Sun Tech Days (27 — 29th Feb 2008)

On 27th February '08 morning, Hyderabad International Convention Center

witnessed a gathering of developers and executives representing companies from

across the globe. The purpose-Sun Tech days-a three-day, global developer event

organized by Sun Microsystems. This event provided a platform to the Sun's

developer community, which stands tall at 650,000, and is also growing at a fast

pace in India, a chance to participate in communities, share knowledge and build

skills in the world of Web 2.0. The theme for the event was 'Open Opportunities'

and the technologies covered were: Enterprise computing, mobility, wireless,

Solaris, and developer tools amongst others.

The first day witnessed more than 5000 attendees. The event started with the

keynote session from Rich Green, executive vice president, Sun Microsystems. He

talked about the acquisition of MySQL by Sun, the changing application

development environment, and the open source virtualization. He said “Developers

are the backbone of the software industry and the open communities, who create

new possibilities, inspire new thoughts and drive innovation.” He stressed on

the need to innovate more and code less; he emphasized this could be achieved by

using open platforms like Java SE, JavaFX and NetBeans IDE for RIA development.

After his keynote, various tracks spanning over different technologies like

Java, Solaris and RIAs started. The RIA sessions involved introduction of the

JavaFX, jMaki and AJAX that can be used to develop rich Internet applications

for Web 2.0. The Open JavaFX was also introduced as a mobile OS platform that

would be completely open source and would be able to give user experiences like

iPhones and Androids. The famous Euphoria band ended the first day, with lead

singer Palash Sen entertaining the attendees.

Rich Green(left), ex VP and Matt Thomson(right), Director, Sun Developer Network presiding over the Sun Tech days event

Day two began with the keynote session from David Axmark, co-founder of MySQL,

who explained innovations in the storage engine area with InnoDB and PBXT in his

presentations. He also talked about, how MySQL enjoys a 66% of market share in

enterprises including Google, Yahoo and Facebook amongst others. Similar to the

previous day, there were sessions on SOA and Mobility. Topics discussed were:

how OpenESB and NetBeans can be used as SOA-based integration platform and how

the enterprises can use Mashups to build web-centric composite business

applications. In fact, both Intel and AMD conducted sessions for optimizing

Solaris on their platforms.

The final day was all about community events, where Ian Murdok, Chief

Operating Systems Platform Strategist at Sun gave a presentation on OpenSolaris

and beyond. The community covered the projects :