Shine With SUN

Take-overs from DrupalCamp'08, India

I attended the first Drupal related technical gathering in India, DrupalCamp'08, organized by Gloscon Solutions Inc. at Gandhinagar, Gujarat. I was there to talk on the work done by Sun around Drupal, which were majorly concerned with performance of Drupal on Solaris and NetBeans IDE support for Drupal. The event was held during August 8-10, 2008 at the huge beautiful campus of DA-IICT, Gandhinagar.

The event was marked by a relatively low attendance, owing to the slow growing popularity of Drupal in India and secondly to the recent terror attacks in nearby regions. It started with a keynote by Mr. Roshan Shah, CEO, Gloscon. He spoke about the emergence of popularity of Drupal in India and about the scope of effectively introducing Drupal based web-sites within India (especially in Government Organizations highlighting on localization support). I was a bit amazed when he pointed out that Drupal User/Developers in India are more in number in Gujarat and indeed most of the company representatives that had come for the meet were localites! Well, major IT hubs like Bangalore/Hyderabad/Pune have a long way to go in this particular area! The talks were divided into two tracks : Students and the Developers/Marketing track. Students track consisted of talks like basic introduction to CMS and Drupal, Hosting Drupal based website, Getting involved in Drupal Community and Demonstration of some in-place websites. The Developers/Marketing track was meant for code Drupal developers and it included sessions like Building Scalable Business with Drupal, Building Social Networking sites, Drupal solutions for building online store, and talks by me on Drupal on Solaris and NetBeans Support for Drupal. These sessions were to be followed by a Code Sprint on the third day.

I spoke on Drupal on Solaris and NetBeans support for Drupal. I threw some light on the benchmarking tests done on Drupal running on Solaris and Linux, also running on different SUN servers using different software stacks. It was followed by the showcase of some of the projects we do to integrate/run Drupal on Solaris, like Amazon EC2 image, package on IPS repository and some whitepapers, etc. On the NetBeans front, I concentrated first on the new NetBeans support for PHP development and threw some light on its cool features. Then I spoke about the documentation to host and run a Drupal based website through NetBeans IDE as well as the Plugin for assisting Drupal Module Development. I focused on the Drupal support by various IDE's and how NetBeans, being a FOSS, would be more advantageous! I have uploaded the presentation over here (Drupal on Solaris) and here (NetBeans support for Drupal).

There was a lot to take over from the DrupalCamp! Firstly, people were very pleased at the availability of Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Drupal on Solaris. There were couple of curious enquiries on it. I will be passing on the comments/enquiries to the concerned SUN Engineers. There were some representatives enquiring about the Sun Startup Essential Programme. I will be hooking them up with concerned people in SUN. Also, I got some good ideas to improve the NetBeans Plugin support for Drupal. I plan to capture all the requirements and all possible work that we can do to improve it further. Companies like Openkick, Gloscon and VirtueInfo have showed interest in evaluating NetBeans IDE for the Drupal/PHP Development.

And for me, it was a good experience, talking at the first Drupal related event in India. Myself, learnt additional things about Drupal and where it stands in terms of usage and popularity in India! Hope, SUN (products) and Drupal form yet another formidable pair.....

Posted at 10:19AM Aug 11, 2008 by Sujit Nair in Sun  |  Comments[1]