How to Take NetBeans Platform Trainings in South Africa!

By Geertjan on May 24, 2010

Over the years I've been in touch with several developers in South Africa interested in a NetBeans Platform Certified Training. Yesterday, Mark Clarke from Jumping Bean, an open source Linux and Java consultancy in South Africa, wrote to indicate they'd be interested in organizing NetBeans Platform trainings. Jumping Bean is an LPI Certified Training Partner and already run Drupal trainings as well, while they're now considering moving into the Java/NetBeans space too.

I asked Mark about some background about Jumping Bean, together with some info about Jumping Bean's interest in the NetBeans Platform. He mentioned that the South Africa National Defence Force work on the NetBeans Platform (described here) has helped in generating NetBeans Platform interest there, artificial intelligence application Maltego too, would be my guess. Mark also sent me the following info:

Jumping Bean started in 2001, as a company focusing on integrating open source components into a holistic business solution. From the beginning we focused on Linux and Java. At that time Java wasn't completely open sourced but we could see that it was inevitable that it would be open sourced at some point.

We thought "what a great value proposition for corporates, an opens source enterprise level language/platform running on an open source enterprise operating system." It's still a bit of an uphill battle because that was what the big boys like IBM and Oracle realised as well, but they left out the cost saving part. Branding is still important.

With the advent of Web 2.0 and the Rich Internet Application (RIA) phenomenon, people started to become more aware that maybe the browser wasn't the only way nor necessarily the best way to deliver applications. Now people are realising that the benefits of the browser, such as easy deployment of client code, operating system independence, and open standards can be retained, but without the issues around poor UI and security.

The pendulum has started to swing back and once people had begun to admit the possibility of of richer client experiences by moving out of the browser, it opened the door for the rich client platforms of NetBeans and Eclipse. A particular attraction for these frameworks is that developers are already familiar with Java, so there is no need to learn a complete new RIA technology such as Adobe's Flex or to deal with the warts and bumps of javascript needed for Web 2.0 applications. NetBeans tends to be favoured over Eclipse RCP, as it uses the standard Swing framework for GUI's and there are at least some Java developers around who still know Swing, whereas SWT would require another learning curve to get over.

Currently we are consulting to a company looking at moving their application onto the NetBeans Platform.

So, in short, if you're in South Africa (or one of the countries in that area) and you'd like a NetBeans Platform training, Jumping Bean needs to know about it. Depending on the level and type of interest, NetBeans Platform engineers from Prague, myself, and/or NetBeans Dream Team members such as Toni from Eppleton could be the trainers in delivering the courses, with some free events for the local JUG thrown in.

Write to "mark at jumpingbean dot co dot za" and maybe we'll all meet up in South Africa. :-)

This is excellent news! Me (and several others) will certainly be very enthusiastic about this possibility. Will contact Mark right now.

Posted by Ernest on May 24, 2010 at 06:32 AM PDT #

Cant wait ... so excited .. hope this happens soon!

Posted by Bessie on May 25, 2010 at 10:40 PM PDT #

Geertjan Wielenga (@geertjanw) is a Principal Product Manager in the Oracle Developer Tools group living & working in Amsterdam. He is a Java technology enthusiast, evangelist, trainer, speaker, and writer. He blogs here daily.

The focus of this blog is mostly on NetBeans (a development tool primarily for Java programmers), with an occasional reference to NetBeans, and sometimes diverging to topics relating to NetBeans. And then there are days when NetBeans is mentioned, just for a change.

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