David R. Heffelfinger

Day one of JavaOne 2016 is in the books. Day 1 is typically JavaOne's NetBeans Day, and this year was no exception. Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend several sessions showcasing NetBeans capabilities, I saw features present in the current version of NetBeans, some features are available in the upcoming NetBeans 8.2, others, Java 9 features specifically, will be available in a future version of NetBeans, but you can start experimenting with them today by downloading the NetBeans Java 9 build.

In no particular order, here are some of the coolest things I saw yesterday on day one of JavaOne 2016.

1. Adding new refactoring capabilities to NetBeans on the fly.
   Michael Nascimento Santos (@mr__m) demoed how to add refactoring capabilities to NetBeans on the fly with Project Jackpot. The specific example he showed was to add the capability for NetBeans to provide warnings when using Joda-Time, and suggest that the code use Java 8's Date/Time API instead. Java 8, for those that don't know, introduced an improved Date / Time API which is much nicer than was what available with Java in earlier versions. Before Java 8, your best bet when working with dates was to use the Joda-Time library. You can see a video of Michael's demo here.
   
2. Create complete Java EE applications with JPA Modeler.
   Gaurav Gupta (@jGauravGupta) demonstrated a very cool NetBeans plugin called JPA Modeler. JPA Modeler can generate database tables, JPA artifacts (entities, DAO's etc), and even complete Java EE applications just from a database model. The tool works like those graphical applications that DBA's use to create the database (i.e things like ERWin), but goes beyond the capabilities of these tools by generating a scaffold of your Java EE application. Gaurav is JPA Modelers project lead.
3. NetBeans JShell Integration
   JShell is a new upcoming feature of Java 9, it allows to write "low ceremony Java", which means, to develop a "Hello World" program, you would just have to type System.out.println("Hello, World"), instead of having to declare a class, create a main() method, etc. The NetBeans Java 9 build includes built-in support for JShell, you can open a JShell window from NetBeans, experiment with your Java code, then automatically create a Java class with your JShell code snippets. Geertjan Wielenga (@GeertjanW) demoed all this, it was jaw droppingly cool. You can read a blog post explaining NetBeans JShell integration in Geertjan's blog.