Angad's Blog

About this blog

I am Angad Singh. I have served as the Sun Campus Ambassador of JIIT University, Noida (India) from August 2007 to July 2008 and as a Campus Ambassador Tech Lead from July 2008 to July 2009. This was my sun blog. Here I jotted down all my random scribblings, reports on all activities I conducted as CA at my university, my little projects, hacks, geeky stuff and new technology I came across, all the way to things I learnt in my exciting journey with Sun..

About Me

Technorati Authority

View blog authority

10 Recent Entries

» Goodbye..
» JavaOne 2009: Roundup
» JavaOne 2009: San Francisco Sightseeing Tour
» JavaOne 2009: The Parties and Dinners
» JavaOne 2009: James Gosling Student Q&A
» JavaOne 2009: Keynotes
» JavaOne 2009: The Conference Floor
» JavaOne 2009: The Pavilion
» JavaOne 2009: CommunityOne
» JavaOne 2009: The Prelude and the journey

« May 2009
Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30

Today

JavaOne 2009 (6000+ Photos and Videos)

Those of you could not attend JavaOne this year, don’t be disheartened – you can still watch all the keynote replays online, read articles on them, and download their presentations in PDF! It turns out that there’s even a blogging contest. Share what you’ve learned from the online PDF’s and get a chance to win $300.

I have published a series of 9 blog posts on JavaOne 2009 describing my experience in a bit more detail under these headings:

JavaOne 2009: The Prelude and the Journey
JavaOne 2009: CommunityOne
JavaOne 2009: The Pavilion
JavaOne 2009: The Conference Floor
JavaOne 2009: Keynotes
JavaOne 2009: James Goslng Q&A
JavaOne 2009: The Parties and Dinners
JavaOne 2009: San Francisco Sightseeing Tour

Posted at 08:51PM Jun 24, 2009 by Angad Singh in Java | Comments[2] |

JavaOne 2009: San Francisco Sightseeing Tour

We did our San Francisco tour on June 4th. First we went to Pier 39 by Taxi, where we had lunch at the sea-facing restaurant Neptune.

Pier 39 is a festive marketplace built atop a pier near fisherman's warf, a very popular tourist place. Enjoy the fresh and lively atmosphere with soothing blues music playing in the background, go for a ride on the merry go round and enjoy the waterfront sight of the Alcatraz Island. The Neptune served some amazing Fish & Chips and an assortment of seafood items. It gave us a beautiful view of the Alcatraz Island while through the wall sized windows. We had lunch quickly and then took off for a bus tour of the city from Pier 39. It was an antique looking motorized bus with lovely wooden interiors and a very funny tour guide cum driver who kept us amused all the way telling different stories connected with the places we visited as well as important history. The guy was an expert. The bus took us to all the popular landmarks and attractions with 3-4 hours. We took a tour of downtown San Francisco, which covered the Palace of Fine Arts, Japantown, Chinatown, North Beach, Old Mason Street, Fort Point, the Golden Gate Bridge (!!), and back to Fisherman’s Warf.

San Francisco is a beautiful city.. a blend of old suburban homes in a variety of styles with modern infrastructure and amazing sights. I remember Gary asking the tour guide to tell us a joke and he said the biggest joke is that he's driving :). Fort Point is a small fort located just off the shore. It had some amazing views, compelling us to take lots of photos there. We just got 15 minutes wherever we stopped (which I guess was enough or our camera batteries would have drained anyway). We walked half way through over the Golden Gate bridge and came back.We came back and had some crepes at Pier 39. We then walked out to see the sea lions! Fresh sea breeze, soft barks of the lazy californian sea lions, and an evening sun in the backdrop.. that was just an amazing experience. I then walked back to the hotel with David and his english friend discussing iPhone and Guitars :)

This is part of a series of blog posts on my JavaOne 2009 experience..

Posted at 08:51PM Jun 24, 2009 by Angad Singh in Personal | Comments[0] |

JavaOne 2009: The Parties and Dinners

I have to admit: Sun folks really know how to have fun! My JavaOne experience was full of parties, dinners and evenings, all with Sun employees and peers! Sun has super-geeks know how to have fun! Here is the roundup of all the official and unofficial JavaOne evenings I’ve had!

Sunday (May 31st)

Dinner at Anzu - A delightful dinner at the japanese restaurant called Anzu, at the hotel we were staying with Gary, Tzel and all the CA's on the evening we arrived itself. . I had this amazing cook-it-yourself japanese speciality called the "Rock". They serve raw slices of beef with a real sizzling black rock heated up to 400 degrees F. You're supposed to cook the slices by laying 'em on the rock. That was so cool! Just like barbeque! The vegetarians from India had some trouble choosing what to order though, as in most restaurants in the US veg items on the menu are too scanty.

Monday (June 1st)

OpenSolaris and Sun Cloud Party – This was in my opinion the best party of JavaOne 2009. A killer band called the Spazmatics had set the stage on fire (and they didn’t limit themselves to just that stage!). Play dodge ball, drink Martini Luge, eat some great food, roll on some cool segways and listen to a scintillating band performance to keep the fun going!

Tuesday (June 2nd)

The Thirsty Bear – the connected student party. This place was a cool pub located just a walk down the Moscone center. The CA program folks were there: Gary, David, Tzel, Liana, all the campus ambassadors/tech leads/coordinators – Tom, Felipe, Kevin, Hyejin, Avinash, Ashwin, Abhishek, Kira. Naveen Asrani and folks from his team were present too. Tirthankar also gave us company and showed off his skills at the dart board :). I beat Avinash to a quick game of pool just before leaving.
XYZ – It’s a club at the Hotel W just off of Moscone. An only party at the XYZ, Hotel W, San Francisco.. all the top people at Sun drinkin and chilling like ordinary people. This is where I met James Gosling (again, after the student Q&A) and got my picture taken with him.
JCP Party - Intercontinental Hotel, 4th floor – This party was for the people connected with the JCP (Java Community Process). It was a fun party with a lot of good food. I got a photo with the Duke there.

