NetBeans Platform Training in Linz, Austria

The Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austia, was one of the first to include the NetBeans Platform in their official syllabus, a few years ago. This year was the 5th edition of the NetBeans Platform Certified Training in Linz. I was there, together with Jaroslav Tulach from the NetBeans team.

Here's a picture of the group:

The training was organized by Thomas Würthinger, a researcher at the University. Thomas has created and contributed to a lot of really cool Java projects, including the Ideal Graph Vizualizer for displaying evolving Compiler Graphs, the Maxine Virtual Machine, and he hosts a patch for the HotSpot JVM that supports true Hot Swapping (not only method bodies) and fixes one of the most voted for bugs in JVM.

It would be really cool to have that patch integrated by the HotSpot team. That would result in a real Developers JVM. Just think about how it would improve the development process if you could apply your changes immediately to the running application. There are already a couple of projects providing similar functionality on a higher level of abstraction via bytecode instrumentation or a combination of bytecode abstraction with classloaders, like Javeleon or JRebel. Thomas solution, instead, works already on the JVM level. He showed us an example of how this could be used in NetBeans by creating a version of Matisse that is capable of dynamically applying the changes to the design to the running application... pretty impressive! I'm really looking forward to seeing more of this in the future.

In the course, we had around 15 students eager to learn about the NetBeans Platform and a lot of good questions during the two days of our course. The course itself was slightly different from previous editions. In particular, Jarda discussed his interpretation of DCI versus MVC, and how DCI can be used to explain how Lookups and Actions are used in the NetBeans Platform, while Thomas did a great introduction to the visual library, including a lot of demos. What's especially cool about the course in Linz is that usually the majority of the students are also doing the advanced certification to be certified engineer or even certified committer. So we're looking forward to seeing this year's projects soon!

It was big fun to be in Linz once again and I'm really looking forward to continue this process next year.