Abhishek Mahanty's Weblog

Sun @ TechFest 2007, IIT Bombay

Techfest 2007 - IIT Bombay's Annual International Science and Technology festival began yesterday (Jan 26th) with much fanfare. The beautiful campus near the Powai lake was jostling with Students and Industry folks alike. Sun is one of the key sponsors of the festival and has a lot of presence during the entire three-day event - Technical sessions (interestingly titled Sun Lectures by the TechFest folks ), Quizzes etc.

I was invited to talk.. err.. rather show how to develop applications for different Java plaforms - Java SE, EE and ME. I was accompanied by Sundar, Moinak and Naveen. We reached the campus in the morning and were taken straight to the lecture hall. The hall was packed with students and you could feel the excitement in the air.

After being formally introduced we took our seats and Naveen, who takes care of Developer Relations welcomed everyone to the event. Since, Jan 26th happens to be India's Republic Day, he requested the audience to start the event with the National Anthem. It was well taken by the audience and within moments the hall was resounding with the student voices singing the Anthem.

Sundar took the first session and spoke on Java - Now and Future . He shared with the audience some exciting features/work (Scripting support, JRuby etc.) that are currently under development and also explained the effects/benefits of open sourcing Java.

My session was titled - Building Applications for the Desktop, Web and Mobile leveraging NetBeans. I gave a quick overview of NetBeans and delved straight into the application development bits. The audience simply loved the ease of use side of Java.

• I created a simple desktop application using the Matisse GUI builder and showed the Localization support that aids development of multi-lingual applications. I demonstrated it using different regional languages viz. Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi etc.
• There were few web application developers in the audience and they were completely smitten by the NetBeans Visual Web Pack plugin especially the validation and pagination features.
• Most of the students in the audience had come to see Java ME application development and totally loved NetBeans Mobility Pack. I showed them couple of games and developed an End-to-End application - A mobile client (Midlet) that accesses a web application (Servlet).
• I followed it up with a brief demo of profiling applications using NetBeans Profiler and how it helps in diagnosing various performance problems.

Moinak took the last session and spoke about Solaris and its features. He also shared with them information about OpenSolaris and BeleniX - his baby . Many students penned down the URLs and email addresses of various resources and OpenSolaris user groups respectively.

Later, we distributed CDs/DvDs of NetBeans/OpenSolaris to the attendees and took a stroll around the campus. There were banners/posters of various technologies and companies all over the place. I instantly understood what Naveen meant in the morning when he said - if you're not here you're not there .

On the whole, it was an exciting first day @ TechFest, IIT Bombay.

Posted at 05:45AM Jan 27, 2007 by Abhishek Mahanty in Sun  |  Comments[0]