Wednesday (June 3rd)

Buca Di Beppo - A memorable dinner with the CA family - awesome Italian food, witty humour and lots of gifts presented ;)
4th Street Bar & Deli – How can we go home without drinkin. ;)

Thursday (June 4th)

After Dark Bash - A dazzling way to end JavaOne with an extravagant party, and an amazing rock band performance at the Mariott. The band was totally rocking and after a while we saw half the crowd up on the stage dancing in between their instruments. It went crazy near the end! It was first supposed to be held in the beautiful Yerba Buena Gardens but later taken inside due to speculation that it might rain. We got pics clicked with the rock band at the end.

Friday (June 5th)

Dinner at the Louis Diner – This wasn’t an official dinner. I went out with Abhishek to explore the nightlife of San Francisco on the last night of my trip. We went to this restaurant on North Beach which greatly resembles the All American Diner chain in India serving fantastic American cuisine.
The Stinking Rose – I couldn’t make it but still mentioning as I was supposed to there. This was the last dinner, which David hosted for the CA gang, just before everyone leaves the next day to go back home. I came back from Stanford a bit late in the evening so couldn’t join them.

This is part of a series of blog posts on my JavaOne 2009 experience..

Posted at 08:51PM Jun 24, 2009 by Angad Singh in Java | Comments[0] |

JavaOne 2009: James Gosling Student Q&A

This well deserved a seperate blog post. If someone ever asks me, what was my most memorable moment at JavaOne – it would be this one. A student getting to sit down and chat face to face with a geek god is nothing that happens everyday. James Gosling is a really down to earth person. First he gave 80 students a tour of the best technology being demoed at the Pavilion and the same evening he invited students to have a Q&A session with him asking him whatever they want to ask about his life and work, and so we did.

I have captured the entire conversation in this video over here. And if you just want to see a short clip, here’s a JavaOne Minute made around it:

Here’s a transcript of our entire conversation:

Student: I have a good question for you I think. So when you were developing Java, what influence did other languages which were popular at the time on what you made Java

James Gosling: Huge.. huge.. you can find bits and pieces of doesn't different languages in there. The syntax is like C++, mostly because I wanted to trick a bunch of C++ programmers into using.. smalltalk. I mean there was basically an act of subversion to do that. You know, and, the smalltalk crowd never really got performance. So the way that the object model works is somewhat different. It's all about performance. Some of the object model comes from Simula. I used to maintain. I used to maintain a Simula compiler.

Student: Are there things that you see now, that you think you should have done back then?

James Gosling: If I could go back in time and give myself a period of 3-4 years to do stuff, you know if I could get a little time bubble off of the side of the timeline, there's a huge pile of stuff I would do. Generics should have been in the runtime model. But time is a funny thing, you don't get to do that, right. You know, once I had a long fight with Bill Joy about this- Ok Bill we could sit around for another 2-3 years and nail a bunch of these issues.. and by that time who will care.. or.. we've got this opening.. let's just do it now and get the hell out there and at some point you just gotta decide whether you're going to get out there or just sit there polishing. Yea, some of the things I would have loved to have, but.. I wouldn't given up those features in exchange for.. time. But unfortunately, the evil twin of having released a product is that your life gets consumed by it.. one of the 2 things happens.. either it fails miserably or you get the life sucked out of you.. because its a success.. and then you've got a gazzilion people using it. It's really hard to chose. You can't really decide if you want to change such software. I mean like, someone inside Coca Cola says lets change the formula for Coca Cola.. but they'll be like.. Not really. So as long as we don't make changes that break the NASDAQ or the Chicago Board Options Exchange, it's fine. We've got some spectacular Java apps out there. Almost every stock exchange on the planet runs a Java app. We don't get to break them. Every financial transaction system on the planet is a Java app. We don't get to break 'em either. On one hand, you know, that's like a millstone around our neck, and on the other hand, it's kinda cool. Student: Would there by any change in Java in the future which could possibly harm its past legacy, like as we see with the modularization happening with Project Jigsaw. James Gosling: Right, so there's breakage at different levels. Like at the language level, I don't think we'll ever break everything. Fortunately its a 2 level language. There's a Java virtual machine and the language itself. If we ever felt that there was something so compelling, we wouldn't break it, we would just call it a new language. There's some pretty interesting languages that run on the JVM, like Scala, and that's all goodness, instead of breakage. The libraries get to be kind of an interesting deal. There are things that we can do because we can partition the namespace. Classloaders can load different versions of effectively the same class. It actually works pretty well. You know, there's 2 things that I would love to break.. but not so much that it'd be worth the carnage. One of the sad things is that when you've got 6 million professional developers out there, who code everyday. Even at the Mythical man-month rate of 3 lines a day.. 6 million developers.. thats a lot of code. And its been that rate for well over a decade. And it's amazing how much some of that stuff people are still running. The numbers are pretty big. The problem is still pretty big.

Student: Is there a core team? Do people contribute and oversee that? How does the model actually work?

James Gosling: Actually, it's none of the above. It's all broken down into different subgroups that have responsibilities of their own. Within Java SE, there's a group that just does the VM, just does HotSpot. There's a group of people that just does the compiler and one which just does the graphics stuff. That's wrapped up in the Java SE group. And there's kind of a coherence mechanism. But's sort of like business teams who look at the feature lists and make sure that all the stuff is put together. Some companies like Apple, they have chinese walls between their teams, and they're not allowed to talk to each other and they're really not allowed to talk to each other. You know, at the cafeteria, people are talking about stuff like basketwall because they can't talk to each other about work with their coworkers. We do exactly the opposite, right. We have all kinds of different teams and we do all sorts of things to get them to cross-polinate. In some companies, there are architects and then there are developers. Na, we don't do that. Pretty much all developers are fully responsible for some piecce or the other and that sort of bundles up. We've got less experienced folks and more experienced folks. It's a fairly different model than what most companies do.

Student: Where'd the name come from?

