Evolving Experimental

Gone are those days when people used to call Internet explorer in  place of a web browser. It was Internet explorer (not very true  though) by any means a viable chance to read or write in web. Even  though Netscape had a share, it was way too less used. Firefox proved  a completely different point though. Thanks for making such an  important application open-source.Thanks to web 2.0. People now have choices and the web experience has  drastically changed/evolved. The users are exponential in number and  trillions of requests hitting servers every second makes it more fun.

Even though there are problems concerning cross browser  compatibilities, the script developers are doing a good job to  overcome them and are well treated by their employers. With the  advent of technologies like AJAX and dynamic client side programming,  the importance of browser based technologies have grown enormously  and generated a very high demand for professional javascript experts.

Many vendors are trying their own ways of bringing in AJAX into  practice with help of code generators and frameworks. To what extent  (with these browser technologies) client side can become interactive  and dynamic is another question. It’s amazing to think how it will be  in another 10 years down the line. Even though we have all these  technologies evolving so does the problem of threats and complexities  glowing at the other end.

The complexity of maintaining has always been a big concern and will  continue to be. The dynamism always comes with a price tag! What do  the big IT players have in mind about the future of web technologies  with the understanding  that web runs business almost everywhere.

I would name 2k+ as an experimental century since we could already  see, when a technology is proposed, there are hundreds of experiments  happening around it. For example XML has influenced the way IT  projects are done and already many technologies pinned with it.

It’s again very interesting to see how IT managers are smart enough  to cope up with flooding options knocking their doors esp. in the  technology front.

Sun tech Days chennai 2008

February 28th Chennai, Hotel Taj Coromandal it was a perfect set up for Sun Tech Days sponsored by Sun Micro systems. There was a key note and a long lecture to follow on Sun products and evolving Opensource technologies. I liked the speech by Rich Green on sun’s strategy on various technologies including Mysql which is their recent interest. The event was broad casted live from Hyderabad. Even though we had a delay and a non-sync between audio and video, it was quite a good setup and people enjoyed.

All went well until we had the coffee break. Then came the presentation on Java SE 6 Installation. It was quite a dry topic and the presenter also went into a mode of sleep. Everyone were sleeping that time. Suddenly some good pointers on Automatic Update feature which is proposed to be released. The idea is to deliver the jre with minimum/core libraries/classes and then on demand (when ever a program requiring a special library is run) the jar’s are downloaded. The downloading could also be done by hosting internally.

Then came the session on Ajax Basics and tool kits. The presenter was patient enough to explain the ajax concepts. JMaki was presented and demo’ed. It still has a long way to go to capture the Internet market i feel.

Session by Accenture on Model Driven Architecture was sadly not well prepared. The presenter ran/read through slides and it was filled with technical terms which was to the least de-codable. There was also a session on Java Emitter Templates which sound quite good. But again poor demo. Everyone went to sleep mode again. It was a killer esp. after lunch.

The hallmark of the session was that it completely ran out of time (as it was suppose to be) and the speakers were comfortably saying “Due to lack of time, we are not in a situation to take questions and we encourage people to visit us outside the hall with their doubts if any”. Bad again. I remember Linux Desktop Conference 2004 at bangalore where Jon stopped the presentation and started answering questions from the public. It was quite an amazing experience. Any way no comparison.

I decided not to stay any more and left the place. Finally filled up a survey asking for where you work, what technology you use etc.., and handed over to the sun officials at bench outside the hall.

I am not sure about the off line lectures are Bangalore and Hydrabad but it was dismal effort at Chennai. Over all i was not happy with the sessions and my rating is 2/5 which again is for the keynote and the green speech.