Tuesday Sep 02, 2008

Participate in MySQL-GlassFish Student Contest and Win $500


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!

Posted on: Sep 02, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: Sun

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Wednesday Jun 18, 2008

New to OpenSolaris? Let the students help you...


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

Posted on: Jun 18, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: OpenSolaris

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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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Couple of more OpenSolaris reviews...


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

Posted on: Jun 18, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: OpenSolaris

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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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More OpenSolars goodies...


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

Posted on: Jun 17, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: OpenSolaris

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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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4 more OpenSolaris reviews from the contest


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.

Posted on: Jun 16, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: OpenSolaris

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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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Friday Jun 13, 2008

3 more OpenSolaris reviews from the contest


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

Posted on: Jun 13, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: OpenSolaris

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Tuesday Jun 10, 2008

Reviews from contest...


As mentioned yesterday, we would be making the submitted reviews available over the next two weeks. We would publish one or two reviews within a single post so that all students can get their share of limelight. And the best ones will additionally be featured in Sun's student reviews site. All these are in addition to the prizes. :-) So keep checking this site regularly.
Today we are featuring Zhen Tao. He is studying in Peking University, and he is a Sun Campus Ambassador as well. Zhen wrote a review of OpenSolaris. While this is well-written, the contest entries needed to be in English. So this review is ineligible for the prizes, but we want to thank Zhen for his efforts.
 Zhen Tao
Zhen Tao
Peking University
On that note, we received some entries that were in languages other than English. The rules were clear about the language requirement, and on each instance we informed the submitter about their language mistake as soon as the submission came in. We asked those students to resubmit in English, which some of them did. Going forward, we will try our best to expand the list of languages in which the reviews can be written.

The submissions of the following students are ineligible because of language, invalid URL, ineligible product or similar issues:

Paulo Cesar
Ding Liang
Szakacs Marius
Ernesto Leon Mejia Isaza
Thao Uyen Nguyen Dang
Virlan Petru
Anirudh Sharma
Zhen Tao
Linh Trinh Viet
Franklin Zura

Students in the above list, please feel free to contact us if you feel we made a mistake.

Posted on: Jun 10, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: OpenSolaris

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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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Sunday May 04, 2008

Sun Student Union: Reviews on Tap

Welcome, everybody!

This Student Views and Reviews site is part of Sun's Student Reviews Program, and is dedicated to students working with Sun technologies. Here students from anywhere in the world can post their findings on Sun products, discuss our cutting-edge technologies, and get connected with technical experts. To contact Student Reviews Program, use this form or send us email at...   reviews dot program at sun dot com

Student Reviews at Sun
We will be running contests, highlighting student profiles and giving away cool prizes. So join us, participate, and most important of all -- have fun!

Posted on: May 04, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: About this weblog

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