JavaOne 2016 NetBeans Day Is Gonna Rock
The annual JavaOne conference, which kicks off on Sunday (Sept. 18), looks to be chock-a-block with sessions, workshops and keynotes, and I'm expecting significant news from the Oracle Java team and tons of third-party product announcements. One of the best components of this consistently great conference, in my opinion, is NetBeans Community Day, which focuses on what continues to be one of the industry's favorite open source IDEs.
As the no-frills NetBeans Day Web site puts it, "The NetBeans team, NetBeans Dream Team, and NetBeans community will share highlights of how the NetBeans ecosystem has evolved, the work that developers around the world are doing with NetBeans IDE, what's new and noteworthy in NetBeans IDE 8.2, and together we'll explore what's up ahead in the coming period."
The speaker lineup includes NetBeans community members from around the world -- from Serbia to Burkina Faso (a country I confess I haven't actually heard of). Two of my personal favs will be presenting: Arun Gupta, VP of developer advocacy at Couchbase and founder of the U.S. chapter of Devoxx4Kids, and the Father of Java himself, James Gosling, now applying his considerable experience to the challenges of writing software for an unmanned ocean robot at Liquid Robotics . There are some juicy-looking sessions on Java 9 and Jigsaw, open-source tools for teaching Java, so-called DukeScript, Big Data, MVC 1.0 and more.
One session that caught my eye is being presented by Gluon's Johan Vos (CTO) and José Pereda. The session, "Java Mobile and Embedded Development with Gluon and NetBeans," promises to show "how the flow between writing a Java application and deploying it on mobile and embedded devices is extremely easy with NetBeans and the Gluon plug-in."
Gluon is the company that stepped in to fill a serious mobile-development gap left when RoboVM was
acquired by Xamarin, which was then acquired by Microsoft. The end of development and distribution of that ahead-of-time (AOT) compiler and runtime library for Java was later announced on the RoboVM
Web site.
Gluon provides plug-ins for the leading Java IDEs (including, of course, NetBeans), that allow Java developers to build apps for Android and iOS using a single code base. In June, the company unveiled the Gluon VM, which it bills as a high-performance virtual machine that leverages the OpenJDK class libraries and supports Java 8 and 9 on Android and iOS. The Gluon VM can operate in three modes: interpreter, just-in-time (JIT) compilation and AOT compilation. The VM is the foundation of the company's Gluon Mobile and Gluon CloudLink products.
Gluon is run by serious Java Jocks, so I'd expect this to be a great session. Catch it and the other promising NetBeans sessions on Sunday, Sept. 18, in Rooms 102 and 104 in Moscone South.
Posted by John K. Waters on September 13, 2016