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The 10th Sun Tech Days, which is an annual developer conference organized by
Sun Microsystems, was a successful event. Giving testimony to this success is
the presence of 10,000 developers who attended the event.
Held in Hyderabad on Feb 27 to 29, 2008, the conference was telecast live in
Chennai and Bangalore. There were over 70 sessions running parallely on various
tracks including Netbeans, Solaris, Opensolaris, Mobility, Glassfish, SOA,
Virtualization, Web 2.0, and MySQL.
The theme for the event this year was on 'Open Opportunities' touching upon
skill sets such as Java EE, Jruby, JavaFX, NetBeans, Java SE, OpenJDK, and
OpenSolaaris amongst the others. Claiming that India has one of the largest
developer communities, Divyesh Shah, Director-Systems Engineering, Sun Micro
Systems said, “Web 2.0 must be looked upon as an economy as lots of
opportunities lies ahead in front of the developers. The developer community
grows YoY along with the number of software. The web economy too grows to a
greater extent as lots of applications are develo-ped keeping Internet on mind.”
He also said that industry should see a revo-lution through Web 2.0, which is a
huge revenue-generating segment.
India is the next big thing In his keynote address, Richard Green, Executive
VP-Software, Sun Microsystems said that India is witnessing a tremendous growth
in the web space, which is a great base for generating more business. He expects
this to grow QoQ.
“Web economy continues to grow and every end-user wants everything for free.
This is heading the open source for growth. Web economy would continue to grow
and new applications would enable life on the web. Free and open source is the
engine that powers this innovation,” he said.
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Matt Thompson, Senior
Director-Technology Outreach and Sun Developer Network, Sun Micro Systems
speaks on the open opportunities in joining the Sun Developer Network |
Green described how JDK, MySQL, xVM, GlassFish, NetBeans, Solaris and other
similar offerings provided a suite of products that cover the entire portfolio
of open source software.
With the open source revolution soaring, application development and project
management had grown to $127 million in 2007. Speaking on the changing scenarios
in business and applications, Green said, “Application development and
businesses are changing and the applications have tohandle the business changes
by reducing the delivery circles and now things need to be immediate and
iterative.”
At the same time, developers need to create content everyday and update it in
real time. This in turn will spur better the adoption and acceleration of open
source applications. Green commented that developers are the backbone of
software development and open communities; they need to create new
possibilities, inspire thought and drive innovation.
Open opportunities
With the Sun developer population growing at a blazing pace in the country,
this conference highlighted the importance for the Indian developer community to
graduate to the next level of contributing, competing and collaborating on
platforms of global technological expertise.
As one of the largest contributor of open source community, Sun had arranged
lot of sessions that emphasized the importance of open source driving open
opportunities.
“The community plays a vital role in developing new solutions and
applications. Joining Sun's developer community, one could contribute a lot
through the existing Web 2.0 architecture and help each other in dwindling bugs
and creating new opportunities in both revenue and development areas,”
commented, Matt Thompson, Senior Director, Technology Outreach and Sun Developer
Network.
MYSQL in Sun
The Sun Tech Days also saw the two huge contributors to the open source comm-unity:
Sun and MySQL joining hands to make a joint contribution to the end-users. Sun
completed the acquisition of Sweden-based MySQL AB.
While commenting on the acquisition David Axmark, Co-Founder, MySQL said,
“Indian market has been very focused on everyday's progress in open source. No
one is satisfied with the fools proof and everyone wants to try by their own,”
Axmark said. However, he claimed that it is too early to comment on building
customized solutions for Sun's products.
The first day saw cool demonstrations and semi-nars in using various
scripting languages like JavaFX, SunSPOT, Java2D & jMaki in addition to the
demonstrations on JavaEE, Web2.0, and GlassFish platforms.
Apart from the acquisition of MySQL the event also saw the announcement on
the acquisition of Innotek, a German based supplier of open source virtual
software called VirtualBox, which will extend Sun's xVM platform onto the
desktop, strengthening itself in the virtualization market.
Mobility and SOA
Axmark took the developers through the history of MySQL and innovation and role
of storage engines in Web applications. Innovation in open source could be small
but it could generate useful ideas, which would become a great revolution one
day or another. “MySQL has lots of such instances,” claimed Axmark.
While the day one was more focused on Web based applications, day too was
more on the mobility solutions and SOA with technical sessions from Oracle, SAP,
Nokia and Ericcson.
Both Oracle and SAP showcased their ability on SOA based solutions. Though it
was nothing to do with the open source strategy of Sun Microsystems, which was
the key concept of the conference, both stressed the importance of SOA, which
has appealing allure for reducing costs and improving your company's agility and
also joining their community for building solutions on this SOA architecture.
Ericsson and Nokia sessions talked about effectively using the Java ME
platform for creating mobile-based applications. And the mobile vendors too
stressed developers to join their community for enjoying the fun of mobility
solutions.
Intel and AMD sessions separately debated on the performance of their
microprocessors in Solaris. AMD's session was on optimizing for Quadcore
Solaris systems based on AMD platform, while Intel's was on the Multicore
platform. The developers were urged to write optimized codes that would increase
the processors performance to the maximum.
NR Sethuraman
sethuramannr@cybermedia.co.in Page(s) 1
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