The IndicThreads.com Conference On Java Technology was a great success. Really feels good to say that

As this was the first independent conference on Java to happen in India, we had nothing to compare with and no way to predict what the response would be like. As they say, if there’s no competition, maybe there’s no business at all. Fortunately this adage did not work in our case and over 150 people attended the event.

There were some hiccups but overall the conference went smoothly. The audience was just great. Q&As discussions, debates… it was all there. We were a little circumspect about having 10 hours of Java on day 1, but even for the late evening sessions there was admirable enthusiasm and interest.

Our sponsors – Oracle, Pramati, Microsoft, Persistent, SAS, BMC software and Canoo were all very supportive. They understood that the core idea behind the event was to keep it focused on learning and on being vendor-neutral. So there was never any interference in any of our plans for the conference. The speakers also stayed well away from any marketing pitches and product promotions. It was just technology all the way.

Day 1 started with a quick introduction to what was planned and to the facilities available. The first session by Raghu Kodali talked of SOA, BPEL and Rules. Atul Kahate followed with a talk on Java Security dos and dont’s. He kept things simple and pointed out some mistakes often committed in enterprise Java applications.

Janakiram MSV from Microsoft spoke about interoperability between J2EE and .NET. A Microsoft guy at a Java conference might seem a bit strange, but the talk brought information that Java guys wouldn’t hear otherwise. Debu Panda had a fun session on EJB3, which was followed by Peter JTrac Thomas’ session on Spring.

To recharge the participants’ energy for later sessions, we then had a beautiful dance performance from the NrutyaVardhini cultural academy in Pune.

Kishore Kumar, the author of “Pro Apache Geronimo” spoke about Apache Geronimo and the day ended with my introductory session on Groovy and Grails.

Day 2 opened with a typical Gavin King session which included blasting established notions of enterprise development and dancing on stage. His session on using JSF, EJB3 and Seam was fun and informative.

Later Janak Mulani spoke about RIA alternatives. He compared taking a Java Swing, HTML-JavaScript and a Flash based approach. Sanjeeb Sahoo help demystify Java EE 5 by highlighting the differences between J2EE and Java EE. We then had a session on Ruby and Rails presented by Jatender Singh. Since there is so much of Ruby happening, the session, as we hoped, shed light on what Rails is all about. Day 2 ended with a panel discussion on Ajax and Web2.0 and their adoption across enterprises, the value they bring to a web app, the successful ongoing Ajax projects and lots more. The panelists were Swarraj Kulkarni who is the Principal Architect at Cognizant and Vinod Kulkarni who is the heads the Web2.0 Competency Center at Persistent.

Do have a look at the Conference Program Guide. The conference presentations and videos will be up on the site soon. You can find photos from the conference at Flickr

Rest assured that once the team gets back from their break, we will get down to planning the “QThreads.com Conference On Software Quality 2007″ and the “IndicThreads.com Conference On Java Technology 2007″. See you there.

Written by Content Team on December 4, 2006      Print