Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...: Arun Gupta's Weblog

Sunday February 22, 2009

Sun Tech Days 2009, Hyderabad - Technology meets fashion and entertainment

A fashion show was organized for Sun Tech Days Hyderabad attendees. Check out some of the videos:

And some dance performances as well ..

And some more ...

And you can of course see the Tech Days team on the ramp ...

Technorati: sun suntechdays india hyderabad 2009 fashionshow dance

Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[2]

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Wednesday February 18, 2009

Sun Tech Days Hyderabad 2009

India has always had the largest number of attendees of all the Tech Days, and this time is certainly no exception. 10,000+ attendees, the passion for technology, the eagerness to share their work, and everything else makes it certainly one of the most exciting venues for Tech Days.

The Hyderabad International Airport is certainly very impressive - big, clean, and very 21st centurisque with a 8-lane freeway connecting to the main city.

See a short video as the attendees were allowed to enter the Hyderabad International Convention Center (the venue for Tech Days):

I got a chance to talk to the General Manager of the convention center and very happy to know that similar convention centers are planned for Pune (1/2 the size of existing one), Mumbai (4x), and Bangalore (2x) in the near future.

As part of the opening, there was an excellent performance by an 11-year old percussionist, enjoy the video here:

Absolutely stunning performance!

It was funny, I was standing right next to the boy's parents while recording the video. Apparently the boy was allotted 10 minutes and the parents were trying their best to distract the boy right at the beginning of 11th minute :)

I presented on:

WSIT: Security, Reliability, Transactional, and .NET-interoperable Web services (slides). The screencast #ws7 is the demo shown during the talk.
GlassFish & Future of Java EE (slides)

There were 1000+ attendees in both the sessions and had some very interactive discussions post session. It was a great opportunity to meet lots of local Campus Ambassadors, students using GlassFish for their projects, engineers using GlassFish for their development/deployment, Sun colleagues and lots of other folks!

Here are some of the pictures:

And finally the evolving album:

Technorati: conf suntechdays glassfish metro wsit hyderabad

Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[2]

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Friday February 06, 2009

GlassFish swimming to Singapore, Delhi, Bangalore, and Hyderabad - Feb 2009

I'll be traveling (again) and this time to Singapore, Delhi, Bangalore, and Hyderabad over the next couple of weeks. A few meetings are already planned but there is buffer for squeezing any last-minute JUG visits, Rails Meetup or meeting Campus Ambassadors.

Here is my schedule:

	Singapore: Feb 12 & 13
	Delhi: Feb 14, 20, & 21
	Bangalore: Feb 15, 16, & 17
	Hyderabad: Feb 18 & 19

And I'll be there at Sun Tech Days in Hyderabad. Ask me anything about GlassFish :)

Did you know James Gosling is going to be there ? Check out agenda, details and register today!

One of the good things about traveling internationally is an opportunity to taste the local cuisines. Here are a few local delicacies that I don't intend to miss:

Singapore Sling (Raffles) - Not a big crab fan ;-)
Delhi Chaat (multiple venues)
Bangalore Dosa (multiple venues)
Hyderabadi Biryani (Paradise, Cafe Bahar)

Any particular recommendations for restaurants or delicacies that are missing ?

Anybody intersted in meeting or running together ?

You can always follow along at twitter.com/arungupta.

Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[2]

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Sunday March 02, 2008

GlassFish Day Hyderabad 2008 - Packed & Highly Interactive

The overall fourth (after San Francisco - May 2007, Milan - Sep 2007, Beijing - Nov 2007) and first in India GlassFish Day concluded last week. This was by far the biggest and the most heavily attended event dedicated to GlassFish. The room with a capacity of 400 was completely packed as is evident in the pictures below and we had to order additional chairs to accommodate the attendees. The audience was very interactive and had very pointed questions in all the sessions. In some cases the speakers were busy upto 45 minutes outside the conference room answering questions from the attendees.

The slides and video recording of all the sessions will be available soon.

The complete album of Sun Tech Days is available at:

Technorati: conf suntechdays hyderabad glassfishday

Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[3]

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Hyderabad in Pictures and Traffic

Shahi Qutbi Tomb, Golconda Fort and Charminar. Ate biryani @ Cafe Bahar in Basheer Bagh. This place served real good biryani with a good variety. I went there with a friend who ate at Paradise Biryani earlier in the week and he liked it much better at Cafe Bahar.

