Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...

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]

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.

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[1]

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]

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.

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[13]

South Indian Food & GlassFish

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

• 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.

• 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.

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[1]

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]

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):

Register now!

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

Technorati: conf glassfishday suntechdays hyderabad glassfish

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[1]

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]

Sun Tech Days Beijing - Talent Show in Pictures

One of the Sun Tech Days event is "Talent Show". It allows the conference attendees to demonstrate their non-technical skills on the stage. It was first introduced 5 years ago and became so popular that it's now part of the regular agenda. Attendees do all sort of things - typically juggling, dancing, singing, wiggling ears, whistling and I remember the winner at Atlanta Tech Days showed a back flip. And the winner is awarded a Java Jacket.

The show serves two purpose: audience interaction and add levity in a technical conference. As Jonathan Schwartz says - The Age of Participation is Now and this event encourages the community to show their skills to rest of the audience.

The way it works is that 3 volunteers are chosen from the attendees in the room, each volunteer gets to introduce them self and then demonstrate the talent. After all the volunteers have shown then the audience is asked to pick a winner by applause meter. In Beijing, there was an overflow room for the morning session and so there were two sets of volunteers who demonstrated their talent. And of course, we gave out two Java Jackets as well :)

Here is the talent show captured in pictures:

The winners this time performed Street Dancing and Kick Boxing. Watch the complete album here:

And of course, follow the complete coverage in Sun Tech Days Event blog.

Technorati: conf suntechdays talentshow beijing

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[2]

Sun Tech Days Beijing - Day 1 Report

1500 developers kick started 10th anniversary Tech Day event at the Beijing International Convention Center earlier today.

Joey Shen, Angela Caicedo, Doris Chen and Chuk Munn Lee demonstrated Swing/Java2D, Sun SPOTs, jMaki and JavaFX demo respectively as part of the demo showcase. All the demos were really good and showcased different technologies from Sun. I personally liked Sun SPOT demo which showcased how Robosapiens can be easily controlled using the JVM. It very well resonated with "Internet of Things" that Lionel Kim (President Greater China and COO APAC Sun Microsystems) mentioned in his keynote earlier in the morning.

According to Lionel, there are three factors driving global innovation:

• Web.next - The key point here is that currently the major producer/consumer of content on the Internet are people. But very soon it'll be an Internet of things where different "things" are interacting on the Web fueled by all the innovations happening in Web.next.
• Age of the startups - Facebook valued at $ 15 billion has already changed the current landscape and similar companies are going to drive the needs for next generation.

• Rise of communities - Time magazine awarded YOU (community) as Person of The Year award for 2006. And that indeed is the most important factor in driving innovation.

Carla provided a great coverage of Jim Hughes keynote (during which I was busy with local translators for my upcoming session :) This is the 10th anniversary year of Tech Days and we celebrated by cutting a birthday cake. There is lot of backstage work (audio, video, rehearsal, logistics and all sort of things) that often goes unnoticed and some of the photographs below highlight that work.

Right after the keynote, I gave a talk on "Java EE5, GlassFish and Their Future" and the slides are available here. It was great talking about GlassFish to a 560 capacity room full of audience. Leon showed a demo of localized version of GlassFish and how it can be configured in a clustered environment. Jim Jiang offered to give away 10 copies of his recently published book on GlassFish. You can order it online here. Jim Jiang and Wang Yu are the primary authors with content contributed from Jason Huang, Ada Li, Liang Ye and Evrin Yan. It was great meeting most of these individuals face-to-face. If you missed being one of the lucky winners of the book, then attend GlassFish Day on Saturday, Nov 3 and there will be many more copies distributed.

I also attended Chuk's talk on Metro and REST. He really presented the concept very well and it was fun seeing somebody else present Metro :)

I spent rest of the day talking to people on the GlassFish booth. Once again, Jim Jiang helped me connect with the local audience. I'll prepare a summary of the  questions and then provide answers to them in a subsequent blog. In the meanwhile, here are some links for you to get started:

• GlassFish Multi-lingual download
• TheAquarium in Chinese
• GlassFish Forum

The evening ended with Yanjing Beer and Beijing Duck dinner. And as always, enjoy the pictures from through out the day:

Follow the complete coverage in Sun Tech Days Event blog.

