Tuesday Jul 01, 2008

OpenSolaris and NetBeans Student Reviews Contest Winners Announced!!!


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!!!

Posted on: Jul 01, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: Sun

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Wednesday Jun 18, 2008

More NetBeans reviews...


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.

Posted on: Jun 18, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: NetBeans

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Tuesday Jun 17, 2008

OpenSolaris and NetBeans reviews/tutorials


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.

Posted on: Jun 17, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: OpenSolaris

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NetBeans reviews... continued!


Rajath Shanbag from National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, India, had couple of interesting NetBeans submissions, including one on GUI internationalization in NetBeans and another one on checking out projects from Java.net through NetBeans. He had a NetBeans profiler tutorial along with another post on new launguage support in NetBeans 6.1, but the latter two posts are not being considered for this contest as they were submitted in an earlier NetBeans contest.
 Rajath Shanbag
Rajath Shanbag
Rajiv Perera
Rajiv Perera
 Rajiv Perera is based in Sri Lanka and he is studying at Australian College of Business and Technology. He is using NetBeans in his day to day academic projects, and he likes the fact that with NetBeans 6.1, "hectic manually configuring xml files era is over." The two NetBeans features he found the most useful are refactoring and find usage. Check out Rajiv's NetBeans 6.1 review here.
Mohamed Sanaulla, another student from National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, India, described his experiences as a first time NetBeans IDE user (coming from Eclipse background). He found NetBeans 6.1 installation a breeze and it was must faster than Eclipse. Even as a first time user, he was able to develop a simple Java desktop application in less than five minutes, thanks to all the embedded functionalities in NetBeans. Check out his review here. Mohamed Sanaulla
Mohamed Sanaulla

Posted on: Jun 17, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: NetBeans

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Monday Jun 16, 2008

More NetBeans contest submissions...


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.

Posted on: Jun 16, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: NetBeans

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Sunday Jun 15, 2008

Another 4 NetBeans reviews from the contest


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. :-)

Posted on: Jun 15, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: NetBeans

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Monday Jun 09, 2008

OpenSolaris & NetBeans Student Reviews Contest Update


The OpenSolaris 2008.5 and NetBeans 6.1 product reviews contest has come to an end. We are very happy with your response and enthusiasm!!!

48 students from 14 different countries -- Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Moldova, Pakistan, Romania, Sri Lanka, Sweden, USA and Vietnam -- have submitted 78 technical reviews during the contest period.
 Student Reviews
Out of the 78 reviews, OpenSolaris and NetBeans reviews were pretty evenly matched. There were 40 OpenSolaris reviews and 38 NetBeans reviews.

The document here lists the participants and their university affiliations. If you submitted an entry, your name should be there. If it isn't, please contact us and we will investigate. (But we are pretty sure we got everybody...)

Now the judges are getting very busy evaluating your submissions. The results will be out on June 25th.

GOOD LUCK!!!

In the mean time, we would be publishing the submitted reviews in this blog...

Posted on: Jun 09, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: Sun

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Monday May 05, 2008

Announcing a cool contest...


This morning we are announcing OpenSolaris OS and NetBeans IDE 6.1. We're pretty excited about these products, but we want to know what you -- the student developers -- think.

So we have arranged for a student contest with cool prizes!

Review OpenSolaris OS and/or NetBeans IDE 6.1 for...
  •   a chance to win a grand prize of $250 in Visa Debit Card, and
  •   5 chances to win a prize of $100 in Visa Debit Card
Student Reviews Contest
Simply:

      1. Download OpenSolaris OS and/or NetBeans IDE 6.1.
      2. Test the product and post a review!
      3. Submit the URL of your review.
      4. Do it before June 6, 2008.

The student reviews program 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 all the submissions in this site, so continue to check it out.

Good luck and have fun!

Posted on: May 05, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: Sun

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