And now have a feel of the traffic in the video below:

Technorati: india traveltips hyderabad

Posted by Arun Gupta in Finance | Comments[3]

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Saturday March 01, 2008

Euphoria @ Sun Tech Days Hyderabad

As mentioned earlier, Day 1 of Sun Tech Days Hyderabad reception party had a peformance by Euphoria - one of the most popular rock band in India. In case you could not attend, feel the energy of their lead singer Polly and audience in the videos below:

Technorati: conf suntechdays hyderabad euphoria dhoom mehfuz

Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[2]

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Friday February 29, 2008

Sun Tech Days Hyderabad 2008 - Day 2

The highlight of Day 2 of Sun Tech Days Hyderabad for me was the keynote session by David Axmark - MySQL co-founder. In his presentation, he explained how Storage Engine Innovation (Falcon, InnoDB, PBXT & others), "Free" Time Innovation (MySQL proxy, Language Connector), Buying Innovation (MySQL Cluster from Ericsson), Business Innovation (open source in 1996, work with an impressive list of languages, on any platform, all compiled from one source code, designed with portability in mind, simple recompile for 64-bit portability) and other different kinds of innovation give MySQL 66% of market share in enterprises. Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, YouTube are some of the prominent names.

The GlassFish booth was loaded all the time with a great amount of interaction. I've been living out of India after the IT boom started there and have only heard about the energy, passion and excitement about the Indian developer community. I totally experienced it first hand during this event. There were pointed questions which I'll summarize in a later blog (of course along with answers). Here are some more pictures of visitors at the GlassFish booth and attendees in the session:

But it is overwhelming especially if there is a giveaway at the booth as seen in the picture below:

I spent the evening reviewing the slides of a colleague for GlassFish Day (more on that later) while rest of the conference participants were enjoying a walk on the ramp by Indian fashion models. Here is a video of the show I found:

However I was fortunate to catch a ramp walk by the Sun Tech Days core team. Meet Liana, Nichole, Julie, Ranjini, Anita & Renita on the ramp:

And some of them had a celebrity moment when a local TV channel had a brief interview with some of them:

Overall, it was great fun! The Tech Days concluded yesterday and a subsequent blog will talk about GlassFish Day which concluded earlier today.

The complete album with all photographs is available at:

Technorati: conf suntechdays hyderabad mysql glassfish fashionshow ramp

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Thursday February 28, 2008

Sun Tech Days Hyderabad Talent Show Video - Day 2

Sun Tech Days are fun event where you learn a lot about different Sun technologies. A "fun fun" event in the agenda is a talent show where attendees get a chance to show their weirdest skill on the stage. A winner is decided by the audience applause and awarded a leather jacket. And it requires a lot of courage to do that in front of 5000 people, as was the case in Hyderabad Tech Days 2008. There were four participants who performed a variety of activities - yoga, reverse counting from 100 to 1, mimicry and singing.

Enjoy the video of this unique talent show and then decide who was the winner :)

Read more about what and why of talent show here.

Technorati: conf suntechdays hyderabad talentshow

Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[4]

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Sun Tech Days Hyderabad - Day 1

30% of the approximately 5000 attendees at Sun Tech Days Hyderabad were a repeat audience. It is the biggest developer Tech Days of all - both in terms of the number of attendees and tracks/sessions. This is my first Tech Days in India and found the show to be quite impressive so far. Once you enter the main conference hall, it's hard to differentiate between Moscone Center (location for JavaOne) and Hyderabad International Convention Center (HICC). Starting from the entrance, conference rooms, audio/video facilities and the crew is just amazing and very helpful.

Here is a little video right before the opening session:

The main convention hall can accomodate upto 5000 people at a given time and it was packed for the opening keynote by Rich Green (Executive Vice President, Software, Sun Microsystems).

Rich described how JDK, MySQL (yaaay!), xVM, GlassFish, NetBeans, Solaris and many other similar offerings provide a comprehensive suite of products that cover the entire portfolio of software. He talked about how Sun Campus Ambassadors, one-fifth of the total approx 500 are from India, are playing a key role in shaping the future.

Rich also talked about "Innovate more, Code less" - basically talking about how providing incremental functionality over existing FOSS components foster the open source spirit and create a community. It can be measured by a ratio of the number of lines developed and used. Rich also talked about how MySQL (pronounced as my-ess-kew-ell) acquisition (completed earlier this week) has made Sun the largest open source company in the world.

And this is India, so of course lots of people show up at sessions, booths, lunch and every where else as well!

I participated in a technical showcase right after the keynote which demonstrates the latest & cool technologies from Sun Microsystems. There were lots of cool demos ranging from JavaFX, SunSPOT, Java2D & jMaki. A replay of the jMaki demo along with complete instructions to recreate is available here. The opening session was telecast live to Bangalore & Chennai and then there were other sessions conducted parallely as well in these cities.

In addition to the technical showcase, I delivered 2 more sessions - JavaEE, GlassFish & Their Future and Web 2.0 Applications Made Easy using jMaki. And a Hands-on-Lab on Performance Tuning your Web 2.0 Applications. Both the sessions were heavily attended with 45 minutes presentation and an equal amount of time answering the questions.

