• More focus on HTML5, shift in the notion of Javascript as a merely client side programming language.
• Mobile platform getting a greater share of developer attention and companies like RIM (Blackberry), Microsoft, Nokia, Google going a step ahead to build developer communities. RIM lured in developers by giving away free Playbooks to all its participants at their workshop. ( I know a lost chance for me, but as usual Grapes are Sour).
• Leveraging HTML5 to build mobile compatible websites.
• Focus on Functional style of programming and mainly on the ones like Scala, Clojure which run on JVM. Alternate JVM languages getting a wide attention.
• People talking about Java 7 and also about Java 8.
• Focus on Cloud computing with the likes of Java EE providing cloud support in Java EE 7 and onwards.

Few observations:

• 90% of the participants where attending the talks by Venkat Subramaniam or Scott Davis. So you can guess the number of participants in the other 4 halls.
• 90% of the participants (of course the same people above) were spellbound by Venkat’s and Scott’s presentation and they say they would return only for them.
• I feel sad to say that #gids was never trending in India. This shows that not all developers are twitter savvy or not all have realised the potential of twitter.
• People still dont know how to tweet or how to use twitter.
• Expo stalls are useless, people visit only to get their expo cards stamped. And the exhibitors are happy to oblige. This has been the situation right from the 1st edition. Expo stalls should be more active, give out goodies and so on. I know RIM gave away Playbooks for porting applications.
• RIM has been clearing its Playbook stock by giving them away for FREE for workshop participants, for twitter contest winners. I know one guy getting 2 Playbooks.
• I missed a chance to get a FREE Playbook. And I this would linger at the back of my heart for a few days.
• Being geek is one part, being a good presenter is another. So one cannot guarantee the other.
• Lot of active participation this year than any of the previous years.

• Each of the sessions were filled with technical content and lot of things to be learnt. I got an early peak into the Lambda expressions to be introduced in Java 8 and whole lot of other features to accompany that release. Also there was a quick walk through of Java 7 features.
• The concurrency in Java session showed as to why the current concurrency model in Java is aptly called as synchronize and suffer model. We were shown how the Software Transactional Memory model of  Clojure could be made use of in Java as well.
• We as Java developers dont spend much time writing  JavaScript and more so people working with component frameworks like JSF, ADF would spend even less time. During the session about JavaScript, there was a face-off between Java and JavaScript and how they are familiar and different.
• There was a really good session on Scala by Venkat Subramaniam which stretched beyond the allotted 45 minutes into about 90 minutes. He covered concepts such as Tail Recursion, Traits, Val-Var, Classes and so on. I really appreciate the effort he put in and the dedication he showed in conveying and covering the concepts he intended to during the session which involved stretching out of the allotted time.
• I by chance happened to sit in a session on creating RESTful WebService using JAX-RS and the new features in JAX-RS 2.0, though there was lot discussed, my eyes were paining seeing at the amount of code one had to write to create and consume the RESTful webservice. But for people of JavaEE stack that shouldn’t be much of concern.
• Interesting to see lot of Goldman Sachs employees turning up at the GIDS 2012 and being present in their Expo booths. Also go to know about a Collection library developed by Goldman Sachs for their internal use which now they have open sourced. I have a copy of their source-code, binaries and some material which I would go through in the coming days and see if I can share some of my findings here. So looks like they are trying to build and sustain a good technical expertise inhouse.

So stuffs to try out:

• Goldman Sachs Collections API
• JavaScript and BackBone.js framework
• Lambda expressions in Java 8
• HTML 5 features

]]> /2012/04/19/overview-of-the-java-sessions-at-the-great-indian-dev-summit-2012-2/feed/ 1 Sanaulla /2012/04/19/birds-eyeview-of-web-track-at-the-gids-2012-2/ /2012/04/19/birds-eyeview-of-web-track-at-the-gids-2012-2/#respond Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:31:12 +0000 http://blog.sanaulla.info/?p=1435 The main focus of the day was the emergence or in otherwords out growth of mobile devices over desktop/laptop in the Q4 of 2010. And also the importance of making the applications mobile compatible. With the advent of HTML5 and lot of browsers including mobile browsers providing support for these features, it gives much more power to the developers in creating rich applications for mobile and desktop browsers.

