Spark IT 2010 Developer's Conference

With the economic slowdown being left behind, there is a lot that developers

and project managers can look forward to for their future growth. Considering

that India is one of the world's largest developer hubs, it's important for

developers and project managers here to stay ahead of the curve. This is only

possible if they can learn the latest technologies, development techniques, and

best project management practices. Only then can they grow in their own career

and in turn help the organizations that they work for grow as well.

It was with the quest to keep Indian software developers and project managers

stay ahead of the curve that PCQuest and CIOL collaborated to host a two day

mega-developers' conference, Spark IT 2010, on March 18th and 19th earlier this

year. The event was held in the prestigious Indian Institute of Science (IISc)

campus, Bangalore. The platform aimed to address the needs of software

professionals by bringing them face to face with eminent speakers and tech gurus

from India and abroad.

Spark IT indeed delivered that, and created that 'spark' in everyone's mind.

Over the two days, there were sessions on technology and project managements,

besides hands-on workshops. The various sessions on Agile development, Java EE,

Cloud Computing, SOA, project management etc. taken by renowned speakers like

Dr. Venkat Subramanium, Arun Gupta, S G Ganesh, Rohit Bhardwaj, Dr. M R Gopalan

amongst others, all of whom were well received by the audience.

Around 2000 developers and project managers attended the conference across

the two days. But for us that's not enough. We'd like to make sure that we can

update all the software developers and project managers in the country (and even

across the world through online) about the learnings from this event.

Presented here are the key takeaways from Spark IT

All about Project Management and Product Management

Kirthiga started off the session named ‘Project Management in a Global,

Cross-cultural Environment’ by laying the importance on the universal nature of

today’s enterprises, and explained how with the increasing globalization every

enterprise has touched the aspect of global team. She covered various aspects

like external perspective of project management, understanding the global

cross-cultural environment, role of project management and the common

challenges. According to her, various drivers of the teams are lower cost

structure, expertise, 24x7 consumer service and co-locations. These result in

faster time to market, increased response and greater customer satisfaction. She

emphasized that the role of project manager is to define value of the customer,

lead the team from the concept stage to application of the idea.

Kirthiga Reddy, VP & GM, FailSafe and Phoenix India

Taking another session on “Product management Fundamentals”, Kirthiga quoted

that “Role of a product manager is to define product and services that create

value for the customer and profit growth for the company.” Further she

elaborated and said that product management is a journey that is in three parts

as concept, execution and delivery. She added that the companies slice product

management differently; product manager could be structured as CEO of the

product. It can also be sliced more narrowly like eBay that worked towards

outbound analysis.

Go KISS the Social Media

In past couple of years we have seen the surge of Social Media and it setting

the trends and also coming into enterprise scenario as well. Sachin Khosla while

speaking at Spark IT 2010 said that today when companies are looking for means

to reach out to customers, unlike the other way round, social media is promising

to be the platform for great potential in terms of customer support, especially

in this age of 2.0. Social media such as Twitter, Facebook etc. are fast, cheap,

give instant feedbacks, help in relationship building and also are the best

means of free advertising. He also cautioned to take a note that one has to keep

it (message) simple and short (KISS). The message should not be imposed upon

anyone, and it has to be the community to take the call. He also demoed how to

build applications around the APIs of the social media sites and how they can be

consumed by enterprises for better relationships with their customers. He also

talked about location awareness and what benefits are there for serving the

content through your web applications that is context based. or instance, if a

mobile user accesses your web application from his phone’s browser then

depending on his current location you can show relevant information to him. He

also took another session on HTML 5, where he talked about web workers and

programmable web that are leading towards Semantic Web.

Sachin Khosla, Founder, Digimantra.com

It Could be heaven or It could be Hell

Dr. Venkat sparked off the proceedings of the event through his keynote

speech with the title, “It could be heaven or it could be hell”. Bewildering the

audience of the packed hall to think what’s he going to speak about, Dr. Venkat

took the audience on an informative trip about the nuances of software

programming. He advised budding developers to be unique and try to write their

codes differently. He urged programmers to change their method of coding in

primary languages and start developing applications using multiple languages.

He insisted on the necessity of becoming a good black swan amongst the common

white ones. With this he meant that the developer’s method of designing an

application is heavily influenced by the language he knows. Knowing just one

language limits the thinking possibilities, while getting hold of multiple

languages makes one think and perceive differently to a given situation. For one

programming language it is not easy to be effective in all areas. According to

him, people assume Java to be relentlessly hopeful as it was simpler than C++,

but Java features are becoming complex with less benefit. In the past six to

seven years there has been language explosion, and now there are more than 200

languages in Java virtual machine alone. He pointed out to developers that it

would be heaven for them if they took advantage and became polygot programmers

by using multiple languages for different layers of the language or layers

within the language. Else it would be hell, for restricting themselves to just

one language.

Dr. Venkat also took sessions on Agile Development and prudent practices,

powers and perils of JavaScript. Also he took a hands-on workshop on Groovy,

which had the audience who were keen to attend and not to miss out were seated

on the stairs also.

