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.

NetBeans Day 2015 had to be rescheduled to bigger rooms because of attendee demand. It was a very busy schedule. Here are my notes to give you a flavor of the event.

Meeting James Gosling and NetBeans Community Members

Geertjan Wielenga kicked off with a brief intro including new books on NetBeans and new features in NetBeans 8.1 – release is imminent and offers some really cool JavaScript features for developers.

Mark Stephens talked about the NetBeans days in Greece and UK and an overview of the events in general. Anyone can organise one…

Constantin talked about NetBeans usage in Burkino Faso and general NetBeans update in the country (it is a big hit with government, education and business).

Zoran Sevarac showed a very cool neural network and talks about NetBeans usage in Universities.

Finally, James Gosling showed his robots being controlled from Java (software currently being rewritten in Java) and his favorite feature in NetBeans – the code checking. He does not save his files unless he has a green box. He explained he still uses Java because what he does is beyond the capabilities of HTML.

Being Productive with Maven, Java EE, and the Cloud

This talk focussed on how well Maven works in NetBeans, including the graphical dependency view.

Martjin Verburg also showed how NetBeans lets you find which pom file the dependency is actually in if you have multiple POMs. Strong recommendation not to use Gradle and Maven together.

Adam Bien showed how he simplified Maven and did a walk though building a NetBeans application and even adding in a plugin for test coverage. Being able to move seamlessly between IDE and command-line and use exactly the same setup is a big plus in development

James Gosling, Robots, the Raspberry Pi, and Small Devices

There were lots of interactive demos running devices from NetBeans, deploying to Pi and other ARM embedded IoT devices and even a datacenter in a box. Johan Vos showed how you can still get JavaFX for embedded JDK (which Gluon supports). There is actually one of James Gosling’s robots parked in the Hilton if you want to see one up close.

Getting Started with Awesome JavaFX Development

If you thought JavaFx was slow, inefficient or hard to code, Paul and Gail Anderson and Sean Philips exploded those myths with high performance JavaFX demos. Sean also showed an Open Source JavaFX library to draw 3D lines.

Lightning Talks: Even More Productivity with Free Open Source Tools

VisualVM is actually built on NetBeans platform. Kirk Pepperdine showed how you can integrate its features into your own code.

Sven Reimers showed the ‘out of the box’ Gradle integration which can also run tests, code coverage, PMD, findBugs easily as part of build.

Martin Klahn showed how quick and easy it was to setup Maven projects in NetBeans. 30 seconds to download, setup an run a sample project from Internet!

David Heffelfinger setup some restful services and client straight of the box in NetBeans.

WildFly, Hadoop, JavaFX, and HTML5 in the Enterprise

Quick sessions showing you how easy it is to setup WildFly (download and unzip), debug Hadoop, add JavaFx to your NetBeans applications and use NetBeans as your Development IDE.

If you want more information on JavaOne 2015 and further coverage of the entire event check out our JavaOne Series Index, which covers everything that is happening and is constantly updated, keep checking back for new info!

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