The evening concluded by a great performance by Euphoria - one of the most popular rock band in India. Their popularity was quite evident by response and participation from the audience. For me, it was quite exciting to attend an Indian rock concert after a looong time :)

I captured the video as well and will upload once I get "decent" upload speed ;-)

The complete album of the visit so far is available at:

Technorati: conf glassfish glassfishday suntechdays chennai bangalore hyderabad

Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[13]

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Wednesday February 27, 2008

South Indian Food & GlassFish

Here are some pictures of the food I've eaten so far:

Here are some of the characteristics of Thali (first 3 pictures):

Banana leaf is used as the base for serving the food - clean and green
A large variety of items are served, including the traditional sambar/rasam/rice/yogurt
Modular - Items are served in a pre-defined order.

Over the lunch table, we were talking how this correlates to GlassFish v3:

HK2 is the core kernel - clean (written from scratch) and light-weight (green)
GlassFish v3 is a container that can do the traditional JavaEE and much more such as JRuby, PHP & Phobos.
Modular - Appropriate containers are loaded only if they are required. For example Web container is loaded only if there are any web applications deployed. Similarly for JRuby, PHP & Phobos as well.

Do you see any other similarity ? :)

And finally the Dosa (making & the final product)

And even a Biryani on the plane too :)

Technorati: food india glassfish v3 dosa biryani bangalore hyderabad

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Thursday February 21, 2008

Sambar/Dosa, Biryani & GlassFish

I'll be spending some time with partners in Bangalore office next week (Feb 25, 26). Then I'll be speaking at Sun Tech Days Hyderabad (Feb 27, 28) and finally coordinating GlassFish Day (Feb 29). Of course, my overarching theme is to talk about GlassFish. But these two cities are also known for their local cuisines.

For those who don't know, Hyderabad and Bangalore are metropolitan cities in two different states in southern portion of India. Other than more popularly known as the hubs of IT in India, they are also known for Sambar/Dosa and Biryani respectively. I'm certainly looking forward to feast on the local cuisines.

The GlassFish Day agenda is pretty compelling with interesting topics like High Availability and Clustering and Performance Tuning. And then there are talks by our partners on Java CAPS and NetBeans/GlassFish Tooling. We hope to share our knowledge with you and learn from your wisdom and experience. And there are a wider variety of GlassFish sessions in the Tech Days as listed here.

Anybody for Dosa or Biryani together ?

Any restaurant recommendations ?

Technorati: conf glassfish glassfishday suntechdays dosa biryani bangalore hyderabad

Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[4]

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Wednesday February 06, 2008

GlassFish Day @ India Tech Days Update - Feb 29, 2008

The GlassFish Day (Feb 29) as part of India Tech Days is now shaping up. This is one full day of focused and in-depth discussions about GlassFish - The Best Open Source Application Server. Starting from state-of-the-union, excellent tools integration, performance tips and high availability/clustering support - get ready to drink from the firehose :)

There is a session by Accenture talking about they build their SOA infrastructure on products based on GlassFish. The in-progress agenda is available here.

The agenda of the main Tech Days is now available. Here are the GlassFish related sessions in the main Tech Days event (Feb 27 & 28):

Date/Time	Topic	Track
Feb 27, 2008
11-11:50	Java EE, GlassFish & Their Future	Enterprise Track
2:00-2:50	Rapid Development with Ruby, JRuby and Rails	Enterprise Track
3:00-3:50	Java Persistence API: Further Simplifying Persistence	Enterprise Track
5:20-6:10	Java EE with Spring and Seam	Enterprise Track
5:20-6:10	Building Rich Web Applications with jMaki	Rich Clients Track
Feb 28, 2008
11:10-12pm	Metro: Everyday Web Services	Interop Track
11:10-12pm	JSF and Ajax with Project Woodstock	Community Track
12:10-1pm	REST-based Programming Model	Interop Track
4:30-5:20pm	SOA using OpenESB, BPEL and NetBeans	SOA Track

Register now!

And of course, how can one miss eating Hyderabad Biryani :)

Technorati: conf glassfishday suntechdays hyderabad glassfish

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Tuesday January 22, 2008

Hold the Date - Feb 29, 2008, GlassFish Day is coming to India

What is GlassFish and Why GlassFish ?
How community is an important aspect ?
How is it different and better than other alternatives ?

If you would like any (or more) of these questions answered, then the upcoming GlassFish Day in Hyderabad, India will provide answers to all of them. This is our first such event in India and we are excited! There will be presentations and demos highlighting different aspects of GlassFish.

Date: Feb 29, 2008
Venue: Hyderabad International Convention Center, Hyderabad, India

All you need to do is Register for the Tech Days and then you get to attend GlassFish Day as an extra bonus day. The Tech Days Session also provide a wealth of information ranging from Java SE 6, Java Scripting, Project Metro, Java ME and many others.

Community is an overarching aspect of GlassFish. Let us know if you have been using GlassFish and would like to talk in front of audience. Just leave a comment on this blog to get in touch.

Read about success stories, see how GlassFish is used in your geography and how it has been gaining adoption. You can also subscribe to the weekly highlights.

I'll be there, will you ?

Technorati: glassfish glassfishday suntechdays india hyderabad

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices | Comments[0]

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