Since, it was the my first tech session, so i started off by talking about Sun Microsystems and the role they are playing in Open Source Arena.
Then i talked about the Campus Ambassador Program (although many already knew about it). Also i talked about various benefits of a product/technology being open source.
The talk was attended by around 100 students from my department and 2 faculty members. Also Mrs. Anuradha Sen took out some time from her hectic schedule and made it a point to attend the talk. Would really like to thank everyone to make it a success.
Vidya Madam presenting bouquet to Anuradha Madam
(Reader @ Department) (My coordinator from SUN)
The topic of the talk was "Web Services with Netbeans 6.0". The talk included a detailed description of some cool features of Netbeans 6.0 and its comparative study with IBM's Eclipse.
The particular points i stressed on were:
> What is Netbeans 6.0 ?
> Why Netbeans ?
> Whats New in Netbeans 6.0 ?
> Why Netbeans rocks over Eclipse (spent 2 slides and 10 minutes) :-)
It also talked about the out-of-box support that the IDE provides, especially for Java EE 5.
Then i introduced them to the world of Java EE 5(something completely new to them) by introducing to them, the basics of Web Services.
It includes points like:
> What are Web Services ?
> Why Web Services are required ?
> History of Web Services (talked a bit about the technologies before the advent of WS)
> What earlier distributed systems (DCOM, CORBA, RPC) lacked :
--> Interoperatability
--> Firewall traversal
> Simple Web Service Architecture
> About w3c standards for Web Services
> Advantages :
--> Interoperable
--> Accessible
--> Economical
--> Automatic
--> Available
--> Scalable
It followed with a demo showing them how easy it is to create, deploy and invoke a web service by using (Drag & Drop) in Netbeans.
Also stated the process going behind the scenes and the role Glassfish plays in it.
Glassfish is an open-source implementation of Sun's Application Server. And i also talked about how Tomcat differs from Glassfish.
I showed them the messages that Netbeans & Glassfish displays when we run the project and while deploying and invoking the web service.
What i could not show, was how to decipher those messages as it would have been really advanced for an introductory session.
I also talked about the ease with which you can use almost any application server with Netbeans and why you will never need any other Application Server as long as you have Glassfish.
I did not failed to mentioned that Glassfish is already shipped with the latest version of Netbeans and how it is fully compliant with Java EE 5.
At the end, i gave them the URLs of the various resources that they can lay their hands onto.
Also Anuradha Madam talked a bit about SAI(Sun Academic Initiative) and cleared a few doubts.
I also distributed some freebies (caps and pens) to the students in the question-answer session. And some refreshments were also given to the students after the talk.
Some points to improve upon:
I overshooted the time : took almost 2 hours ;)
I have a tendency to divert from the topic and i did it some times during the presentation.
And if you would like to add on to it, i would really like to hear. :-)
All in all, it was an interactive session with the students, an amazing experience and something that i will always remember, in spite of how many more demos/presentations i give.
