Student Views and Reviews: Sun on Campus

Eze Singer posted an absolutely fantastic blog over in OSUM that gives OSUM Leaders a nice consolidated resource list to prepare for a NetBeans tech demo, as well as some sage advice for all students.

What's the big deal with a tech demo?  Well, as Eze points out, "This can help you leverage your career.  Nowadays, big companies are looking not only for the best developers or sysadmin, but also people that can lead others, and share knowledge with the rest of a team, showing great pro-activity and teamwork skills."

And this is a really important point in today's tight job market.  Demonstrated experience and skill in executing tech demos can really give a new graduate a leg up on the competition when being screened by potential employers. You never know when you will be asked to step up in your first job -- look at Ramin Mohammadi -- he just graduated this summer and is already presenting at a developer conference this month!

Nervous?  Of course, who isn't!  But as Eze says, "A tech demo isn't a big deal, so don't be afraid if you are a newbie." But, even better, Eze has compiled a series of resources for OSUM leaders to get started with their very first NetBeans tech demo!

Plus, all month, there are weekly Webinars being held in OSUM to train students and give them the resources they need to lead their first demo. 

So, with all the resources, tutorials, and support you could ask for, what are you waiting for!  Get started on your first tech demo!  And if you aren't an OSUM Leader, ask your OSUM Leader to help them coordinate and set up the demo to gain valuable experience for the future as well. 

These resources are here for you to succeed!  Please take advantage of them! As David Botterill said in an e-mail today: "Be involved in OSUM and other open source universities.  You can easily make a name for yourself by contributing valuable information to communities and by being involved.  This will open opportunities for you in the future." I couldn't agree more.  Work today and see the opportunities unfold tomorrow.

Then check out the upcoming OSUM webinar called NetBeans 6.7 – the only IDE you need! This webinar will cover all the NetBeans basics and will also give you the chance to see the IDE in action with some NetBeans demonstrations.

This webinar is scheduled for Thursday, October 8 at 10 a.m. Mountain time. You can use the World Clock Meeting Planner to figure out when this will be in your own time zone.

David Botterill, the Global Technology Manager for Sun's Campus Ambassador Program will be hosting the webinar. David has worked at Sun for more than 9 years as a software engineer with the Sun Tools team, and as a NetBeans Evangelist.

The webinar – which will be conducted in English – will use the Elluminate Live! Platform which will allow participants to listen to the live audio and ask questions via chat and text! So, to get the most out of the webinar, do your best to attend the live event. But don't worry if you can't make it, all OSUM webinars are recorded and filed for replay.

Here are some links to additional resources to get you started with NetBeans!

• Learn Java, NetBeans, OpenSolaris & More!

• NetBeans 6.7 Video

• Activity – Technical Talk – Intro to NetBeans 6.7

If you plan on attending or are interested in more information on the webinar go to this OSUM page to RSVP or just indicate your interest. Hope to see you online!

Update: I also just came across this great bunch of screencasts for people who are complete newbies to NetBeans -- it is a series of instructional videos that will get you introduced to the main NetBeans APIs.  Or, alternatively, here is a 21-minute crash course in NetBeans.  Check it out!

I have no doubt that over the summer break (well not everyone has a summer break from school as I very well know!) many students are experimenting with new technologies that they don't normally have time to play around with while school is in session.  Since most of Sun's technologies are free to download, everyone ought to try their hand at some of the great developer tools such as JavaFX 1.2, NetBeans, and OpenSolaris.

As most of you know, last week the new NetBeans IDE 6.7 was released.  My interest in NetBeans piqued after reading about the new features in 6.7 including support for Zembly and a tight configuration with Project Kenai.  Today I stumbled upon some great NetBeans resources which you can check out here. The landing page has links to dozens of tutorials and screencasts to help you get started with NetBeans.

Do you know of other (FREE!) NetBeans tutorial resources?  If so, please share by posting to the comments below.

Lior Kolnik, a Sun Campus Ambassador at Bar Ilan University, recently sent out some links for NetBeans shortcuts. 

Lior says the shortcuts are "absolutely awesome and make a huge difference when coding, especially the fix all imports one (ctrl+shift+i)!!" Lior also said after passing the links along to a group of students they "went off to try every single thing on the pdf I just linked," which is why he wants more people to pass them along!

Here are the links Lior provided:

• Keyboard Shortcuts Template PDF
• 10 Handy Editor Shortcuts in NetBeans IDE 6.0
• Top 10 NetBeans IDE Keyboard Shortcuts I use the most

Do these links help you or do you know of any others to share with everyone?  Please let me know in the comments section!

Carlitos is a student at the Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, UNICEN, Tandil, and a member of the OSUM community.  He has written a very thorough blog -- in English and Spanish -- recounting his experience using the NetBeans profiler as part of a project at his University.  

Carlitos thoroughly details his project and the goals in the blog, but in summary, it was a project built with NetBeans IDE with a GA framework that was designed and implemented to provide the settings to test the approach.  He used MySQL as a database engine and modeled objects related to the context of the problem, finally testing the desktop application in swing.

Carlitos writes that the development process was great because he saved the testing to the very end.  Initially, Carlitos reports, "everything seemed to go well, the program responded correctly for small projects...but the goal was to support larger projects, so I started testing with the PSPLIB...and as expected, something went wrong." 

The initial problem with larger projects was that the VM ran out of memory, so he increased the memory, which Carlitos discovered just meant "it takes longer to run out of memory." After doing some profiling and getting some sleep, Carlitos returned to the project and realized he had left an empty try/catch block -- which was the only error with no treatment.  He happily reported that after correcting the error "everything worked wonderful." 

I want to thank Carlitos for going to such great lengths to describe his project, which really sounded like a great learning process. I encourage everyone else to continue to blog about your student experiences -- you never know how it may help someone else, and often you will find that it helps you learn just by describing the process.  

Please check out Carlitos' blog for all the details on his project, and e-mail links to your blogs at maijaliisa[dot]burkert[@]sun[dot]com, or by dropping it on my OSUM page.

Daisy, a student and campus ambassador at GuangDong University of Foreign Studies, China has posted a great blog on OSUM.

In the blog post she shows how to create a PHP application with NetBeans, and includes an attached tech demo.

Daisy has included screenshots which are a great asset, even to someone who cannot read the characters!  She also links to the source code for the wishtree from the developers section of Sun.

So check out Daisy's blog to learn how to create a PHP application with NetBeans and then share what you learned from her exercise. 

And please post to my page in OSUM or e-mail me directly (reviews[dot]programs[at]sun.com) any blogs you've written about Sun products -- to include either a product review or a tutorial such as Daisy's so that we can highlight your work here!