Mark has been working with Java and PDF since 1999 and is a big NetBeans fan. He enjoys speaking at conferences. He has an MA in Medieval History and a passion for reading.

As has become something of a tradition in recent years, JavaOne kicked off with a NetBeans day on the Sunday.

The sessions began with a reminder that NetBeans was 15 years old – and everyone who attended the talks received a cupcake and a little present to celebrate. The special guest (James Gosling) helped to fill in the history of the IDE, and the fact Sun nearly did not buy it because it was too cheap. Management had its heart set on purchasing Forte for a huge sum and NetBeans was a ’rounding error’. So James Gosling persuaded them to buy both!

In the second session, James Gosling showed the audience his work on software to drive marine robots using Java SE- they now include web cams so that you can see what they see. James even showed us the code in NetBeans which avoids passing ships!

In the second half of the session, we were treated to a detailed guide to profiling in NetBeans. Glenn Holmer showed us Four different ways to attach a profiler to your code, and Kirk Pepperdine showed how NetBeans made it very easy to hunt down memory leaks.

The day was split in 2 by the Keynote talks, and in the afternoon there were two more sessions. In the first, we were given a whistle stop tour of 6 plugins for NetBeans (Jelastic, Codenameone, NBAndroid, Gradle, JRebel and Vaadin).

For the final session, there was a choice of sessions on EE or FX. I went to the FX talk where Five developers showed us work they had been doing on Applications with NetBeans, there were lots of tips including advice on mixing Swing and JavaFX, how to use Charts effectively, drag and drop, Graphing and how NetBeans is helping with space exploration.

It was very useful, fact-packed day and you also missed your slice of cake and your free gift if you were not there….

If you want more information on JavaOne 2013 and further coverage of the entire event check out our JavaOne 2013 Series Index, which covers everything that is happening and is constantly updated, keep checking back for new info!

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