Finally! I have set foot on hyderbad soil! I was looking forward to three days of fun and excitement at sun tech days 2008 and day 1 definetely did not disappoint me. There was a lot of energetic crowd from all categories ranging from university students to well established techies and managers present at the meet.
Morning session:
Commuting using share autos, i arrived at the venue around 8:15 in the morning. There was already a good crowd even at that time. After registering at the registration desk, i took a look around the sponsor stalls trying to make sense of the plethora of software and services being advertised by them.
The morning session started a bit late with Matt Thomson starting off the proceedings. Rich Green took the key note speech today with a talk on "Platforms that empower web technology". The speech was really enthralling and he gave a short update on each of Sun's products. The topics addressed include Sun's acquisition of MySQL, JavaFX and its future, Glassfish achievements and its future roadmap and of course notes on solaris and virtualization.. There was also a demo by Satish Vaidyanathan from the N1SPS group on xVM. It is noteworthy that the talk was being broadcasted simultaneously to chennai and bangalore!
Later there was a mini competition held where there were two teams formed each containing three technical evangelists and each of them had to present on some topic for five minutes each. The winner was chosen from an audience based SMS polling.The topics ranged from using SunSPOTs to a demo on compiz on solaris x86(i am personally waiting for it to work on sparc!)
The first session that i attended was by Arun Gupta who presented on Glassfish. It was an interesting talk where he traced the history of glassfish and the features that were added as time went by, the present state of glassfish, improvements made with each version and its achievements (such as being the only first fully compliant JavaEE5 app server and the fastest among its breed), the future road map of glassfish V3 and glassfish's tooling support. There was also a short overivew on Metro (which i suppose will have a more detailed presentation tomorrow also by him) and glassfish's clustering architecture. There was also a short demo on how to use glassfish with netbeans for web services.
The next one i attended was by "Rags" on JavaFX. It was a talk on what JavaFX is and what it is NOT, the advantages of FX (Object oriented, declarative, automatic data binding, extensive colln. of widgets etc.) The general idea was that you could do anything that you could do with JAVA API for GUIs with FX but only easier. There was also code comparison between the two. Then there was a very excellent demo too. Hopefully, once the APIs stabilize, there will be a good market for FX.
Post Lunch sessions:
After a very heavy and excellent lunch, i thought i was going to sleep in the next session. But rather (un)fortunately, there was a very excellent session by Lee Chuk Munn and Roumen Strobl on Rapid web development with Ruby and JRuby. Lee Chuk first gave a introduction on Ruby's history, how it came into existence. Later, he went on to give the scripting language's syntaxes and its usages along with examples. This really helped for dumbers in Ruby like me in getting started with Ruby and helping me realize its power.
Roumen gave a talk on what JRuby is, how it relates to Java,what are its advantages and gave some code examples and demos using netbeans.
The next session i attended was by Sridhar Reddy on Java Persistence API. He gave a brief note on what EJB 3 was, its advantages compared with EJB 2.1. Later he started off with a simple example showing a POJO and how it later was converted to a entity bean. Later, he used it with a database table and demonstrated the usage with a session bean. He demonstrated the various usages of entity beans and its advantages in relation with the earlier version of entity beans. He also touched upon the advantages and other improvements made in EJB3 when compared with its previous release. There a lot of interesting questions posed to him during the Q&A session.
After a good tea break, i attended a session on Filthy Rich Clients by Joey Shen. He gave a lot of good advice on Java GUI programming and how we could increase performance, scalability and at the same time achieve good quality graphics with good useful progamming tips. Unfortunately, i have to admit that i am not much of an know-how in that field. I suppose the session would have really benefited folks who are into this sort of stuff.
My day ended with another incredible session from Arun Gupta. He gave a presentation on JMaki. He explained what JMaki meant(J-Javascript and Maki - combination(?) ) and what benefits one obtained from such a wrapper framework. I was really impressed with this. Some of the advantages include standardized event/data model, consistent programming model among different frameworks and defaults for the components set out of the box. The presentation was very interesting in the sense that it was interlaced with a lot of demos.
For those who thought that the day was over, there was also an enticing performance by the much renowned "Euphoria". I have a high regard for this group, who once in my university (when i was studying) performed non-stop 200 minutes live on a stage jumping, dancing and yelling all late in the night till about 3 in the morning.
Hopefully tomorrow will also be a very fun filled day. And for those who happen to read this blog before day 2, there is a presentation on JSF, Ajax and woodstock in the community track. (It's the first session in the morning!) So, be there!