Dr. Venkat  Subramanium, Founder, Agile Developer Inc.

Java EE6 outgrows one size fits all myth

Arun Gupta while talking on the latest Java Enterprise Edition, Java EE6,

said that java EE is a monolith one size fits all, and Java EE6 has outgrown

that myth. He talked about the features of Java EE 6, which includes web

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

way to define how to integrate frameworks, such as Struts, Spring, Apache Wicket

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

and will also extend support to multiple languages, such as Django, JavaFx,

Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Jruby and COBOL. Java platform allows one to create

composite application, such as Enterprise Bus, service engine, Intelligent Event

Processing, XSLT, data mash-up, encoding etc. and has a wide range of adapters,

communications and databases. This new platform also has several offerings for

Ajax including Ajax Pulling, Ajax Push (Long Push), Ajax Push (Streaming) etc.

And also, there are several tool kits on Java, such as ICEFaces, RichFaces,

which offer Ajax integration. It also supports JavaFx. Java EE 6 will serve as a

platform for creating and deploying rich Internet application across all screens

of life such as TV, mobile laptop etc. soon. This allows a full spectrum of

technology wherein a Java developer can assume multiple roles, such as of

communication, enterprise, BPM, Web 2.0 etc. He also took another session that

was on improving engineering processes with Hudson, which is an open source

Continuous Integration (CI) server, and is already in use by big names like

EBay, Yahoo and LinkedIn.

Arun Gupta,  GlassFish Evangelist

SOA and SaaS are Complementary

Starting with explaining the context where SaaS moves on to the architecture,

and detailing the advantages, challenges and solutions, Yogesh More further

talked about SaaS in enterprise application scenario and also talked about the

complete architecture of SaaS with enterprise applications and SOA. He said that

when SaaS based applications work in enterprise 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 aspects.

To showcase this, he used the example of Virtual Edge (VE), an application

track suite. The benefits from it were that there’s no coding required, has auto

upgrades, 24x7 availability and is accessible universally. While the challenges

lied with the customization, third-party application integration, multi-tenant

application and database and ensuring 24x7 availability.

Yogesh More, Manager, R&D, ADP Private Ltd

He emphasized on the benefits from the complete architecture, which includes

SaaS based enterprise application integrated or laid upon SOA platform. This

ensures timeless implementation, sharing of utility services, shared

infrastructure services, re-use of the infrastructure and development of new

services in faster time. He cited challenges of the architecture to be the

timelines of a true SOA, seamless integration to fullest, single sign on,

integration and governance of support layers are major bottlenecks.

A Software Bug can Kill You, literally

SG Ganesh compared the software bugs to icebergs, as most of them are hidden.

What we see is just the tip, about 1/10th of all the bugs that are present in an

application. During his session on “Software bugs and Code Quality”, he

emphasized on the code quality and how essential it is for software development.

Since software usage is critical, software requires “Five Nines”, which means

only five minutes of downtime is allowed in a year. In his animate way he listed

examples from history where software bugs have been disastrous. In 1996, Ariane

5 rocket blasted within minutes of take-off due to software bug. There was error

because of conversion from float to int in Ada, which resulted in an overflow

exception. Similarly Microsoft’s Zune player froze on December 31, 2008. The

reason was that the code was written in such a way that it would never terminate

if the year happens to be a leap year and the day’s value is 366.

 Bugs in software are a serious issue and to eliminate them and ensure

code quality is a difficult task. He said that the first thing that a programmer

needs to realize is the cost of code quality. He went ahead to say that though

testing is not the only solution for creating code quality. Testing does show

the presence of bugs, and not their absence. For 99.9% of inputs the bugs would

go undetected during tests. It’s not only the developer, but also the manager’s

responsibility in creating quality software.

The other session that S G Ganesh took was on “Google Go”. He got going in

this session by saying that “A language is not just for communication, but it

heavily influences one’s thought process as well. So when you know multiple

languages one tends to think and perceive things differently,” while addressing

the audience. He cited that there were no major programming languages created

during the last decade, while during the same period much has changed in this

ecosystem. In an era where language libraries are becoming bigger with lots of

developments, Internet and networking becoming pervasive and multi-core

processing becoming mainstream, the present system programming languages,

developed over three decades back, fall short of catering to the above mentioned

properties.

S G Ganesh, Member Technical Staff, Siemens (Corporate Technology)

This is where Google Go enters into the picture. It’s a language created by

Robert Griesemer, Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. Google Go, takes the name after the

first two letters of its parent company, and is a dynamic language that has a

concise and clean syntax, where separation of interface and implementation is

possible, and Go routines is based on CSP, which is safer than lock-based Java.

This experimental, concurrent, garbage-collected system programming language,

launched in September 2009 and touted to be the next ‘C’ language is still in an

evolving stage, with tools and packages in development stages and being used by

only one per cent of programmers as of now. Ganesh sees there’s great potential

in Go and the probability that it being used in embedded systems as well.