Technorati: conf suntechdays metro webservices jmaki web2.0 glassfish netbeans beijing

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[0]

Travel Tips to Beijing

I arrived in Beijing for Sun Tech Days earlier this week. Here are some travel tips:

1. The Beijing city has Tina'anmen Square and Forbidden City at it's center. Rest of the city is structured in multiple ring roads around the center. Each tourist place can be located as between X and Y ring road easily.
2. If you are a Wells Fargo banker, take the Access Code from Customer Service before boarding the flight. This code allows you to talk to a Wells Fargo banker in USA from anywhere in China. There are separate codes for North and South China. Dial the access code, get the operator, mention the 800-869-TO-WELLS and voila you are connected to the network.
3. Nichole & Renita were gracious to let me share the ride from airport to the hotel so I missed that part of the experience. But it's recommended to walk out of the airport and get a Taxi from the Taxi Stand instead of getting lost in rooks within the airport. It's also recommended to have your hotel name written in Mandarin because the Taxi Drivers may not be able to read/speak English. Once you checked into the hotel you can use your hotel key to show the address (which has the address written in Chinese) to move around the city.
4. Took a guided tour from the hotel to Forbidden City and Great Wall of China. It covered Transportation, Lunch, Parking tickets and Tolls and an English-speaking guide. You can do the same using a private taxi but it may turn out to be slightly costly and most likely you will not get an Mandarin-speaking driver and therefore no guide :) As part of the standard tour, they may take you to a Silk Emporium and Jade Factory, they are fun places just to learn how they are all manufactured.
5. Shopping is a LOT of fun in Beijing. There is a great variety of clothes, toys, gadgets, etc. at local shops. And no shopping is complete without bargaining and that too HARD bargaining. For example when shopping at touristy places, such as street-side shops near Great Wall, bargain HARD. The rule that I followed was to quote the price to 10% of the original. Here are some examples:
    

   Item	Quoted	Paid
   Tee-shirts	1 for 130 RMB	3 for 50 RMB
   Cashmere Scarf (can't be original ;)	1 for 160 RMB	5 for 80 RMB
   Great Wall Memento	350 RMB	20 RMB
   Refrigerator Magnet	20 RMB	5 RMB

   Generally the shopkeepers will give a counter offer but be straight-faced and maintain your price. To keep it easy, just stick to your price and pretend walk away. In all the cases, I was approached with my quoted price :)

6. If you plan to visit Great Wall during November, make sure to carry good warm clothing including gloves and an ear-long cap and a good hiking/walking shoe. It is extremely windy and certain portions of the Wall are really steep.

7. There is no tipping in restaurants and taxi. Don't be surprised if you see a confused look on the person serving if you leave the tip.

And here are the pictures so far:

Sun Tech Days Beijing kick started this morning and a subsequent entry will talk about that.

Technorati: conf traveltips beijing suntechdays

Posted by Arun Gupta in Finance  |  Comments[1]

GlassFish Day @ Beijing

What are the dates ? Nov 1 - 2, 2007 for Sun Tech Days and Nov 3, 2007 for GlassFish Day

Where is the venue ? Beijing International Conference Center. More details here.

What is the agenda ? Sun Tech Days agenda here, GlassFish Day agenda here. You experience multiple tracks dedicated to Java and Solaris, Hands-on-labs, Community events such as GlassFish Day. And above all you get 1-1 interaction with industry experts.

What do you get ? Complete immersion in GlassFish and it's ecosystem.

How to register ? Click here.

See you there!

Technorati: conf suntechdays glassfish

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[4]

Europe Summer 2007 Trip Report

Here is a summary of my Europe Summer 2007 Trip Report:

• 6 Events
  • Rails Conf Europe in Berlin
  • NetBeans Day and Tech Days in Rome
  • GlassFish Day, NetBeans Day and Tech Days in Milan
• 6 sessions & Booth Duties (JRuby, jMaki, Metro, Jersey, NetBeans)
  • Rails powered by jMaki and GlassFish (blogs/screencasts/tutorials)
  • Metro & Jersey (slide deck)
    • Excel 2007 invoking a Secure Reliable endpoint deployed on GlassFish (code, screencast)
  • jMaki (slide deck) in NetBeans Day & Tech Days
    • Sun Tech Days Event Map
    • jMaki on Rails - 2nd edition
• 3 Hotels and Cities
  • Maritim Pro Arte in Berlin
  • Melia Roma Aurelia Antica in Rome
  • ATA Quark Hotel in Milan

GlassFish is the common theme between all these events, sessions and cities - that's what I was talking/preaching/demonstrating in all of them :) Here are all the detailed blogs covering each event:

• Rails Conf Europe 2007 (day 1, day 2, day 3, album)
• Sun Tech Days Rome 2007 (blog, album)
• NetBeans Day Rome 2007 (blog, album)
• GlassFish Day Milan 2007 (blog, album)
• Sun Tech Days Milan 2007 (blog 1, 2, 3, album)

During my travel, I posted several tips that are available at:

• Travel Tips to Berlin (album)
• Travel Tips to Rome (album)
• Rome to Pisa - A Day Trip (album)
• Travel Tips to Milan (album)
• ATA Quark Hotel, Milan - Thumbs Down

All my travel tips to Europe are aggregated here.

