When CUBA Platform started its way in the world of enterprise development tools, the first users were enthusiasts who gained no profit from spreading the word about CUBA all over. With the community growth, we watched CUBA becoming a popular tool. In 2016 CUBA Platform went open-source and experienced a great rise. Сontinuous community growth and Java professionals acknowledgment showed that the framework has a confident future.
But we all know, the world is desperately short of software developers! So, since the start we offered free CUBA licenses to academic organizations to help them on their mission. For instance, for several years we’ve been providing free academic subscriptions. Not long ago we made the request process even easier. Today it is possible to request an academic subscription both for students and teachers in a few mouse clicks on the CUBA website.
CUBA is modern, productive and easy-to-learn - probably that’s why more than 40 universities all over the world use it for teaching enterprise computing, including University of Hagen (FernUniversität), Queensland University of Technology, University of California, Irvine, National University of Singapore, Pirogov Medical University and others.
For the last 2 years we provided more than 200 academic license keys. Recently we received a request for academic subscriptions for a whole cohort of students. One of the Stellenbosch University professors, Mr Richard Barnett, dedicated a full course to software development and low-code environments, particularly Java frameworks. He has chosen CUBA Studio for practical lessons.
Stellenbosch is the oldest university in South Africa. It is famous for designing and manufacturing Africa's first microsatellite, SUNSAT, launched in 1999. Richard Barnett’s course is designed for postgraduates getting the Honors degree - it traditionally follows the bachelor’s degree in South Africa. Mr. Barnett’s postgraduates get education in the field of Information Systems Management. They prepare to work as business analysts. The educational program has a focus on designing enterprise systems, so that the graduates could be good at system analysis and working with databases.
The course covers the essentials of building enterprise applications on Java and forms programming and analytical skills. Almost half of it focuses on Java and CUBA Platform. “I saw an ad on Twitter, and went to CUBA website. I understood that CUBA is the best fit to study enterprise applications development in Java. It’s great that the team provides academic licenses for free.The students can program with a real widely used tool,” commented Mr. Barnett. The students will make their final projects on CUBA as well.
We also asked Mr. Barnett what made him choose CUBA. Here’s his answer: “I chose CUBA Platform because it is easy to start making a working application on it. The development process is comfortable and the technology stack is modern. Java is now popular for enterprise development in Johannesburg, you know.” Also, the professor’s aim was to find a framework with a low code environment which concentrates on enterprise applications. He is going to use this educational program and CUBA in the future, too.
That was encouraging news for the team - we hope that in a couple of years these students will use CUBA in real applications and bring value to South African businesses. We are also grateful to Mr. Richard Barnett for sharing his feedback and experience with us, and wish him and his students luck with studying at such a challenging time.
Take care and do not hesitate to request an academic license for your own course or project!