James Gosling: Where'd the name come from? There's no interesting story about the name. There was just this other project and it became clear that doing a programming languagish thing was required. And I really wanted to do just the lower levels and didn't wanna do the whole compiler or anything like that. But since I was the only one who had made compilers before, so that was my part of the project. And you know I was sitting at the office, staring at the window. And while I was staring, there was an Oak tree outside, so Oak it was. Incredibly non-creative. I just needed a name, any name. If you think hard about it, it just sucks up too much time. By the time we got to 95 when we were about to release it, couldn't use that name, cuz the lawyers said there were so many conflicts and if we tried to launch a compiler named Oak, we'd get sued by a half a douzen different companies. Somebody tried to come up with clever names and intelligent names. And every clever or intelligent name was already taken so you had to come up with something kind of goofy.. umm and this whole thing came to a point when the number one thing stopping us from shipping was that we didn't have a name. We had this great meeting where they said things like "How does make you feel?". What makes you excited? Java? What else makes you excited? What is it about? It's about the web. Well, Silk then. So what happened was that we ended up with a list of dozen names, ordered them from top to bottom, handed them all to the lawyers. So whatever was it on the top, that's the one we'd go with, no more discussion on that. Java was number four in the list. Number one which I hated, but since it was being done like a democracy and the one which most people liked, I don't know why they liked it, was Silk. The lawyers said naaaah.. Forget what number 2 was, number 3 was my favorite, which is Lyric. Would have loved calling it Lyric, I think Lyric would have worked really really well. The problem was that it was already taken. There was some programming language used for control systems for submarines or something called Lyric.

Student: What features you'd like to add if you had the time (asked second time in a different way by a different student).

James Gosling: Well one thing is closures. I am a big fan of type inferencing and the recurrent syntax is really based around the way C does it. So I would do a lot more type inferencing. Make things a lot simpler. There's bits of Scala that I would pick up. I'm a big fan of functional languages. I'm more of a fan of functional langauges because of you know in multi-threaded systems there's all kind of techniques for mapping functional programs to thousands of threads. Sun makes machines that will easily support tens of thousands of threads and huge address space. We actually have one machine which 230 or so CPU's, its a strange number of CPU's. People use that for massive protein coding to various sorts of simulations and it's very popular in the stock trading crowd. Things about the object-model, or different approaches to object oriented programming with delegations. It's more like a research project. There are different ways of handling concurrency and multi-threading. I mean in every app that anyone writes, you really have to think well about multi-threading. Fortunately, for enterprise apps it works out pretty well, cuz all the framework does all the multi threading for you, but that isn't gonna scale.. well.. it will scale well in that particular problem domain. Any other question?

Student: Yea I've got a question. Why are the first few characters of a compiled Java file CAFEBABE?

James Gosling: Well there were 2 of them. CAFEBABE and CAFEDEAD. CAFEDEAD was picked up because around the corner from my office was a small cafe that we ate lunch at everyday. One of it's claims to fame was that the greatful dead before they were famous used to play there all the time. You know, when Jerry died, a little shrine appeared on the wall. At some point when we ate lunch, we refered to the place as CAFEDEAD. Somebody observed that, you know that's a hex number! That's a funny joke. So we used that for the object file format. And I needed one for the class file format, cuz originally the magic number had been ASCII string /bin/0. And that made a class file executable on unix. Problem was that it didnt make it executable on anything other than unix. So, when I first went .. nooo I need to worry about the Windows and Mac too. And grep was your friend.. so.. find something next to CAFEDEAD.. and so.. CAFEB.. umm CAFEBABE was just something that was weird enough to appeal my twisted self.

Student: How do you think about the JavaFX technology?

James Gosling: JavaFX is I think, incredibly cool. Its a totally different technology. 10-15 years ago, the effects that we used to do with Java were just stupid, we couldn't do it. None of the graphics accelerators were that fast enough to do all this stuff. Taking an image and then rotating it and then putting that little drop shadow behind it. You couldn't do it. But now it's what everybody wants to do.

Student: James, do you have something to tell our student audience watching this session?
James Gosling: You know the important thing for me is to have fun. I can't do a good job unless I'm having fun. One of the nice things about software development is that you can do anything with it. You can write applications that do art, you can do applications that do banking. You can sort of mix-match and have a good time. And just, you know, screw around at it for hours. Things like writing games is a good thing to do.

Student: What's the next big thing you're going to do?
James Gosling: Umm.. Dinner, Sleep.. getting the Java store really launched..

Thank You so much James for your time

This is part of a series of blog posts on my JavaOne 2009 experience..

Posted at 08:51PM Jun 24, 2009 by Angad Singh in Java | Comments[1] |

JavaOne 2009: Keynotes

The following are my writeups on all the JavaOne keynotes I could attend. In case you’re looking for my blog on the CommunityOne keynote, it’s over here. I missed the IBM General Session and Microsoft General session on June 4th as I was out in San Francisco, but I guess I had no interest in attending those anyway. There’s one keynote I wish I hadn’t missed – the Sun Technical General Session called “Intelligent Design: The Pervasive Java Platform” on Tuesday afternoon, but I enjoyed watching the replay webcast online. The major news coming out of the Sony Ericsson General Session was about their new “Application Shop” and the bigger part of that news is that unlike “other app stores” out there, Sony’s developer program will be completely free! The model is that the once the application is purchased by a user, the revenue is split 70-30 between the developer and Sony (yep, that’s the catch).Note that I use the terms “general session” and keynote interchangeably.

Here’s a list of links to all the general session replay webcasts:

Sun - Java: Change (Y)our World [JavaOne Keynote]
Sun - Intelligent Design: the Pervasive Java Platform
Sony Ericsson - Being Unique with Sony Ericsson
Sun - Your Java Lifestyle: Mobile, TV, and Beyond [Sun Mobility Keynote]
Microsoft - Software + Services: the Next Application Platform
IBM - Extreme Transaction Processing and Elasticity – the Answer for Your Most Demanding Applications
Sun - James Gosling's Toy Show

The JavaOne Keynote (June 2nd)

There was a lot of anticipation, excitement and suspense before the JavaOne keynote. As Scott McNealy rightly said, there was an elephant in the room.

