University College of Engineering, Burla, India
Samir Kumar Mishra
Zach Elko
Zach Elko
Zach Elko from Ball State University, USA, wrote his top 10 list of great features from the new NetBeans 6.1 IDE. The list include code bookmarks, build platform, code completion, code formatting, single file compile, diff, favorites, symbol tracking, include directories and local history. He goes over these features with examples here.


Kurchi Subhra Hazra, Sun Campus Ambassador at National Institute of Technology, Durgapur, India, likes what she sees in the "new kid of the block." She elegantly describes live CD, what is does and what happened when she tried out OpenSolaris 2008.05 live CD. Kurchi explains the advantages she sees in OpenSolaris and its evolving community. Check out her review here.
Kurchi Subhra Hazra
Kurchi Subhra Hazra
Blake Deville
Blake Deville
Blake Deville from University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA, described his OpenSolaris 2008.05 experiences from the lens of an administrator familiar with Linux. He briefly glanced over the history, and compared his installation and set-up steps against what he has experienced in other Linux distributions. Blake's review is here.
In his review, Avinash Joshi from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri Campus, India, focused on the new features of OpenSolaris 2008.05, requested a feature for enhancement and went over the details of how the new OpenSolaris OS benefits him as a student. Check out his review here. (Scroll down to see the review if you happen to get formatting issues in your favorite browser at the top section of his site.)
Avinash Joshi
Avinash Joshi
Silveira Neto
Silveira Neto
Jose Maria Silveira Neto, Sun Campus Ambassador at Federal University of Ceará, Brazil, focused on ZFS file system feature of OpenSolaris 2008.05 OS. In his review, Silveira experimented with corrputing the data in a mirrored zpool (RAID-1) and demonstrated how the self-healing characteristic of ZFS keeps the data intact. He concluded this review with the steps administrators should take on the defective disk. In a second review, Silveira showed the tricks of turning on colors in an OpenSolaris terminal.

Sunday Jun 15, 2008


Agraj Mangal, Sun Campus Ambassador at University of Delhi, India, had a submission of how to send email using Java. He used NetBeans 6.1 to write a simple Java program that sends an email using the owner's email account details. This functionality can also be embedded in a web application. Agraj had put together a nice tutorial with code snippets and lots of helpful NetBeans 6.1 screenshots as he was developing the application.
Agraj Mangal
Agraj Mangal

Wasif Tanveer
Wasif Tanveer
Wasif Tanveer from University of Engineering & Technology, Lahore, Pakistan, detailed the specific NetBeans 6.1 functionalities that he liked most, especially from a mobile application developer perspective. The default heap size wasn't sufficient for a huge data file that he was reading in his application, but he resolved this issue by using dynamic heap size argument -Xmx512M. Check out Wasif's review here.

Chris Leong from University of Sydney, Australia, observed that various great features of NetBeans (deservingly) gets a lot of attention but there are simple things that considerably increases user's productivity. Chris focused on the NetBeans Editor itself as he felt that there are features in the editor that not only increase productivity individually but also make a huge difference collectively. Chris is a Sun Campus Ambassador, and his review in a nice story telling format is here.
Chris Leong
Chris Leong

Alper Celik
Alper Celik
Alper Celik, Sun Campus Ambassador at The Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, noted the performance improvement in NetBeans 6.1 as well as some of its key features. Being a good ambassador, he didn't forget to prominently include the "call to action" of downloading NetBeans 6.1 and trying it out to his fellow student developers. :-)


Friday Jun 13, 2008


Carrie Arnold from Ball State University, USA, had a nice experience installing OpenSolaris using VirtualBox on her Intel iMac. Check here to see the details of how she set it up to be ready for her development platform. The speed with which she managed to set up OpenSolaris with powerful development tools has convinced her to work with this systeem regularly in her coursework.

In a second submission, Carrie shared her experiences setting up SDL on OpenSolaris for her game development work.
Carrie Arnold -- Ball State University
Carrie Arnold
Pedro Reis -- Universidade Estácio de sá
Pedro Reis
Sun Campus Ambassador Pedro Reis from Universidade Estácio de sá, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, have already installed OpenSolaris 2008.05 in 12 notebooks, 2 macboooks and 18 PCs! So sure he has a lot to say about his OpenSolaris experiences in his review. Interesting to see his range of experiences about drivers. And he has some good tips for newbies. Check out Pedro's review here.

Jaynil Gandhi from Sardar Vallabhbhai Vidhyalaya, India, had an entry that focused on various features of OpenSolaris 2008.05 as well as benefits of the LiveCD option. He touched upon the new packaging system IPS, ZFS and DTrace. Jaynil's post is here.

Jaynil Gandhi
Jaynil Gandhi

This blog copyright 2009 by chhandomay