The Great Indian Developer Summit

The Great Indian Developer Summit - finally I got to attend a developer summit in Bangalore!! Initially I got a promotional invite for this summit(since I was a member of some Java forum). After checking the registration fee, I decided against attending the summit(I have a big hole in my pocket :(, can't afford to spend 9k for two days). Infy being a knowledge sponsor for this event had many delegate passes. I got one of these delegate passes for the fourth and fifth day of this summit.

The summit was divided into 3 sections depending on the current prevalent technologies. It was aptly called- bleeding edge .net, rich web and daring java. Daring java sessions was on the fourth and fifth day(22-23 May).

Day 1 - May 22:

I went to the venue hoping to find some fellow Infosions whom I knew. And as I went in I found few TFG (Techinical Focus Group)guys whom I knew very well. We got registered and like all the summits we got some goodies( a small bag and a pen ?!!). We had some tea and then went into to the main hall. This was my second time to this hall. I remember the first time I had come, I was in my college(7th semester) and a company by name Exalto had arranged a seminar on mobile Java technology. The only thing I remember of that seminar was I got a very good bag... The whole seminar didn't make sense at that time as I had just started Java in that semester.

Now coming to this summit. Everyone came into the hall and the day started with a welcome address and a brief vision on Enterprise developer platforms!! The day was divided into a number of sessions planned simultaneous across three halls. I planned to attend a selected few sessions on performance, mashups and cloud computing. And the seating to these sessions were first come first served basis(people ran from one hall to another, literally!!)

- Java Performance - Myths, Mysteries and Paradoxes, this session was taken by Holly cummins, a Java Performance Expert with IBM. Perhaps the words like 'Performance' and 'Java' drew large crowds to this session. Least to say many went disappointed, because there expectations were much above the speaker's vision. Though the speaker tried to be not biased towards any particular JVM, at times she was kind of too happy about her pet JVM (IBM's JVM). She did explain a few good issues involving Garbage collection and Java memory allocation. It was all nice to hear and get gyan, but its seldom thought about and applied in day to day programming.

- Java and Dynamic Languages, this session was taken by Dr.Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer Inc. His profile read a Agile Mentor and he lived up to his profile. Perhaps he was one of the most enterprising speaker of the summit. His session on Dynamic Languages was very informative and involving. The session was about how you could use dynamic languages like Groovy, JRuby and JPhyton with Java and build you applications more easily and effectively. p.s. I loved his Mac notebook. I am going to get one very soon!!

There was a fabulous lunch arranged for everyone(fabulous, what does that mean??).

- Enterprise Mashups using Java, this session was taken by Greg Murray, AJAX Architect for Sun Microsystems and creator of jMaki project(a AJAX framework to build applications). He took note of the audience knowledge and instead of explaining mashups he explained JSON and jMaki project and latter took on mashups with live demos.

- Cloud Computing session by Jinesh Varia, technology evangelist from amazon.com. I wanted to know what is Cloud computing and how it works and Jinesh addressed these with all the details. At times he was very happy about himself or I guess Cloud computing!!!

After this I was kind of bored and none of the following session interested me, so I called it a day and went back home.

Day 2 - May 23:

Well the day started somewhat very sober, since it was the last day of summit.

- Java Performance Tooling, this session was again taken by Holly Cummins. She gave a overview on various performance measuring tools which were more IBM specific(for obvious reasons). The tools she mentioned were IBM support assistant, MDD4J and GC and Memory visualizer to name a few.

- An Introduction to JSF, this session was taken by Murtaza "Taz" Abdeali, Design Patterns Expert, This session was kind of replacement to another session. He went through the life cycle of JSF and I guess by the end of this session boredom had crept in and everyone were dozing off as this session was after lunch.

- Open Source Tools for Agile Development, this session was again taken by Dr. Venkat, it was again full of fun and involving. He was explaining many tools like Junit, Mock Objects, JDepend, Corbertura and Jester. Just to mention this guy had a very good taste of humor. Eg:- He wrote a test case to show usage of JUnit and how it can help code coverage, and suddenly someone asked is there some tool to generate the particular code you just wrote and he was quick to respond "yes my friend, its called 'Copy and Paste'. Similarly when someone questioned whether it is right to change the design while development, he responded " If someone says- I have never changed the design after the design phase, then he is politely saying that the project got scrapped!!"The session end with a good number of Q&A's.

The summit also had a exhibition. All the sponsors had set up shops which had various activities like quiz, lucky draws, registering to forums etc. Some tried to exhibit there products while some were busy advertising Jobs. One of the most attractive shops was of Adobe and Nokia. Nokia was attractive because it was giving away N95's. And Adobe was showing off there flex technology on their Mac pc's. The entire team(Raghunath Rao and his team) from Adobe impressed me and others by giving live demos and explaining how exactly the Flex worked and how one can start off developing it.

After all this I wasn't in any mood to sit in there, I was also checking rains, while my friends were busy planning for the party that was arranged in Palace grounds by the organizers. The party had some developer anthem launch, two of the best rock bands playing and some cake cutting function. I wasn't too keen in attending it, so just chucked it and returned back home.

All in all this was a great summit, and I would love to attend it next year also!!