Sun Technical Summit, Bangalore
Sun Technical Summit 2007 was held in Bangalore on Friday. It was a half-day technical event where some of the following technologies were showcased:
- Java SE Language Features - Today and Tomorrow
- Ajax and Web Frameworks
- Web Services and SOA Applications using Java EE
- Sun JavaDB
- Java EE 5 and Glassfish
- NetBeans - Matisse, Profiling, Rich Clients ....
- DTrace
- ZFS
- OpenSolaris
The event was graced by the inimitable Scott McNealy, Chairman, Sun Microsystems. Scott gave the keynote address. He touched upon the resurgence of Multi-Threaded computing and Sun's CMT processors, The Java FX script and Java FX mobile platfrorms, Netbeans, Enterprise Java Stack and Solaris. Scott looked visibly tired in the midst of a whirlwind world tour. But that did not dampen his usual sense of humor one bit. He was upto to his jokes ranging from the impact of Dell Boxes on Global Warming to renaming Sun to take advantage of the Java branding !
Meanwhile Sanjeev and Me were geared up for our respective presentations on ZFS and OpenSolaris. The folks who attended the OpenSolaris talk were the ones who were really interested because it was the last talk of the afternoon, the previous talks had delayed the sessions considerably and they were in danger of missing their lunch :-) Still, more than a hundred developers were huddled in a overflowing hall.
Some of our engineers had recently got new Sony Vaio laptops with NVidia cards. So we had Compiz running on the latest Nevada bits. This was dramatically helpful in showing how much more usable Solaris has become on the Desktop front. Having given numerous presentations to similar audiences before this, one thing that I can positively assert is that - Developers (except for the hardcore geeks like Sun Engineers), are big-time suckers for Desktop Features, Multimedia Apps and Graphical Effects. Compiz 'WOW'ed a hundred times more people than DTrace or ZFS did. Its very difficult in a span of 30 minutes to convince ordinary developers that Solaris kicks butt using DTrace or ZFS. But Compiz just gave us that opening. After that, anything told about ZFS and Dtrace was readily accepted as magic ! I had at least twenty people walk upto me and say something to the effect of "Wow ! This is mind-blowing stuff. How can I run this on my PC ?"
Most of us folks at Solaris Revenue Product Engineering, India have our desktop so configured that people walking up to our desks generally refuse to believe that we are using Solaris :-). This is one of the reasons why BeleniX (which originated from Moinak Ghosh of our team) is probably the most "friendly" OpenSolaris distro out there. Now if only we can have an Official Sun-Distribution of OpenSolaris that can deliver such an out-of-the-box experience, we would be reaching out to a whole new set of people - Not our regular boring sysadmins who manage massive data centers and insist that '/bin/sh' is god's own shell. Is 'Project Indiana' the answer ? Scott at least dropped hints that it might be so !
Posted at 09:15AM May 20, 2007 by Ananth Shrinivas in Sun | Comments[0]