Great Indian Developer Summit- 2009, Day-4. GIDS.Workshops:
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.
ut 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.