I got into the keynote 10 minutes late and the moment I entered I saw Jonathan Schwartz presenting on stage, and was I happy to see him. It was everyone’s speculation that he might not come up this year to JavaOne at all due to the recent changes in the company, but I’m glad they were all proved wrong. I felt very satisfied and happy to see him being the first to present at the JavaOne keynote. He has led Sun through rough seas and has completely redefined the company and he deserves to lead it going forward too. He talked about how Java has evolved from a simple virtual machine meant to isolate the hardware from a progam’s runtime to highly scalable systems powered by Java EE and the resource limited Java Me running on billions of mobile devices. He took us down memory lane and talked about Java’s success and rapid growth throughout the years.

Sony’s new java-enabled blueray players will now feature a high level of interactivity and peer to peer connectivity across set top boxes. Now thats what I call impressive. Next up was the Chicago Boards Options Exchange, who happen to be running completely on Java. Sun & Intel's hardware and software optimization helps CBOE reach 300,000 transactions/sec. We finally saw JavaFX on TV. Loved the demo. JavaFX was finally truly on all screens of your life (fully baked!). Then we had Nandini Ramani, Director of JavaFX up on the stage demoing the much awaited JavaFX Designer! I think that’s the coolest thing they’ve done for JavaFX’s adoption… now any artist who does not coding at all can easily develop rich, compelling, cross-platform and cross-device user interfaces. The best thing is that it can be loaded from within a browser window wherever you are! Talk about versatility! I was in all complete awe to see James Gosling for the first time in person, on stage when he came up. He talked about the launch of the next big thing for Java developers wanting to make some money from their hard work – the Java Store. I like the fact that many companies are adopting the store model started and executed successfully Apple. It’s ok to copy a concept, as long as you adapt it well to the problem domain you target. The Java Store will be a big hit. The only thing which matters then is the money model for the store, which I hope Sun dwells out nicely. Runescape is pretty slick. 150 million users isn’t a joke, specially for a game developed in Java! They deserved the Duke’s choice award. They seem to be a little overconfident about getting it to run so easily on JavaFX TV, but let’s see. Soon I found myself looking at 2 demigods and 1 god on-stage: Jonathan Schwartz, Scott McNealy and James Gosling. It couldn’t get any better.

I was glad to see Scott McNealy taking the stage to reassure the Java community about Java’s positive future and the healthy growth. As funny as Scott always is, he talked a bit about the possibilities that had opened up for Sun after being acquired by Oracle Corp including but not limited to “free advertising” – Java logo’s on sails boats, then he showed a slide with Larry shaking hands with Steve Jobs inside an iPhone – now that really excited.. really if that could happen, it would be the best thing ever for so many iPhone users (especially those like me who would get best of both worlds on the same device one and for all!). And Oh Yes – he speculated that now JavaOne could be conducted in Japan as well. We were all shocked to see him calling up Larry Ellison on stage. It was very reassuring to hear Larry speak positive things about Java’s future including 2 words that I cannot ever forget : “expanded investment” :). He plans to use JavaFX for the user interface to OpenOffice. He said JavaOne will definitely continue to happen in the years to come (yay!).

Scott made us all emotional in the end first taking the opportunity to thank all the Java developers and the Java community at large for all their contributions and then telling us that this is the last year that he’ll be the president of JavaOne. Everyone stood up in ovation for him when got off the stage, the crowd was cheering and applauding him as he settled down. Touchy moment there.

The wifi at the Moscone center was severely down during the keynote session and then lightly broken throughout the day as there were probably thousands of tweeters buzzing about the announcements made and then the goings-on of the first day of the conference. The funniest thing was that I did tweet during the keynote via my GPRS connection but my tweets still did not appear. Some problem with the Twitterific app on the iPhone. I then had to retweet everything in the afternoon.

We were all anticipating Larry Ellison to be present at the JavaOne keynote, and present he was. His presence, along with Scott’s confidence in Oracle reassured our faith in Java and put our worried minds to rest for a while.

Sun Mobility Keynote (June 3rd)

I was really looking forward to this session. This is one session which would demonstrate the ultimate versatility and pervasiveness of the Java platform and its empowerment across all devices defining your digital lifestyle. I got myself a seat right upfront in the 3rd row, all ready to be blown away by the cool demos. Eric Klein took the stage. He tells us that he’s a virgin at giving keynotes as it is his first time. It’s ok Eric, we all have our first times. He called up James and Chris to help him with some T-Shirt mobility ;). 3 lucky guys caught those special edition T-shirts. And they were special not because they were special, but because the catches won themselves the first JavaFX mobile phone by HTC. One of them was a campus ambassador, sitting just 3 rows behind me, shooting past by me. Here’s a video of how that happened.

I thought I heard Eric giving a hint that JavaFX would soon run on the iPhone? Maybe that was just me. We soon had some tweet love on the stage with a live demo of a twitter app running on JavaFX mobile phone. Paypal showed off its mobile app, allowing one to pay a friend on the go using their JavaFX mobile app. Way cool! Now I’ll just wish the people I owe money to don’t get hands on these ever! Anyway I’m glad Paypal got 2.6 billion new users thanks to Sun, the JavaFX Mobile team, and ofcourse that 1 developer who made the app in a week’s time! They then further make us envy with their one letter domain name – X.com, their new developer platform website.

Eric unveils the much awaited major release of JavaFX mobile as well its developer environment, along with the world’s first JavaFX enabled phone and a book I’m soon going to review, called “Essential JavaFX”

The JavaFX content authoring tool was already amazing and it just got better with the ability to develop for JavaFX Mobile as well! Open it up in a browser, connect your phone via USB, write your app and deploy! Select target device screen and everything adjusts automatically! Lots of other cool features like drag and drop binding. You just have to see this in action in the keynote replay!