Technorati: conf glassfish netbeans jmaki metro jersey jruby suntechdays railsconfeurope

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[3]

GlassFish Day Milan 2007

The first ever GlassFish Day, as part of Sun Tech Days, wrapped up last week. The event started with around approximately 60 attendees and a good part stayed all the way late in the day. The slides of all the sessions are available here and read a complete coverage of the event here. Ed Ort particularly talked to some of the attendees and captured the dialog as part of his report.

GlassFish is not only a fully open-source, production-quality and Java EE 5 compatible Application Server, it is also a community. And that's why Raffaele from Imola presented on "Imola JBI Binding components" as part of Open ESB story.

There were lot of attendees who came at the GlassFish Booth and were interested in finding out how to get started. Really it's very simple - Download, Use and Let us know. And this one image captures the distinguishing feature set of GlassFish V2:

The pictures below show how the attendees were involved and enjoyed the sessions.

View the complete album here:

See you in Beijing Tech Days!

Technorati: sun suntechdays glassfish conf glassfishday milan

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[4]

Sun Tech Days Rome 2007

Sun Tech Days Rome 2007 was kick started by Maria Grazia Filippini (Director General, Sun Microsystems Italy) to a room full of approx 300 audience. She was followed by Corrado Sterpetti (Software Practice Manager, Sun Microsystems Italy). Both of them addressed the attendees in the local language. I could not understand any part of the talk (except bongiorno) but the passion was quite visible in their tone. And this is what brings Sun Tech Days back to Italy.

Reggie explained that this is 4th Sun Tech Days in Italy which is exactly the number of times Italy has won FIFA World Cup so far. It was fun when he divided the room in two halves and made them say "World" and "Cup" as he was waving his hand from left to right and wishing for Italy to win the 5th World cup in 2010.

The two main goals of the day set early in the day were:

• Learn and Immerse in the different technologies presented.

• Talk to one of the presenters and share with them how they can help you.

If you have attended any of the JavaOne, this is how John Gage sets the tone as well. And truly, this is one of the main objectives of taking Sun Tech Days all over the world. It's all about community and participation.

The first event of the day was a demo shoot out where 5 engineers demonstrated cool technology demonstrations. Here are the technologies that were demonstrated:

Then the day were split into three different tracks - Java, Solaris and Hands-on-Labs.

The first talk in Java Track was presented by Sridhar on "Java EE 5, GlassFish and Their Future". GlassFish is an open-source, production-quality and JavaEE 5 compatible Application Server. GlassFish V2 is now available and has lots of cool features. This one slide captures all of them and Sridhar gave details on all of them. He also gave a preview of what's coming in GlassFish V3. GlassFish V2 Final can be downloaded from here. You can try a Technology Preview build of GlassFish V3 here. If you have any questions about GlassFish, please post them at users@glassfish or GlassFish Forum.

Sridhar's talk was followed by my talk on "Metro and REST" where I explained how Metro is one-stop shop for all Web services needs - from simple Hello World to Secure, Reliable, Transactional and .NET 3.0 Interoperable Web services. The talk built upon Sridhar's demo where he showed how a simple Web service can be built and invoked using NetBeans 6. This talk demonstrated how Reliability and other enterprise features can be simply added by a click of button. It also demonstrated how an Excel 2007 client can invoke a Secure and Reliable endpoint deployed on GlassFish. This talk also provided a brief introduction to Jersey (Reference Implementation for JSR 311) and showed code samples on how it enables to easily and intuitively publishing RESTful endpoints. The slides for my talk are available here.

I had to leave right after my talk to catch the flight to Milan and so that's my summary of Tech Days Rome. I hope you guys had fun and we empowered you to be more productive. Feel free to leave comments if you attended and enjoyed.

GlassFish Day and NetBeans Day starts in Milan at 1pm local time today. The complete agenda is here. Looking forward to see you there.

Here is the album for Tech Days Rome 2007:

Technorati: suntechdays rome glassfish metro webservices jersey netbeans jmaki glassfish

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[3]