No wonder why lot of the sessions lined up focussed on HTML5 and Javascript. With HTML5, there’s lot more dependence on Javascript, because a lot of features like Application cache, Local storage, Location aware and others are driven by Javascript. And most of these sessions were by the best of the speakers- Scott Davis and Venkat Subramaniam. There’s not a better way to start the conference day than by attending Scott Davis talk. Just a brief summarisation of the talks:

• A birds eyeview of HTML 5 features namely- Application cache and Local Storage. Local storage allows developers to store the client data in a key-value pairs (like NoSQL) and provides upto 5MB of storage which is much more than the cookies which provided 4KB. Application cache provides support for caching web content on the client, so your images, css, javascript can be cached. This is done by defining a manifest file and referring to it in the html. The good thing is that there’s no cap on the application cache size.
• JavaScript from a different perspective- I always under estimad the power of JavaScript, never took it up for learning and the only way I got around it was by searching on the web for solutions and copying the code. But Venkat in his talk says- JavaScript is often misunderstood because of- the term ‘Java’ it carries with its name and because of the bad code available on the internet. Functional and Prototypal features of the language were demonstrated during the session.
• Improving the page load times by using PageSpeed service. Interesting facts as to where the web page takes time to load were shared along with possible optimisations. I remember using PageSpeed to check the page load times for my blog, but I need to explore the PageSpeed service which does the optimisations on the fly.
• Got to know about Backbone.js which is a JavaScript based web framework. Its a component based, asynchronous and client side MVC based web framework which supports creating single page web applications. The main idea behind single page is that the multiple pages are replaced by individual divs on the single page. And instead of controllers it has an concept called routers which route the requests to corresponding functions/callbacks. Lot of the concepts learnt in the JavaScript talk earlier were useful.

Now coming to the expo booths-

• None of them had anything useful to share about the product there were displaying except for SafeNet,where the person in the booth explained exactly what the product does and was in a position to answer the queries.
• ThoughtWorks were giving out ThoughtWorks Radar and the people in the booth were from the recruitment team, but I thought they should have got a developer or two there who could explain as to how Radar is prepared or may be talk a bit or two about few upcoming technologies or the technologies they are working on.
• The funniest stall was the JetBrains where I guess the person was from the sales/marketing team and had no clue as to how JetBrains is better than Eclipse or Netbeans. I asked him few questions about the features in JetBrains and all he had to say was, please ask your company to get in touch with us, we will provide them live demo from US and before that talk about the purchase plan of your company. Now does that impress hundreds of developers who visit the stall?

Lot to explore tomorrow and the day after. Stay tuned for more updates here.

Tomorrow’s Tech today- HTML5 by Scott Davis

• Excitement and new features in HTML5
• More importance to semantics than tags- Tags mean something.
• W3C thought of paving over the practices in HTML4
• Google using the new <!doctype> element from HTML5. Chrome supporting HTML5.
• Apple- Safari, Mozilla- Firefox also support HTML5
• Oh how can we forget IE- Good news is Microsoft now has introduced HTML5 support in IE9.
• How about Mobile platforms? HTML5 provides common platform for mobile applications.
• The O’Reilly curve- Start learning when O’Reilly publishes a book on a certain technology.
• The paradigm has changed from- developing applications for the slowest browser(slowest animal in the herd) to developing applications to work on the best browser (strongest animal in the herd)
• Dive into HTML5- diveintohtml5.org – Entire book for FREE by Mark Pilgrim

New elements

• Simplified doctype – <!DOCTYPE html>
• header, article, nav, section and so on.
• HTML5 enabling script for support in versions before IE 9
• <form/> enhancements- new form elements- tel, search, url, date, email and so on.- <input type=”new_type” />
• Library to look at- Modernizer- Supports the new HTML5 elements
• Application cache to cache the resources for browsing offline.
• Local storage is for data- treats the data as Hashmap- 5MB per domain of storage.
• WEB SQL database- supported across all the webkit browsers. Firefox and IE not going to support this.
• <video/>- No one single format/codec for working across all browser.
• Use different/alternate formats with in the <video> tag so that there’s a fallback for video formats.

