IndicThreads.com Conference On Java Technology: Day 2

Day 2 was much simpler. Nahar got added to the crew and we had Afteks car ready to commute. We reached on time (though Amit was with us! hehe ... just kidding!)

First session was on Web 2.0 stuff from Ramesh Loganathan who is from Pramati. His talk on bridging the gap between desktop applications and internet application was impressive. He shared some of his good experiences with web 2.0 development. I liked that idea of “Send to Friend who is on gtalk/yahoo/msn” instead of “Send email to friend”. Rather than technology he talked on a new approach towards the product development, new perspective to user interaction (lets call it user interaction instead of user interface as we are in web 2.0! Hmm?)

Next session was from Debu again. He was going to talk on SOA chaos. He was very impressive yesterday so I was expecting the same this time. Though I don’t have any experience of SOA, I had heard about this buzzword many times when I was in CPI. Debu tried his best to keep things simple, but I guess because there was no internet available, he was unable to show any demo. Because of this I guess I was unable to get the real feeling of SOA. Debu was very patient in answering my questions here again. I liked this. I talked about my year old problem of CachedRowset with him. He assured me that he will look into this. I met Madhav Sathe who is working with Debu at Oracle. To be very frank I was very surprised when he talked with me in Marathi! He also said that he will try to help me out in Cached row set issue. Thanks people!

Chris came next to talk on offline Ajax applications. He had given demo of Google Gears. Again because of unavailability of internet he was not able to deliver more. Hopefully Harshad will consider this infrastructural issue next time!

In lunch time, I could not resist myself to go with some non-veg items. Yesterday I was successful in avoiding non-veg but this time sorry! ;-)

After lunch we were expecting some J2ME stuff. But again there is a change in schedule. J2ME session got dropped out and even Advanced Spring session was also not there. Harshad, this was very disappointing ;-)

But then I met Paulo Caroli from ThoughtWorks. He was also impressive in talking on Agile techniques. His sessions on Continuous Integration Technique and Refactoring (to patterns) were very good. Yesterday I missed his session on Unit testing with Dependency Injection and Mock Objects as this session was running parallel to Spring :( I was feeling bad about this. Anyways He said that next time when he will be in pune he will talk on this.

Agile techniques are truly impressive but I guess these will work only if we change our mindset. As per Paulo, they are actually using these techniques in their day to day life which sound encouraging to me. Worth mentioning here is I liked one of his statements “Peer pressure ensures that policies get followed” Very true right? And if we want to go by Agile way automation will be the key to success. So try to automate everything like unit testing, build, integration, use tools to refactor, find bugs etc etc. I have already started towards working out this in Aftek … let’s see how it goes :)

Last session was again dynamic taken by Chris. He talked on GWT. He had shown some demos which were good. About GWT I will just say that: if it works in all the cases then it’s good. Otherwise I will not like that its there to do only simple / small scale java projects. After hearing so much from Chris a question came to my mind: If there are UI technologies like silverlight, flex etc comming up why google is still going with javascript? Any answer (from google?)

This ended up the conference and its now time for quiz winners. Yes Chris was the person who was picking up the lucky chits. Amit was lucky to win 2^nd price for 2^nd day. Good that Aftek is lucky! And we started our journey back to BM office. Overall it was a good experience hearing from industry experts. Time will tell how we implement this.