NetBeans Evening Cologne 2016

On Sept. 9th we joined for the first NetBeans Evening Cologne. Due to the fine weather some people preferred to have a party or something else and thus few seats (apx. 5) had been empty. Nevertheless, it became an interesting evening.

New and Noteworthy

First Geertjan Wielenga talked about NetBeans at a glance and the 8.2 new and noteworthy features. Because we did our NetBeans Evening together with the Java User Group Cologne, he concentrated on Java and JavaScript omitting the PHP part.

Nowadays more and more Java developers have to program JavaScript too and it was amazing to observe NetBeans interacting with the browser. Changes in the source, CSS, client side and more become active immediately without saving. Only when everything is fine, the developer needs persist the changes. A Java EE developer using JSF may benefit from these features, too.

Java Shell

Next talk was about the new Java Shell. I demonstrated some interactions with Java. The attendees instantly thought about their future use. I heard sentences like “This is the end of annoying main classes to test this and that” or “Great. If I load xy in the start up script of the shell, then I could …”. Although the JShell is part of upcoming Java 9, it can be downloaded and used right now. I demonstrated how to integrate with NetBeans by starting from within the NetBeans terminal window and using NetBeans as snippet editor. Since the shell library offers an API too, it can be used within other applications. There is a NetBeans build with integrated shell support. Whilst NetBeans supported this only rudimentary  a few weeks ago, this feature has increased dramatically during the last time. I showed the new NetBeans platform shell and Geerjan added the improved interaction with the IDE. Simply try some code and derive a class from it.

More fun with NetBeans, Maven and SpringBoot

Next, Michael Simons talked about NetBeans, Maven and SpringBoot [1]. He subtitled his talk “having more fun together”. During a life coding session he built a small registration application.

He used project Lombok to replace annoying getters and setters and checked his code using JaCoCo code coverage. NetBeans offers a great support for Maven dependencies. Due to that, NetBeans assists the user by offering code completion for the added dependencies. Michael was able to finish his application within half an hour.

JET

Continuing the JavaScript track, Geertjan talked about JET. This is an open source compilation of open source tools, which is also use by Oracle internally. Thus, this compilation does not include the latest JavaScript frameworks – which change every few days – but frameworks and libraries which became more mature.

Finish

After the talks we had some beer and other beverages. Most of the attendees stayed another hour to communicate among each other and have some fun. With special thanks to Faktor-Zehn who provided room, beverages and snacks.

Future events

When we first planned this event, we wanted to organize an annually NetBeans Day Cologne. Later we switched to an evening event. After the first evening we may keep this smaller format but increase the frequency.

Stay tuned!

[1] Michael’s article about his talk:

info.michael-simons.eu/2016/09/10/netbeans-maven-and-spring-boot-more-fun-together