I can't remember how I spent the last two days(4 & 5 Dec. 2007). Time just flew. I was at the Tech Days in Frankfurt. I and my team spent 2 wonderful days talking to the finest Engineers and managers from all around Europe and the world. Our team had Silke Pumberger, Elenora, Thomas Bastian, Stefan Schneider, Charles Addison and Christoph Brune. Yes, the core ISV team. We had a booth at the Tech Days, the "Sun Partner Program for ISVs" where we spoke about the SPAP that assists the ISVs in migrating their application to Solaris by providing them with system and Engineering resources. I myself have worked on Engineering tasks closely with ISVs and this is a fine program for the ISVs who plan to go Solaris.

4.Dec.2007 

The first day was quite uneventful.The day started off with a welcome talk following which 8 guys briefly introduced Sun Technologies with cool examples. These examples were mind blowing and took the audience by the storm. I especially liked the demo on JavaFX as well as the snappy GUI design with Java 6.0. Another highlight came from Sridhar Reddy, who demonstrated the cool device, Sun Spot. I was nice to see what this small device could do. And the best thing was that NetBeans and Java were driving this device! Impressive.

After this introduction, I attended the talk by Daniel Adelhardt. He spoke on Glassfish. He spoke on a broad category of topics and showed what Glassfish could do. SOA, BPEL, Web Services, Clustering, Load Balancing, wow!! What a good design the Glassfish guys should have had. The coup de grace is that, Glassfish kernel is just 100KB and loads in a few seconds. I've observed this with the Java Enterprise Edition pack of NetBeans 5.5.1, but just took it for granted. Now, I know that Glassfish is agreat app server. I need to invest more time in getting to know this software better!

After a short tryst and a painful lunch of cold sandwiches, we barged to attend the speech by Dr. James Gosling, the creator of Java.I had my expectations rigged high, perhaps because of the fact that I'm seeing a living legend in flesh and blood for the first time and that too within a reaching distance. The speech was o.k. James Gosling was apparently suffering from jet lag. But, he was concise and to the point, without any fanfare or exaggerations. I think his greatness lies in his simplicity. This man has changed the world, and he's just too simple.

After this, I attended the talk by Sridhar Reddy, who spoke on JavaFX. It was pretty interesting to see how simple developing with JavaFX could be. Its something between Java and HTML if I could express it that way. I wanted to continue with the Hands on lab that Sridhar was offering, but I unfortunately, had to stay back at the booth and talk to the ISV. I dont regret this and shall ping Sridhar for more information. As a pointer, for those of you who wish to venture out with JavaFX, please check out this link.

 5.Dec.2007

Today, I helped Peter Karlsson and Philip Torchinsky during their hand on lab session on "Using DTrace for Java and other Web 2.0 Technologies". We had to cover a massive chunk of material in just 2 hours, which was impossible. I was wondering how one could do that, but decided to give it a go. As it so happened, we did not cover all the materials. We went through the basics on DTrace and the modules on Java, which really impressed the participants. Peter did most of the talking and I filled in some points which I considered should be covered in addition to answering the queries the participants posed. This was a nice event. Unfortunately, only a few of the guys brought their notebooks, which was quite depressing. They weren't able to enjoy the fun to the fullest. However, they were very curious at what DTrace could do and I hope they go back and burn the midnight oil learning DTrace and putting it into use. I'm slowly getting the feeling that C++ is slowly retiring as most of my experiences during the Code Camps as well as this hands on lab session had audiences using Java as the main development tool. Well, thats the right way to go too!

To summarize, these 2 days were very productive in getting to know my other colleagues from across the globe in addition to other things.