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A NetBeans Platform Certified Training was held at the Hanze University Groningen - Applied Sciences, in the Netherlands, some time ago. In contrast to most other NetBeans Platform trainings at educational institutions, most of the people on the course were lecturers, rather than students. A tour through the technical aspects of the NetBeans Platform was given, the main reasons for using the world's only modular Swing application framework were explored, and a lot of hands on workshops were done. The docking framework, modularity, loose coupling, explorer views, and distribution were the main topics focused on. Within three days, those on the course had created one or two illustrative examples of how NetBeans Platform applications are put together.

Together with the participants from the university, three employees from Ordina, a leading Dutch software consultancy, also attended the course. After prototyping a harbor monitoring application for the Rotterdam harbor and creating an application used in cancer research, as discussed in this article, Ordina is currently leading and invested in a new and open source farm management system, named  AgroSense.

During the course, Gerben and Merijn, two of the developers on the AgroSense project, dropped by and spent an hour explaining the purpose of AgroSense and demonstrating its use cases. In this interview on NetBeans Zone, Timon, the project's lead architect and developer, explains the project in some detail. The project provides a complete and integrated solution for managing farms and is created in co-operation with educational institutions as well as local farmers in the Groningen area. Nice looking and complex features are part of this software package, including a pluggable and modular ribbon bar, shown below:

Finally, here is a pic of the NetBeans Platform class during a lunch break: