Tech days 2010, Hyderabad: Day-2

The second day of Tech days 2010, Hyderabad started with a keynote session by Georges Saab. He gave an overview of various products of Oracle including JDeveloper 11g, Oracle Enterprise pack for Eclipse, Oracle ADF 11g, Weblogic server, JRockit, Coherence development, etc. It was followed by another keynote session by Nandini Ramani. The session was more like a series of demos – Java EE, Glassfish, JavaFx for Desktop, JavaFx for mobile, Java TV, JavaFx authoring tool. In fact, this session was more inspiring than the session on the first day “Technology: Be inspired”. Following this session, there was Java Jacket giveaway – people with strange and unique talents were asked to perform onstage and the Java jackets were given to the top two performers. Check out the video on Arun Gupta’s blog.

Morning sessions

• Java Persistence API 2: Arun Gupta, one of my favorite speakers of the tech day, was the speaker for the session. He gave some background on Java Persistence API (JPA) and introduced us to the new features of JPA 2. He talked about the query language used in JPA and demonstrated how easy it is to persist data using JPA with Netbeans. But, I still feel that Hibernate and other ORM solutions in the market are better than JPA. Check out the slides from Arun Gupta’s blog.
• Overview of Servlet 3.0: Chuck Lee, another favorite speaker of mine, delivered this session on Servlet 3.0. He talked about four different aspects of Servlet 3.0 – Ease of development & deployment, modular web.xml, dynamic configuration, asynchronous support. The best part of the session was the way he explained each and every concept. He made it really simple. He explained in detail about the “On Demand” loading as well – One of the best features of Servlet 3.0. Reference.

Afternoon sessions

• Comet Everywhere: Building Truly Asynchronous Collaborative Web applications. Abhishek Mohanty was the speaker for this session. He explained in detail about Ajax poll vs Ajax push. He talked about different Comet frameworks – Cometd / Bayeux protocol, Grizzly framework and Project Atmosphere. It was a very good session for anyone starting with comet. To know more, read more on these topics.

This was the only session I attended in the afternoon as I had to attend a tech talk at Google. Overall it was a good experience. It helped me to be updated on happenings in the Java world. Those who were expecting the event to be some kind of a training program would have been disappointed. The motive of the event is not that. It is just to make the developers aware of the technologies available. Whenever there is a requirement / problem, one should be aware of the technologies to help them. After all, we have Mr. Google to teach us anything and everything about those technologies. 

-- Varun