Resources

• http://HTML5Rocks.com
• http://HTML5demos.com
• http://diveintohtml5.org

A superb session by Scott- As usual its dynamic, fun filled. Wish to hear more of his sessions.

Programming in HTML5 by Venkat–

Venkat showed us how different new features of HTML5- new elements, local storage, form enhancements can be used to create web pages. The sessions was complete hands-on like and was a really good introduction to HTML5. And was a good value addition for Scott’s previous talk I had attended.

Post lunch was a show hosted by Edmundo where in he performed some awesome illusions- playing around with a red handkerchief- making it invisible, making it to go into someone’s pant after he blew it and so on. Then there was an illusion where in he changed the color of the 500rupee note to red and It was clearly a 20rupee note which was replaced with a 500 rupee note and so on. But it was really superb performance by Edmundo.

Hidden Webservices: Microformats and Semantic web by Scott Davis

• First thing that comes to mind when Webservices is mentioned- SOAP.
• Web Services as seen now is an combination of Web and Services, but there’s a way to approach Webservices as one single aspect which actually becomes part of the web.
• Two approaches for Webservices- Using RDFa and Microformats. (Scott was really appreciatvie of Wikipedia as source of information, so linking these to wikipedia ;))
• These add metadata to the web pages
• This also helps in SEO as the search engine now gets more information about the page- Semantics of the page.
• <meta> tags are of similar kind.
• Explained different case studies of how these are being used by websites like- youtube, flickr, google, yahoo.
• BestBuy uses RDFa extensively- GoodRelations.

JavaScript- Real language in there by Venkat–

• Basics of JavaScript like no typing, looping constructs, if-else statements.
• Declaring classes, creating objects- A different approach than OO- Using the function keyword.
• Adding methods dynamically to the class.
• Class are actually a collection of properties
• Method reuse supported by Composition.
• Checking the code quality using jslint
• writing unit tests for javascript- seperate the javascript from the html.

Today’s sessions I attended were either Scott or Venkat talking baring the jQuery talk. It feels good to attend Scott’s sessions- he is so lively. Looking forward to the Java conference tomorrow.

GIDS.Web Sessions:

• jQuery at Work: A Beginner’s Guide (Speaker: Tom Marrs)- This should be a starting point for my JavaScript framework learning- I have been planning to do this for about 2 years now.
• JavaScript – There’s a Real Language In There (Venkat Subramaniam)- A talk about the usefulness of JavaScript. I always thought JavaScript to be a client side language, but it can also be used as a server side language(node js). Another reason am interested in this session is because its delivered by Venkat- who is one of my favorite speakers.
• Programming with HTML5 (Venkat Subramaniam)- Again another new HTML specification- Shows lot of promise, competing against the likes of Flex etc..
• Tomorrow’s Tech Today (Scott Davis)- Session by another great speaker, surely not going to miss this. Might complement to the above session. That would be like increase in HTML5 Gyan

GIDS.Java Sessions:

• Java Utilities at Work: A Developer’s Guide (Tom Marrs)- Should be informative as it will help us get to know about the existing libraries for getting work done in Java. I had written about Exec library part of Apache Commons.
• Tackling Multicore Complexity on the JVM (Venkat Subramaniam)- Looks similar to the Scala book written by Venkat. Looking forward to some Scala in the session.
• What’s Brewing in Java 7? (Venkat Subramaniam)- With Java 7 being feature complete, this would be an interesting talk to attend.
• Need to think of more talks to attend. Hoping that the above would not be held in parallel

GIDS.Workshop Sessions:

• Web Services at Work: A Designer’s Guide (Tom Marrs)- Should be a good starting point for Web Services
• SOA at Work: An Architect’s Guide (Tom Marrs)- Complementing the above session- A complete Web Serices, SOA gyan

Overall looks like an interesting GIDS Stay tuned for more posts on GIDS-2011.

