NetBeans Day in Munich, Germany, held yesterday, was pretty amazing. Despite having been arranged at the last minute, and undermined a bit by Lufthansa strikes and Deutsche Bahn hiccups, the room was filled to almost maximum capacity, certainly around 100 attendees were present. (Registration for the event had to close soon after it opened, because there was only room for 100.) The key people to thank for the event are Peter Doschkinow from the Oracle office in Munich and Toni Epple from Eppleton. They set up the whole day, invited speakers, and so on. Oracle hosted the event, provided coffee and lunch, and the room itself was really nice.
Aside from the rockstar speaker line up, which included Adam Bien, Gerrit Grunwald, and Markus Eisele, quite some well known faces attended, such as Sven Reimers, Florian Vogler, and Martin Klähn, as well as uber NetBeans plugin developer Benno Markiewicz. And Reinhard Schmitz flew all the way from Luxembourg. I met Norman Fomferra and Marco Peters for the first time, who're working on a NetBeans Platform application for the European Space Agency, though there were so many people that I didn't get to talk to nearly all of them. Especially, I missed talking to guys who attended from ConSol, where NetBeans Platform work is also being done, while I learned about several NetBeans Platform applications that I'd never heard of before, such as at SSB and Transver, both organizations in Munich.
But, in fact, most of the day was focused on Java EE, and web development in general. Adam talked about Java EE in combination with AngularJS, Markus about WildFly and OpenShift, while I talked a bit about the Oracle Cloud and Oracle Developer Cloud Service, for both of which there are plugins in the NetBeans Plugin Manager. Peter Doschkinow talked on server-side JavaScript, Toni Epple on DukeScript, Sven Reimers on the NetBeans Platform, and Gerrit Grunwald started the day by talking (via Skype) about wearables and Java. I showed some interesting features in NetBeans IDE and talked a bit about the community around NetBeans.
09:00 - 09:10 Anton Epple, Geertjan Wielenga, Peter Doschkinow: "Welcome to NetBeans Day"
09:15 - 10:10 Gerrit Grunwald: "Catch me if you can" - Java on Wearables
10:15 - 11:10 Markus Eisele: "Manage JBoss EAP, WildFly and OpenShift with NetBeans"
11:15 - 12:15 Adam Bien: "The Microservice IDE: From Java EE To Angular"
12:15 - 13:15 Mittagspause & Open Space
13:15 - 14:10 Anton Epple: "Write Once Run Anywhere with DukeScript"
14:15 - 15:15 Peter Doschkinow: "Server-Side JavaScript on the JVM"
15:15 - 15:45 Kaffeepause
15:45 - 16:45 Geertjan Wielenga - "Heaps of Cool Hidden Goodies in NetBeans IDE"
16:50 - 17:50 Sven Reimers: "NetBeans Platform - Inifinite Evolution"
18:00 - 18:30 Geertjan Wielenga: "Manage Oracle Cloud, Oracle Developer Cloud Service, and WebLogic with NetBeans"
For me, the question of the day was asked during a break in the program by Stefan Gürtler from Transver who asked me: "How do you find your methods in NetBeans IDE?" (Somebody then said "if you need to look for your methods, your class is too large", which was an interesting assertion.) I mentioned the Navigator but he said he'd like to be able to pop up a small dialog, like in other IDEs, within the editor, and then quickly search for a method, at which point the list would filter down to the one he wants to work with. That sounds cool and here's the start of that:
The current implementation is that you start typing and immediately the filtering happens:
It's very simple so far, but the idea is you'll be able to press Alt-Q, do your search, find the member you need, click on it, and then the popup closes and the cursor is on the member in the editor. The plugin can be cloned and I'm looking forward to getting pull requests!
https://github.com/GeertjanWielenga/QuickMemberSearch
The plan is for multiple NetBeans Days to be held around the world. Now that we have a good location in Munich, we'll be able to hold more such events there. The next NetBeans Day is planned to be held during March or April next year. Probably it will be done quite differently to yesterday. For example, maybe there'll be multiple tracks and definitely there should be more time for talking and getting to know each other. Maybe small workshops on e.g., creating NetBeans plugins, could be good to include too.
Thanks to everyone who came, looking forward to next time!