Java Conference in Bangalore – JAX India 2007 Update

The first JAX India conference was held in Bangalore from the 28th to the 31st
of May 07.  The quality of technology conferences happening in India is not
that great, so it’s good to see international events like JAX come to India.

I was at the event on the last 2 days and spoke about Struts 2.0, Groovy and
Grails. The conference was well organized and everything seemed to be happening
the way it was supposed to be. I think there were about 300 odd participants at
any given time.

The speaker list for the conference was impressive and consisted of big names
like Craig McClanahan, the creator of Struts. The conference had three tracks –
1) Java 2) Eclipse 3) Enterprise Architecture. Sponsors of the event included
Codegear, IBM, Interface21, Sun, Collabnet, etc. The sessions were conducted in
two small halls and one big main auditorium.

The sessions in the smaller halls were very interactive. But the short 50 min
sessions were not enough to handle all the questions without losing track of the
session.

The audience profile wasn’t easy to gauge. While some wanted hardcore techie
stuff, there were others who wanted overviews / tutorials, so as to be able to
make technology direction decisions. So it was a mixed bag.

I attended Sangeeta’s sessions on Dojo and later GWT, where she introduced the
two frameworks. There was good audience interest in the topics. Dojo is the
easier of the two frameworks to migrate to, as GWT is not that easy to plugin to
established ideas of Java web development. GWT seems best suited if you are
developing a new application and not if you want to ajaxify existing apps. Also
for a GWT implementation to be successful it is important to think of the
application as a whole and not think of it as 200 separate pages and worry about
how the page flows will be managed.

I also checked out a couple of web services related sessions and found
surprising level of interest in the subject. Interest in Web Services has been
up and down for several years now, and it looks like the SOA hype has revived
web services.

As for my sessions, my Struts 2.0 session was titled “Should I adopt/migrate to
Struts 2.0”. So I spent most of the time demonstrating the features of Struts
2.0 and what has changed from 1.0. Most participant queries were related to a
possible migration path from Struts 1 and whether it was worth it. My second
session dealt with my favorite topic in recent times, Groovy and Grails.
Awareness was fairly low however based on queries and post session feedback,
there surely is interest in using the RAD features of a framework like Grails.

The SOA Panel was the last session of the conference and like most SOA
discussions it consisted mostly of bird’s eye views of the offerings from
various vendors. Most SOA product presentations have the same thing to say –
“Our SOA suite provides rapid development and integration of services to deliver
solutions that real businesses require.” You don’t really learn much except
being reminded that X company is also a player in the field. Representatives
from SAP, Oracle, HP, IBM and Sun presented their products. This was followed by
a Q&A session and lucky draw prizes.

Last year when we organized the first
IndicThreads.com
Conference On Java Technology, it was the first such independent conference
to happen in India. The JAX event now gives Java developers in India more
options for independent Java content. Considering the number of software
developers in India, it’s surprising how little groundbreaking work happens in
India. Events like JAX where Indian developers get to interact with each other
as well as experts in various segments, I am sure will contribute to helping
India generate more original work in the Java space.

The IndicThreads Conference for 2007 is scheduled for 26th and 27th Oct 2007.
The details of the event will soon be up on
http://conference.indicthreads.com.
The
response
to last year’s event was great and am looking forward to more Java interactions
at the IndicThreads Conference 2007.

Related

* Indichreads-DevSquare Java Code Contest