DSL workshop by Venkat

This was the last day of the Great Indian Developer Summit-2009. There were 15 workshops running in parallel at 4 different halls. Workshops covered areas like JRuby, DSLs, Silverlight, Oslo, .Net, Hibernate, Adone Flash platform, COBOL among others. The first workshop I attended was “Developing external DSLs in Java” and was taken by Venkat Subramaniam who is regarded as the languages geek. He spoke about the need for Domain Specific Languages(DSL), different types of DSLs which include Internal DSL and External DSL. He told that internal DSLs can be created by using languages like Groovy, Ruby among others and External DSLs can be created using languages with higher parsing abilities like Java, C++, C#. Internal DSLs are also called as embedded DSL. He aslo threw some light on EasyB which is basically a behavior oriented design tool. He spoke at lenght on how to use Java to create external DSL using xText and Eclipse. He later gave a demo on using xText and created a game DSL. Sadly i couldn’t work it out on my comp as I did not have xText plugin installed in Eclipse.

Ola Bini and JRuby

JRuby Duke

The second workshop was “Introduction to JRuby” delivered by Ola Bini, who is one of the core developers of JRuby. He started with speaking about Ruby and JRuby features which was a repitition for me as i had attended his JRuby talk the other day. As he went ahead with his talk, I was busy configuring my Linux for running JRuby applications. Once he started writing some code i followed the same and got some taste of Ruby and JRuby. As the session progressed he went into much higher aspects of JRuby and finally spent some time explaining Ruby on Rails. RoR was the reason why Ruby developed interest which wasn’t there before though Ruby was much older than Java. Using RoR was similar to that of using Grails so there wasn’t much difficulty in getting the general idea but the Ruby related aspects were tough to digest. But i really appreciate and admire the languages Groovy and Ruby for they have added Elegance to the programming which was earlier very verbose thanks to Java ;). Though I really like the way Java is but once i was introduced to Groovy and Ruby, Java seemed like C to me.

Jim Webber in action

By the end of second workshop i was exhausted and rushed towards the dinning area for the last Lunch of GIDS-2009. As usual the lunch was really good with variety of dishes prepared for the developers to choose from which is analogous to the numerous technologies available. The third workshop was on “Web and Web based services and its integration” which by Jim Webber. Jim Webber is Director of ThoughtWorks and is the guru of web and web services. He spoke at length about Web, Web Characteristics, RESTful Web among other things. I was really tired and after a heavy lunch i couldn’t concentrate during this session, so i walked off and spent some time waiting near the registration desk to collect the summit T-Shirt. There was a developer awards function hosted by Cyrus Broacha  and i was eager to attend this function but i was really sick by the end of the day and had no courage to sit for another hour.

ThoughtWorkers under lens

GIDS-2008 and GIDS-2009 have been great learning experiences for me. Listening to best speakers from around the world and there were ocassions when the creators of the technology spoke about their creation. Its feels really great to listen to the creators themselves. The only thing i would want to change in the Great Indian Developer Summit is that they should be introducing some concesison for the student community because that is the heart of action. Though we students may not be experienced with new technologies but surely after listening to such great speakers will instill the desire to learn. GIDS is really a great initiative from Saltmarch media and I am looking forward to attending GIDS-2010 [This was the same thing i had written in my blog about the last edition ;)].

GIDS- Great Indian Developer Summit.

GIDS-2009 Captured

My experiences at GIDS-2008 can be read here, here and here.

My experiences at GIDS-2009 can be read here and here.