Next up was Qualcomm with their new concept of Smartbooks – something between a laptop and a smartphone. It’s a netbook with 3G connectivity, built-in GPS receiver, always-on internet connectivity and a long battery life to keep it running for long as 24 hours. Now that is something I’d like to keep in my bag of gadgets too! Eric then shows off a Sun cloud connected media center app called the ClouDVR. And ofcourse, he ran it on the desktop, mobile and.. Yes JavaFx TV!

Klein also called on stage, folks from Orange to celebrate their 5th birthday and talk about JATAF and another initiative of Orange. He ended the inspiring and exciting keynote talking about the Java Store, coining the phrase “Submit once, sell anywhere”.

James Gosling’s Toy Show (June 5th)

This particular session is one that everyone waits for, for the duration of the entire conference. Many people come to JavaOne only to see this session. It is the prime attraction of JavaOne for genuine Java enthusiasts (not for the business minded, they’d prefer the keynotes instead). This is the session for geeks, by the biggest geek. Every year James picks up the best work done in Java and brings all of those folks together to give cool demos at his awe-inspiring, mind-blowing and enigmatic toy show. I wouldn’t miss this for anything. James started the show talking about how late have got this year with him having to meet people even at 3 am :). He then starts calling up the Duke’s Choice award winners on stage. He calls up Terracotta first and lauds their brilliant work, mentioning that they probably know more java internals than anyone else on the planet! We then had Atlassian.

You gotta love them for all good open source projects they’ve been contributing in the past week. Talks about clover, their continuous integration cum testing system. Then we had something new. James called upon stage, the folks from the BlueJ project just to recognize their work and to wish them their 10th birthday. Runescape is much more than just the game. It’s a complete server infrastructure powered by Java serving 175 million accounts, managed by a team of just 6-7 people and a server which hasnt been rebooted since years. It’s a complete free and open source production workflow. It’s an ecosystem of tools and technologies. All that on java. All that completely free to play! Simply amazing!

This was just the beginning and there were ofcourse a whole bunch of other breathtaking demos. Sun people were on stage for a cool magical demo showcasing the 4th screen javafx can be projected on, a Wii-powered vision-based human computer interface which uses JavaFX for all the awesomeness. It’s similar to what the NUIGroup is doing (although not multi-touch). Tor Norbye, the "demo stud" is then called on stage to show off the cool JavaFX visual binding across all screens of your life! Love the master-slave strategy! FX authoring tool is smart

The coolest duke’s choice award winner IMHO was the Java Jukebox guy. This guy was not a developer, he was a musician. And he had went ahead and made a complete jukebox for wannabe bands to be able to upload their music and be heard at bars. What’s so great in that? Well, the stunning part is that It’s user interface is completely written in JavaFX and.. it runs on Solaris! with a touch screen! Unbelievable, but true! :)

Now: Your SIM card gets as smart as your phone! WiFi enabled Java Card 3.x based SIM card coming soon! SIM cards now have a life of their own thanks to Java! PlaySIM uses a Sun SPOT to power a SIM card with Java programmability and interface to things like GPS! Way cool! Lunacy folks then called on stage. Gee, there's kids younger than me featured on the gosling toy show. Robots on stage get James from the back! He needs to be a lil more careful during these sessions :). Next we see the Squawk VM ported to a previously C-only microcontroller, allowing over-the-air java debugging of a robot! smart work! Then we have Sven Reimers on stage showing how they control and monitor satellites using the Netbeans platform!

Volkswagon, Stanford and Sun have worked together to create the world’s fastest automated car.. a race car that drives by itself, being able to go upto speeds of 160 kph. It’s an Audi TTS! It uses the Java Real Time System! There’s more.. the system is completely running on Solaris! Best story I’ve heard yet. It’s competing for the DARPA challenge, obviously. Stanford is working on the control algorithms for the car to follow the GPS points. Sun’s providing the Java RTS and Solaris goodness. The car isn’t ready yet so that hey to show a video. Neil young’s car wonder was demonstrated just off the stage and he was given a special dukey for making it to the toy show 4th time in a row and to be using Java in so many innovative ways. They’ve revved up a 1955 model 6000-pound, fully-finned, circa 1960 convertible automobile to turn into an energy-efficient vehicle.

This is part of a series of blog posts on my JavaOne 2009 experience..

Posted at 08:51PM Jun 24, 2009 by Angad Singh in Java | Comments[0] |

JavaOne 2009: The Conference Floor

The Conference Floor

There a lot to explore around the Moscone center at JavaOne this year. Get your photo clicked at the Duke’s Photo Op booth or play games on a PS3 or watch a movie or buy some cool T-shirts from the Java Retail store or buy yourself some cheap books at the bookstore or just hang loose on the bean bags at Gosling’s memory lane.

James Gosling’s Memory Lane

As soon as we entered the Moscone center and walked down the escalator, we witnessed a wall with a huge banner stuck on to it like a wallpaper with various cartoons of James Gosling in different Duke T-shirts. The board on the left reads “For 14 years, James Gosling has created limited-edition Duke t-shirts for JavaOne. In this banner, he's brought together many of those designs”. This place was called the James Gosling Memory Lane. On the first and second day this place was full of floating balloons with small cards attached to them where you could put up any message you wanted and after that it had tonnes of bean bags for conference attendees to sit and relax between sessions.

Duke’s Photo Op

You couldn’t miss this one! Here you could stop by and get a photo taken with our beloved Duke! There were 2 versions – either get a photo with Duke in person or with a virtual Duke!

The AMD Hang Space

This in my opinion, was the best thing I liked about JavaOne. When you’ve participated in a lot of sessions and just need a break, this was the place to be at. Bean bags with playstations, a lounge space, a movie theatre and a whole lotta fun! The great escape from all the seriousness!

Hacker Stations

Sun Ray powered thin clients providing access to the internet so that you can stop by to check email, surf the web, check your session schedule in the schedule builder, or tweet your JavaOne updates!

