Tag: J2EE

IEEE Gujarat J2EE Workshop

IEEE (Gujarat Chapter) had organised a two-day workshop on J2EE (or Java EE to be more correct) and had invited me to talk about the latest features of Java EE 5. So I decided to talk on EJB 3.0 , Java Persistence API and JSF.

I had never been to Gujarat earlier and was looking forward to the trip. I caught the morning flight from Delhi and was in Ahmedabad within an hour and half. After a 3-hour car ride (that included changing a flat tyre) I managed to reach the venue. I met few other speakers, mostly academicians from various institutions in the state.

After the initial few formalities the workshop was set in motion. Since my session was not until 3 PM, I took my seat and attended few other sessions. It was good to see enthusiastic students diligently penning down notes as the speakers talked about the various Java EE Technologies viz. Servlets, JSP, EJB etc. I soon realised that students as well as teachers in this part of the country still used Notepad/vi to write Java programs and manualy compiled/configured/deployed the applications on Tomcat server.

Later during the lunch I got to speak with few attendees and they all had this impression of Java being a “tough language”. They cited the example of VB and .NET applications that can be quickly created using drag-and-drop approach. I talked about NetBeans and Creator and requested them to be patient till my session, as I would show them drag-and-drop way of developing Java SE, ME and EE applications.

I made some last minute modifications to my slides to accomodate NetBeans and Creator demos and decided to focus on the ease-of-use side of Java EE 5. The presentation went fine. I covered the following areas:

Demos:

  • Developing Java SE, ME and EE applications with Netbeans. Showed them how EJB 3.0, Persistence and JSF support is present in NetBeans.
  • Developing JSF applications with Creator.

I later distributed few NetBeans CDs among the audience so that they can play with it in the lab sessions.

I got some great feedback from the attendees and they all seem to be hooked to NetBeans. Many of the students want to go ahead and develop their Final year projects using Java and NetBeans.

Later during the evening I went around Ahmedabad doing some sightseeing. All in all it was a nice trip and I look forward to being in Ahmedabad in future too.