Ola Bina during JRuby talk

I started off pretty late for my Day-2 (summit’s Day-3) at the summit, courtesy- extended sleeping But I somehow managed to not miss much of the first session. The first session I attended today was “Introduction to JRuby” which was delivered by Ola Bini. He spoke about Ruby and its features like Blocks, Modules, Mixins among others. He then spoke about JRuby and how it eliminates the pain of using Java and leverages on the ease of Ruby. JRuby is basically Ruby running on JVM. This was developed keeping in mind the old legacy JavaEE based applications.

Venkat during Know u'r Java

Second session was “Know your Java?” delivered by my favorite speaker Venkat Submramaniam. He is a great speaker and i am sure one can continue to listen to him for long hours with out sleeping and getting bored. He did not bore us with the different Gotchas in Java but in turn asked the audience to choose the topic which included “string”, “Static”,”Inheritance”, “Math”, “Basic” and the questions were for 1000, 500 and 100 points. Each one had to choose one question and if he/she would answer it correctly would get the points alloted to that particular question. And he took the questions to explain the concept behind it which i feel is a really innovative way for such kind of topics. I am sure that he had written an application to help him out with this. There were few ppl who scored 1000 and they got the copies of books authored by him. Even last year in GIDS-2008 he gave away his .NET Gotchas book, but for this year’s event he had 4 books on Scala, Groovy, Agile Development and .NET to give away.

McClanahan during RESTful talk

The third session was on “RESTful approach” to developing applications which was devlivered by Craig McClanahan who was incidentally from Sun Microsystems and i was happy to see someone from Sun and was happy to see someone use NetBeans He spoke at length about REST and its different aspects like URI, Actions, Resources and so on. It was a verbose talk with out any code demo but there were 2 demos later in the day one on REST applications using JAX-RS and another using RoR. But the talk was really resourceful and McClanahan is the creator of Apache Struts!!!!

McClanahan during JAX-RS talk

The fourth session for the day was on “Developing RESTful applications using JAX-RS” which was again delivered by McClanahan. But he took a lot of time to summarise what he spoke in the previous session and when he was about to demo the application NetBeans crashed But he spoke about using Jersey which is the reference implementation of JAX-RS for creating RESTful applications. He told that resources were represented using POJOs and annotations were used to indicate which method to be called for which link- in other words using annotations to map the URI’s and Resource class and methods.

Venkat in action

The fifth session for the day was “Programming Groovy” again by Venkat Subramaniam. This was a really superb session and haviing been read thru his Programming Groovy book this session was more like a revision for me. He covered all the major concepts in Groovy and the best part of his session was that it was Powerpoint free. He explained all the concepts by writing code snippets. We were starlted to see the simplicity of Groovy and most of the audience had lots of doubts about the language and many of them missed their team to flock around Venkat to get their doubts cleared.

The sixth session was on SOA delivered by Jim Webbers. The speaker was a great actor and his presentation was lively and the audience were laughing thourgh out his presentation. Even i was laughing but i dont know the reason why i was laughing because i wasn’t listening to his talk but am writing this blog post :).

My Day-2 (Day-3 of the Summit) at Great Indian Developer Summit-2009 was really interesting and i learnt a lot of new concepts, listened to really lively talks. I feel Great Indian Developer Summit-2009 is the best i have attended so far. Am seriously looking forward to attend Great Indian Developer Summit-2010. Meanwhile i have GIDS.Workshops to attend tomorrow. I will surely be attending Venkat’s workshop, then workshop on JRuby and the thirs i havent yet finalised

Visit The Great Indian Developer Summit-2009 official site here.

Read My Day-1 experiences at The Great Indian Developer Summit-2009 here.

The second session was my Fav. It was about Grails- which i believe is a really good framework to work on. This was devliered by Venkat Subramaniam, who is a really good speaker. What I like about Venkat’s talk is that there less of presentation and more of demo/coding. He quickly built a web application using grails framework, spoke about the features of the framework and there were many questions which he tackled tactfully.