This is part of a series of blog posts on my JavaOne 2009 experience..

Posted at 08:51PM Jun 24, 2009 by Angad Singh in Java | Comments[0] |

JavaOne 2009: The Pavilion

The Pavilion

The JavaOne pavilion is THE place to hangout for JavaOne attendees when they are not attending technical sessions. This is the place where all top rockstars – top JUG leaders, Java experts, CEOs, Duke’s Choice Award winners, JavaOne speakers and core developers from Sun are found giving real-time demonstrations of their projects in person and interacting face to face with other java enthusiasts and students. It is THE place to network and interact with industry professionals – with people from over 85 countries. As Chris said during the keynote, you’ll never be able to visit 85 countries in your lifetime so JavaOne is the platform to meet people from so many countries at once, share experiences, learn and collaborate at one single place. This place was filled with more than 50 exhibitor pods of companies working with Java and related technologies. There were fun activities all around the place and lots and lots of goodies and giveaways and T-shirts to bag! It is the place to get all your doubts answered from the people who made the technology themselves! Interesting spots in the Pavilion floor include the OSUM booth, the Change Your World Playground, the Java Utopia, the JavaOne spinning wheel, the Cloud zone, the Sun SPOT booths, the OpenSolaris Install Lounge. There were special 5 minute “Lightning talks” at the Pavilion (a new trend in technical conferences), which are fast-paced and informative BOF sessions for the non-speakers to become speakers for a short while :). There even was a place where you could get yourself a T-shirt with a custom slogan on it and other fun stuff like that! I met a lot of people I always wanted to meet right there on the Pavilion Floor including Geertjan Wielenga (netbeans rockstar!), Eric Reid from ISVe Engineering (him and Scott Mattoon lead the Drupal efforts within Sun), Roger Meike (Director of Operations, Sun Labs!). I was also happy to meet those few I had met last year in India: Arun Gupta (Glassfish evangelist), Vipul Gupta (Sun SPOT team), David Lindt (Sun Learning Services) and couple others. The booths that interested me were those of Intel, the Sun Cloud offerings, Project Kenai, Zemblai, the OpenSolaris SourceJuicer Pod, Netbeans, Amazon, Sun SPOT, LiveScribe, Caucho Quercus, Java RTS, Sun Studio Mixed-Language development, Spring, Atlassian, The Alice Project, Project Speedway (and I’m obviously missing a lot of names as I’m blogging this almost 2 weeks after the conference!).


The JavaOne Pavilion		Java Utopia

Duke’s Choice Winner: Project LincVolt	Java Utopia	JavaFX TV!

JavaFX TV	OSUM Lounge	Play poker and win a porsche!

Geertjan	Me, Geertjan, ND Satcom developer (2009 duke’s choice award winner)

James Gosling’s Pavilion Tour	Arun Gupta (Glassfish Evangelist)	Sun Cloud Zone

Colin Cupp	David Douglas, Sun VP of Cloud Computing giving a tour of the cloud zone	Spinning Wheel Rewards Counter :)

The OSUM booth and Community Corner

The Java.net Community Corner was a meeting point for members of java.net communities, JUGS, Java champions, Netbeans Dream Team as well as our very own OSUM. It also had a podcast booth, book signings and casual Q&A sessions. The Open Source University Meetup Community had a booth setup over at the Community Corner on the JavaOne pavilion floor for the first time this year. It was voluntarily manned by all the campus ambassadors present at JavaOne along with Gary, Tzel, Liana, Colin and Kirby. Our work at the booth was to inform students coming over at the booth about the ever-growing OSUM community, the Campus Ambassador program, interesting opportunities for Students at JavaOne and any other query they may have. Sun had also organized a scavenger hunt just for students at JavaOne, and we collected the stamps from students and also conducted the daily raffles at the OSUM booth itself. We had plenty of giveaways for students coming to the booth – caps, pens, T-Shirts, and most importantly – OSUM badges and bands. We got these cool red T-Shirts which we were supposed to wear while at the OSUM booth - at the back it read "Javaholic. Are you a student? Got questions? Ask me!". Gary was wearing one all the time. We had students from all parts of the world coming over and not just San Francisco. To our surprise, we even had an ex-campus ambassador, Kira with us. It's cool to see how campus ambassadors still hang out together and get to meet like this even after their term is over. Me and Ashwin interviewed Kira for a quick JavaOne minute.


Gary and Kirby	CAs	Liana with Duke

The Student Scavenger Hunt (Dude, Where’s my treasure?)

Sun designed a scavenger hunt just for students, called the "Dude, Where's My Treasure?" student scavenger hunt. On the first three days of JavaOne, June 1 through June 3, students followed a checklist of tasks that led them through the different areas on the conference. To earn stamps on the scavenger hunt card, they had to do specific Java-related activities, and when they filled their cards with stamps, they were entered in raffles to win either an iPod Touch or a Sun SPOT developer kit. I had captured the raffle and prize distribution for the scavenger hunt on Monday in this JavaOne Minute video.

Winners of the “Dude, Where’s My Treasure” student scavenger hunt

The Spinning Duke Game

This was one place I visited everyday for sure! It’s called the “Spining Duke Game”. All you had to do is to visit the various booths like the Cloud Zone, Kenai booths, the Intel booths or the Zembly booth and interact with the expect / receive their demonstrations- and then get your stamp. After that you come spin the wheel here and win a prize! The more stamps you collect, the better the prize is! There were give levels of prizes including one grand prize per day! I got upto level 2 :)

The OpenSolaris Install Lounge

Abhishek, the guy who has many roles in Sun (former campus ambassador, current campus ambassador coordinator and intern with OpenSolaris marketing team) could almost always be found at the OpenSolaris Install lounge in the middle of the Pavilion, helping students install OpenSolaris on their laptops and engaging them in fun activities. He had also given a talk on the same. There was also an area in the install lounge called the “Rockband 2”, a cool hangout spot for all the rockers at JavaOne – where you could play Rockband 2 on the guitar, live! The third area was the Apps of Steel challenge – where one could checkout the winners of the OpenSolaris Apps of Steel challenge

The Change Your World Playground

The most intersting place on the Pavilion floor was this place! Meet the duke’s choice award winners in person, check out cool high school robotics (JavaOne Minute!), witness all the Sun SPOT goodness or have a seat in Neil Young’s Java-enabled biodiesel and electricity powered LincVolt car (JavaOne minute)! Here I met the director of Sun Labs – Roger Meike and Vipul Gupta, who’s a distinguished engineer working in the Sun SPOT team. He gave us a cool demo of the web-based sensor network monitoring system, which we captured in this JavaOne minute.


