A demo on new and cool features of recently released NetBeans 6.5 was held on Jan 20. It was of 2 hrs duration from 3 to 5 pm at CB -16 in our Computer Department.
As expected 71 students attended this demo. Most of them were members of Sun Club(OSUG, Pantnagar).
It all started with a simple question, “What is NetBeans? The most popular answer was that it is an IDE used for Java programming. Well, they were correct but only 33% because apart from being a powerful IDE, it is also a platform for developing applications and a community too.
For next few minutes, I spoke about the interesting history of NetBeans. Students were excited to learn how a final year project turned into such an amazing software. It followed with the overview of its features and the ability to run on any OS with JRE. Students were shocked when they saw the slide showing various technologies supported by NetBeans. A student who have heard of the most of these technologies received a goody.
Then came the real demo, I created a database CRUD application showing how easy it is to create database applications using NetBeans. With this project I also showed how easy it is to develop GUIs with Swing GUI builder(formerly know as Matisse). It was accompanied by demo on advanced editing features.
All the students received a DVD containing NetBeans 6.1, JDK, and other resources. At the end I asked some random questions from the talk and distributed goodies(Pens and Key Chains). Last but not the least, I encouraged them to join NetBeans.org community and explore it.
The demo was successful.
Tags: Demo, IDE, Java, NetBeans 6.5, NetBeans.org
