Sparking the Right Discussions

Bangalore's JN Tata Auditorium at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc)

campus witnessed a huge gathering of software developers, software programmers,

project management professionals and web designers, on the 18th and 19th of

March. PCQuest and CIOL organized the first ever edition of Spark IT 2010, a

conference which combined a robust mix of themes and topics to encompass the

scope of software development and project management.

With innovative speaker topics ranging from 'It could be hell or it could be

heaven' (if you do not code the right way), to 'making a better web', the

two-day developer jamboorie was spread across various tracks — Enterprise

Trends, Client Technologies, Web technologies and Project management, in

addition to a line hands-on lab for code testing.

On day one, Spark IT kicked off by creating a blanket rule that programmers

should not become frogs in their own wells by sticking to a particular language

or platform. Driving home the philosophy that the more open you are to receiving

and understanding newer languages, the more likely you are to evolve as a

programmer, the day proceeded with attendees getting a glimpse of Agile

Methodology, project management in a cross-cultural ecosystem, along with

familiarity with Mono — an interoperability-friendly platform. Adding to the

'agility' of the event was Google Go, RIA in enterprises, the science of

portfolio management and more.

Day two, on the other hand, opened the attendees' eyes to real-life themes

like Google's AppEngine, New developer-friendly features in ASP .NET,

orientation towards code quality, Implementing SOA using enterprise JAVA, with a

lot of emphasis on Glassfish, SOAP UI and project risk management.

Java was a hot topic at Spark IT 2010, and having rubbished the fact that

Java EE is monolith one-size-fits-all, the gathering opened their eyes to new

features of Java 6 which include web profile 1.0, fully integrated mid-sized

profile, converged technologies and extensibility. It also features a standard

way to define how to integrate frameworks, such as Strats, Spring, Lift, Apache

Wicket etc, unlike the earlier editions. Java EE6 also heralds ease of use as

WebXML is optional while writing a server net. EE 6 will also extend support to

multiple languages, such as Django, JavaFx, Scala, Grrovy, Lift, Clojure, Jruby

and Cobol.platform has come a long way from its first release, the 1.4, back in

1995.

The enterprise track began with an intellectual journey from SaaS offerings

to the SOA landscape. Starting with the context where SaaS moves on to the

architecture, and detailing the advantages, challenges and solutions, the track

threw light on the complete architecture of SaaS with enterprise applications

and SOA. The various advantages of Virtual Edge like zero code, auto upgrade,

configurations, 24/7 availability and universal accessibility, and challenges

like customization, third-party application integration, multi-tenant

application and database and providing 24/7 availability were listed out.When

the SaaS works in the enterprise application scenario, the benefits are

application-level integration, security for file exchange, user store and open

standard; however, the challenges come from funding, seamless integration and

performance aspect.

Novell laid the platform called Mono at dissection table while leading a

session named 'Mono — a platform for running and developing modern applications

while promoting interoperability', Mono, incidentally is a platform for running

and developing modern applications while promoting interoperability. Mono has 40

internal developers worldwide and 200 external contributors. It can work on

vibrant ecosystem of open source projects

such as Banshee, Monsoon. Mono is parallel to .NET and is completely open

sourced.

Google explained the idea behind Google Chrome Extensions, which are programs

that enhance Chrome functionalities. Written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, Chrome

Extensions is integrated using simple APIs and developed iteratively. The four

basic types of extensions - Browser Action, Page Action, Content Script -

scripts which modify the DOM of the underlying HTML page, and Theme, had the

audience in a querying mood.