Ashwin, Roger Meike, Me, David Lindt		High School Robotics	Java Real Time System Demo

This is part of a series of blog posts on my JavaOne 2009 experience..

Posted at 08:51PM Jun 24, 2009 by Angad Singh in Java | Comments[0] |

JavaOne 2009: CommunityOne

CommunityOne and The First Day at the Moscone Center

Gary, Me, Ashwin, Avinash, Tom, Hyejin, Felipe and Kevin rushed down to the Moscone center on the first day of the conference, it was most certainly an enjoyable hustle. We entered Moscone, registered for JavaOne and CommunityOne 2009, got our conference attendee badges, conference agenda and other material.. and then we went off to get more material downstairs.

Arrival, Registration and material collection at the Moscone center

The CommunityOne General Session

CommunityOne started with a bang. We all took up front seats few minutes before the session started. Gary introduced us to Lin Lee, our super-super-boss, VP of Global Communities in Sun. Checkout Gary’s JavaOne minute taken just when the halls were filling up. The session's highlights were Sun's new cloud computing offerings. David Douglas, Senior Vice President at Sun for Cloud Computing took the stage to talk about citizen engineering, eco computing and various other stuff and then came then came to the exciting part: he called on stage, 4 of the campus ambassadors who were sponsored to attend JavaOne this year: Avinash Joshi from India, Felipe Cerda and Tom Petreca from Brazil, Hyejin Park from South Korea and Kevin Li from China. David asked them to talk about their experiences as campus ambassadors, in fostering open source clubs on their campus and leading their OSUM communities.


CommunityOne Keynote	David Douglas, Sun VP, Cloud Computing	John Fowler and Panel

Campus Ambassadors on Stage with David	Gary Serda, Manager of CA Program

We all listened to them proudly. Then John Fowler came to set the stage on fire with the launch of OpenSolaris 2009.06 and a discussion of all its great new features! While the presenters kept throwing all the cool stuff at us I tried to keep up with them and tweet updates along the way. Unfortunately the WiFi really sucked at the Moscone Center and I had to do that on my international roaming airtime, but I guess it was worth it. Gary did a JavaOne minute with Avinash to get to know about how he felt being up there on the stage at the CommunityOne keynote! While there were many exciting things announced and demoed during the keynote (you can watch the replay here!), my personal favorites are Crossbow's new drag-drop GUI, multicore optimized networking stack and JavaFX finally working on OpenSolaris (and so well too!). As expected there was a huge crowd at the keynote and lot of people were standing just outside the hall to discuss how things went in the keynote. Thats when we ran into Valeriya Alaverdova, Program Coordinator in the Sun Marketing Team who had travelled to JavaONE all the way from Russia. We did a JavaOne minute with her about how things are going for her and what she's there for. Then we caught hold of the OpenSolaris Community rockstar - Jim Grisanzio in the flesh! I have been following Jim's blog since a long time and keep reading his mails on opensolaris-announce, advocacy-discuss, etc. He is undoubtedly the best community manager the opensolaris community could ever have. We did another quick JavaOne minute with him on his thoughts about CommunityOne and the amazing keynote we just attended. We also ran into Sriram Narayanan! He's a very active member of the Bangalore OpenSolaris Usergroup. I was quite happy to meet him there.


Colin Cupp & Kirby Kerr	James Gosling’s Memory Lane	Gary wearing the OSUM booth T-shirt

You can see all the keynote replays as well as read their summaries here.

At the end of the exciting as well as tiring day, we had the Pavilion reception, with good food. The catering was good. There was a long line for the beer so I skipped that. At around 6.25 PM we were surprised by a group of dancers and musicians taking a backdoor entry and catching everyone’s attention by parading through the Pavilion..!

This is part of a series of blog posts on my JavaOne 2009 experience..

Posted at 08:51PM Jun 24, 2009 by Angad Singh in OpenSolaris | Comments[0] |

JavaOne 2009: The Prelude and the journey

My trip to JavaOne in San Francisco was an amazing experience. One that I can probably not describe completely in words (with my limited vocabulary). It was the most thrilling and exciting journey of my life, yet. It was great to meet many of the people I've been interacting with since the past 2 years on IM, email and virtual worlds, in person. It was the right mix of conference business as well as a whole lot of fun. We used to attend engaging technical sessions/labs, meet tech rockstars and industry professionals in the Pavilion, check out all the amazing products showcased at the exhibitor pods, interview people high on the JavaOne spirit to share their JavaOne experience and get a slice of all the amazing activities scattered all over Moscone Center. Through this series of blog posts I would like to take you through my enticing journey to the beautiful city of San Francisco and the best developer conference in the world, JavaOne 2009.

