A recent NetBeans Platform Training held at the Warsaw University (by Toni, Karol, and Geertjan), has resulted in a small storm of plugins being uploaded into the Plugin Portal.

That is a central requirement for upgrading from the default "NetBeans Platform Certified Associate" to "NetBeans Platform Certified Engineer".

Read about each of these new plugins below (alphabetically sorted)!

• Lukasz Kajda: Smarty Editor. Editor for Smarty, with many features such as code folding, Navigator, code completion, and Palette:

  

• Piotr Kuska: Petri Net. The plugin lets you create a Petri Net, run a simulation, and save the net in a file. Drag and drop nodes from palette into the editor window in order to create your net. You can then connect transitions with places. Click on a node to view or change its properties. The simulation mode is available when you click on the run button. You can now fire an active transition by simply clicking it.

  

• Rafał Nagrodzki: Query XML. This plugin lets you query XML files using the popular languages XPath 1.0, XPath 2.0, and XQuery 1.0. You can explore the structure of the result in a tree view. The XPath 1.0 has syntax check and coloring. The project contains Saxon Processor libraries (http://saxon.sourceforge.net, http://www.saxonica.com).

  

• Aleksander Piotrowski: Neurox. Create a simple artificial neural network with this plugin. It provides functionality for testing and learning about neural networks. The plugin lets you create new NRX files and move items around on a graphical user interface:

  

  In the visual representation of the neural network, new neurons can be created from the palette and connections between neurons can be created by pressing shift and dragging a neuron. By default, the value of every neuron is undefined and can be edited by the user. The user can provide values for every input neuron (input neuron is a neuron that has no incoming connections from any other neuron) and calculate values of every other neuron in the network. There is also possibility to create many pages (by default there is one page). On each page neurons can have different values. To begin the learning process of neural networks, the user should define values of every input and output neuron (so then it will be the training data) and choose Learn Mode. There is also the possibility to save/load values of input and output neurons.

• Piotr Tabor: Google Buffers. Protocol buffers encode structured data in an efficient yet extensible format. It is comparable to XML, though XML is very slow in parsing. There is no such drawback in "protobuf", because of its binary format. Google uses Protocol Buffers for almost all of its internal RPC protocols and file formats. Piotr, interviewed here about this plugin, created an editor for this protocol, which includes a generator that produces Java files from the Google buffers:

  

  Furthermore, Piotr continued to support the NetBeans Platform Certified Training, by traveling to Silesia to talk about his plugin, as described here and here.

• Michał Woźniak: RTF Copy/Paste Formatting. After installation of this module the following are added to the IDE: (1) new option "Copy as RTF format" in popup menu, when you select something in the editor, (2) new Options panel extension, where you can choose the profile formatting for copy, paste, font and size, while there are also two options for copying, either with highlighting or with only static formatting.

  Select something in the editor, right-click, choose "Copy as RTF format", and then paste into one of the aforementioned document types. That gets you the following, in the case of OpenOffice Writer:

  

   

  Related issue: http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=95146

   

It goes without saying that all of the above students are now "NetBeans Platform Certified Engineers". Nice for affirming their obvious understanding and talent, as well as for beefing up their resume. Plus, they can definitely make use of myself or any of the other trainers as a reference whenever they should need it.