Geertjan Wielenga, who was inherited by Oracle from Sun and is now working as a product manager inside the NetBeans team, gave us the pleasure visiting the Euregio for the second talk at the EuregJUG that went by the title “Free Open Source Tools for Maven, HTML5, IoT and Java EE”.
We had 28 registered participants but i actually forgot to count our visitors, I was to concentrated on my spoken English introducing Geertjan. Edit: Actual number of visitors was 23. Thanks Stéphane.
So, what did we hear?
A brief introduction from where NetBeans came and how deeply it is embedded into the Java ecosystem and that is still the platform which is promoted by Oracle for Java development.
Many big private and public corporates are using NetBeans, often not in public, but nevertheless for developing mission critical applications. Among the users is certainly James Gosling, sometimes using NetBeans more than email.
I’d absolutely second the fact, that NetBeans is great for education: For teachers as well for technical leads who want to educate co-workers. Most of the time, its hassle free and it doesn’t get into your way with conflicting plugins and stuff. I’ve written about it some time ago in my NetBeans testimonial.
After that Geertjan showed some demos, especially in the area of Maven and embedded tooling, like inspections, refactoring and code quality.
Many of the stuff I’m using already but what i only saw at my wifes work was the incredible useful integration of NetBeans and Chrome: Through the use of a little plugin you can edit the DOM and shadow DOM of your next great HTML5 application inside NetBeans and need not to use the embedded Chrome tools. Awesome:
We also saw how great NetBeans is as a *drumroll* JavaScript editor. But, the word “editor” doesn’t do justice. The NetBeans team put really great effort into supporting AngularJS, Knockout and others and what i saw in the NetBeans 8.1 Beta: It looks and feels just right. So if you’re looking for an IDE doing JavaScript development, give NetBeans a try. I myself pull my imaginary hat for the effort put into that as I’m trying to build something based on Wro4J myself to only handle JavaScript, SASS and stuff in a sane way for Spring Boot applications.
I really like the presentation a lot and though Geertjan is promoting NetBeans for quite some time, you really get his enthusiasm for the IDE and the platform. As an added bonus, we were the first to see the cover of Geertjans upcoming “authoritative tutorial” Beginning NetBeans IDE including some nice illustrations of well known developers. The book will be available at JavaOne this year. The slides are available at Prezi.
I’d like to highlight one later remark: The fact that there are at least 3 great IDEs for Java is vital for the language. If there’s only one single IDE which may not support the latest and greatest features for language release, than that release is pretty much dead. Having more than one great IDE is a luxury and great value for the platform.
We actually had two talks this evening. Simon Heinen from our host bitstars presented their platform Holobuilder. Impressive UI! The talk about how Bitstars manages to use the same validations for back- and frontend was interesting as well and clearly shows that those kinda problems are still relevant today. Also: Thanks for the opportunity to try out Google Cardboard.
I’m very happy to announce Stéphane Nicoll as our next speaker. On October 8th he will be talking about “Building cloud native apps with Spring Boot”. Stéphane works on Spring Framework and Spring Boot from Belgium for Pivotal. Given my experiences the last 1,5 years with Spring Boot, i only can recommend not to miss this great opportunity to hear directly about the new features of Spring Boot 1.3 while they’re fresh at EuregJUG.
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