The Prelude (Before June 30th)

I was totally thrilled to get the golden opportunity to go to JavaOne. It was my first trip to the US, heck, it was my first JavaOne and I've been wanting to this conference ever since I became a Java developer and Sun Campus Ambassador. I had always been wanting to get a chance to meet the rockstars of the Java world all under one roof, to experience the great knowledgeable sessions and to feel the great conference spirit in person, and not just in videos streamed over the internet. And lo and behold, Ganesh our manager sends out a mail one fine day saying that me and Ashwin, the 2 campus ambassador tech leads from India are sponsored by Sun Microsystems, India to attend JavaoNE 2009, rewarding our 2 years of hard work with Sun first as campus ambassadors and then as campus ambassador tech leads. Apart from us, 4 campus ambassadors were sponsored for their outstanding performance this year as campus ambassadors - Avinash Joshi from India, Kevin from China, Tom Petreca and Felipe Cerda from Brazil and Hyejin from South Korea. Avinash was also there for being the campus ambassador of the year. Carlos Alejandro was also supposed to come but sadly he couldn't make it as he wasn't issued a visa, bummer! The Open Source University Meetup had a booth setup over there for the first time this year and Gary Serda, our superboss, gave us the opportunity to man the booth for the 5 days of the conference, and so we did that in shifts. Our work at the booth was to inform students coming over there about the ever-growing OSUM community, the Campus Ambassador program, interesting opportunities for Students at JavaOne and any other query they may have. We were also given another cool opportunity to participate in the JavaOne Street Team -- each JavaOne street team member was supposed to make 3 one-minute videos per day, each, from June 1st through June 4th. These videos could be interviews with conference attendees, Pavillion exhibitors, Rockstars and prominent Sun folks to capture the buzz of the conference for those who could not attend J1 but still want a glimpse of the experience here and also for updating attendees about all the cool stuff happening there. Each of us got a Flip MinoHD cam for this job, which is way cool. It's a pocket sized camcorder which captures HD video. We were supposed to make 3 of these videos before the conference and the rest while where there. Here are 2 of them which I made on the 31st night. In addition to that, we were also interview by Chris Melissinos a couple of days before the conference for the JavaOne Radio show to discussion about what we all were looking forward at JavaOne 2009. I got my visa just 4 days prior to my flight, just in the nick of time, all because I did not get an early date for the visa, but anyway, alls well that ends well.

Journey to San Francisco (June 30th-June 31st)

It was my first international flight but it all just went fine. We were flying Emirates! It was all very exciting. Ashwin and Avinash were boarding from Bangalore and me from Delhi, we were meeting mid-way at Dubai and then taking the same flight from there to SFO. The flight uptil Dubai was just a 3 hour journey.

Dubai International Airport

The Dubai international airport was amazingly huge, ultra-modern and breath taking. We had 2 hours to rest and take snaps there and then move on to the longest flight of our lives. The in-flight experience with Emirates is good. They have this entertainment system called ICE (information, communications, entertainment) which provides you bundles of movies, music, news and interactive services like SMS, Email, Phone. It even lets you enjoy watching pictures you took with your digital camera via USB on the wide touch-screen. We had plenty of time to figure out that it's a thin-client system powered by Linux and Flash (yep, we caught the linux bootscreen). After a 16 hour journey, with lots of food and lots of drinking we finally set foot on San Francisco International Airport. The first impressions of being in the US weren't really that impressive. The airport in Delhi and Bangalore were just as impressive. There were certainly more security cameras and much more security, but the level of technology was pretty much the same (except the finger print scanners perhaps!). Unbelievably someone stole the lock on my baggage!


Automated Ticket Counter	Airport BART Station	Inside the train..	SFO International Airport

As we started moving out, things started getting better. We went over to the BART station inside the airport (woot!), completely automated ticketing system. The train was pretty empty though, quite unlike the metro in Delhi, but what am I comparing anyway :). We got a bird's eye view of the city while in the train for the 35 minute journey from SFO airport to the Powell Street station.

First impressions..

We got a first look at the real San Francisco just after we exited the Powell Street BART station. It was awesome - lovely cool weather, beautiful streets, trams and limousines! We were finally witnessing what we had been able to see in Hollywood movies and TV - the US of A in all its glory - in the flesh. Then began the real excitement. I quickly took out my iPhone to start making use of all the navigation apps I had downloaded from the appstore back in India to get around SFO - an app called iBART to find BART routes, nearby stations, and schedules, an app for MUNI schedules, and a couple of tourist apps specific to San Francisco. And then also began, my photo taking spree! I have captured around 6000+ photos and videos from my trip and at the time of writing of this blog entry I was still struggling to upload them all to my flickr pro account :).

Powell Street

We walked down to Hotel Nikko on Mason Street, bumping into Mayuresh on the way (talk about being in a small world!). It was a pretty decent hotel with a room big enough for 2 people. We quickly freshened up and came down to meet Tzel in the lobby. She took us to a Starbucks right inside the Hotel premises and then we discussed a few things related to a few initiatives in next year's CA program. Tzel wanted to get our feedback on it. We soon caught up with Gary, who was a lil tired running around whole day. He took us to the japanese restaurant in our hotel - Anzu.

Dinner at Anzu

We had some amazing food and a great time there. I had this amazing cook-it-yourself japanese speciality called the "Rock". They serve raw slices of beef with a real sizzling black rock heated up to 400 degrees F. You're supposed to cook the slices by laying 'em on the rock. That was so cool! Just like barbeque! The vegetarians from India had some trouble choosing what to order though, as in most restaurants in the US veg items on the menu are too scanty. I just couldn't wait for the next day so after dinner, I went on a night walk with Avinash to explore the neighbourhood. We went off to Powell Street again. I saw a real Apple store!

The City at Night

The city looked even prettier in the night. The air was full of energy. People followed the traffic rules. Although many shops were closed, they left the lights on. There were just so many restaurants. For the first time it actually felt nice walking down the street! There was this peculiar trait of SF's roads - you get to hear a lot of echo of the sounds coming from the vehicles on the road - it has be the road's material. It sounds nice and creates good ambience. After coming back to the Hotel, I did 2 quick JavaOne minutes, which were a prerequisite to entering the JavaOne street team and went off to sleep. The next morning we had to report to the lobby at 7 am sharp to quickly go and register for JavaOne and CommunityOne.

This is part of a series of blog posts on my JavaOne 2009 experience..

Posted at 08:51PM Jun 24, 2009 by Angad Singh in Java | Comments[0] |

This work by Angad Singh is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.