Venkat's Grails Talk

By this I was tired and really hungry. The lunch was arranged at the venue. The lunch was outsourced to The Chancery and was good. After the lunch I went around the stalls, getting the Summit passport stamped by various stalls. It feels so bad that many go to the stall just to get their passports stamped and not listen to what they have to say. I answered a quiz at IBM stall and never thought that I would be lucky to win a IBM Developer Works bag and Parker pen. I still cant believe that i have won something

The third session was on different ways of debugging AJAX and again delivered by Venkat. It was really interesting talk where the speaker spoke about different debugging tools and techniques for debugging AJAX applications. During the talk he even distributed toffees to those who would just speak to

him and the person with most toffees got a gift from him. After this there was a key note address on Sony Ericsson’s developer world which i missed. There was a small tea break and this was followed by a session on Developing Rich application using Adobe Flash platform. There were 2 speakers and they spoke about the need for Rich applications and how Adobe Flash platform helps us to do it. They spoke about building SaaS applications and how the application can be used by different users.  Also they spoke about using Flex to access Java Objects and use flex with the server side languages with stress on MVC architecture.

Looking forward to tomorrow’s Java sessions and Groovy session by Venkat in particular.

Thats all from the Day-3 of GIDS-08. I had some great time at the Great Summit-08. Looking forward to attend the next edition
“

It was a great day at the GIDS. I did attend a very few sessions today but none the less there were the most productive ones. The whole of the morning session was spent in the .NET Gotchas workshop. It was an interesting and productive session by Dr. Venkat Subramaniam. Some finer points on .net were dealt in the session. At the end of the session there was a small but easy quiz and he had three copies of the book “.NET GOTCHAS” authored by him as the prize. As the quiz was easy there were many answers and he randomly picked people and gave them the book. I was late to come for the workshop on Silverlight- a three hour workshop- which i was awaiting to attend but i couldn’t get a place for me and i heard the session for about half an hour standing at the door of the hall. This indicates the number of attendents. The hall was jam packed with people seated on the stairs in the hall. I couldn’t follow the talk as it was not audible. So i went out to get stamp from the stalls. We were given a booklet and were asked to get the stamps from all the stalls. It was aimed so that people could learn about the products of the companies at the Expo but anyone hardly listened to them. All those who visited the stalls did only one thing- get the stamp on the booklet. The personnel at the staff were tried stamping the booklets. Just a thought that came to my mind- Why don’t they automate the stamping proess.

Anyways after a long ordeal i could get stamps from all except three companies. I waited for about half an hour near the help desk waiting for the Organiers to start distributing the T Shirts. The main reason why i got the booklet stamped is for the T Shirt. They were asking us to go to each stalls and get to know the products. I then thought of attending some session, it was 3 in the afternoon, went to the main seminar hall- very few attending the talk- on what? God knows! I sat there- result eyes started droping – consequence- walked out of the hall soon after i entered. Fine, i went here and there spent time somehow and then had my Tea at 3:40 and then walked to the Main Seminar hall to attend the Talk on “New Features in VS 2008 for ASP.NET developers” by Colin Bowern. It was a pretty interesting talk for others! Yeah not for me though- i slept through the session- expect at two instants- At the beginning and towards the end. Any way i regret missing the Silverlight workshop by Todd Anglin- One of My favorite speakers the the Summit.

In all on Day-2 i attended only two sessions out of which the Wokrshop on .NET GOTCHAS by Dr. Venkat Subramaniam was amazing.

One thing i always keep dreaming is about the Forum Nokia Luck draw- where a very lucky person gets to win a Nokia N95!!! I have not tried my luck yet. Its a daily draw and each day there’s a different winner. Obviously it has to be a different winner!!! Anyways no freebies for the delegates at the Summit- confused with word “Delegates”??? It none other than we who are attending the conference. The companies could have offered some freebies for people attending the company talks. May be it will be done next time…..

I am not sure whether i will be atending the Day-3 which is on “Rich Web”. If i attend then i will surely put up my experience at the talks.