Tech days 2010, Hyderabad: Day-1

As posted earlier, Tech days 2010 is being organized at HICC, Hyderabad on 24-25 Mar, 2010. Had a great experience on the first day of the event. I should say it had met the expectations set by the conferences previous years.

Welcome

The event was kick started on time by Ravi and his band with carnatic music. The music was mind-blowing. The place looked reddish with logos of Oracle all over it.  Simon Ritter was the anchor for the day and he did a good job. After the Tech days welcome, the next activity was “Technology showcase: Be inspired”. There was a short demo on Virtualbox, teleporting and JavaFx capabilities. Next, it was Mr, Krishnan Dhawan, Oracle country manager, who talked about the Sun acquisition and other Oracle businesses. After this, a video by James Gosling on Java development, JDK 7 were played.

James Gosling: What’s happening in the Java world?

A good part of the audience were students and there were whistles as soon as James entered the podium. It was a very warm welcome for him to India. He gave a talk on “What’s happening in the Java world?”. He gave an overview of what’s new in JDK 7, JEE 6, Netbeans, Glassfish, etc. Check out his complete talk here. He used JavaFx for presentation and it was really cool.

After his keynote address, there were parallel sessions on the tracks – Enterprise computing track, Client technology track, Tools and best practices track, Solaris track and hands on labs.

Morning Sessions

• Java EE 6 & GlassFish 3: Paving the path for the future: ArunGupta was the speaker for this session. He talked about the goals – Flexible & lightweight, Extensible, Easier to use and develop on – of Java EE 6. Then, he briefed on how these goals are achieved with web profiles and other interesting features. He talked about the three principles of GlassFish – Modular, Embeddable, Extensible and explained them. He gave quick demos on JEE 6 and GlassFish 3. Check out his slides here.
• JDK 7: The future of Java platform: Simon Ritter was the speaker for this session. He talked about the new features added on JDK 7 with respect to the language, core, virtual machine and the client app. Project Jigsaw and Project Coin were talked about in detail. New in Java 7: Better integer literals, better type inference, strings in switch, automatic resource management, index syntax for list and map, multi-catch, etc.

Afternoon Sessions

• Hands-on Lab: Build End-to-End RIA Applications using JavaFx, Dojo, REST, JPA and MySQL. This session was driven by Angela. Built a pet store app using JavaFx, Dojo which will talk to REST service and fetches the data using JPA. The content of the session was good but it would have been better had more people were there to help Angela.
• Accenture Technical Session: Exploring Ajax push using ICEfaces. This was a session by the Gold plus sponsors Accenture. ICEfaces architecture was explained comparing its features with other Ajax push solutions in market.
• Java in digital media: Sourath Roy was the speaker for the session. He talked about how Java is enabling the digital entertainment. He gave the whole stack of technologies used in there and explained them individually. He showed some cool ways of tweeting directly from your television and adding other widgets to your TV box.

It was a great first day. The only problem I had was the crowd. Like the last year, the place is too crowded. If I am not wrong, there were around 3000 delegates attending the conference. All the places were horribly crowded. I wish the organizers take some decision on this and reduce the count for the upcoming events.

If you are not able to attend this, no worries. Tech days plus 2010 is happening at Chennai and Bangalore on Mar 26, 2010. Register yourself in.

-- Varun