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.