I had the opportunity to attend Sun Tech Days Technology Conference at Bangalore again. The last time I attended was 4 years back. I made a few notes during the keynote sessions that I would like to share. It would have been better if I had published it on a Wiki. In the absence of which I have posted them on my Technical Blog. The non technical part is here (ok I haven't written it but it will be up soon!)
Sun Tech Days is a premier technology conference conducted by Sun Microsystems and sponsored by a bunch of companies such as SAP, Oracle, Compuware and ObjectFrontier. It is held every year in a few selected cities around the world. In India, this was one the 7th in a row. The event primarily focuses on Java and related technologies. Typically this is a marketing platform for Sun to promote its new products on a larger scale among a wider audience and a community that influences and contributes to software development the most - yes the DEVELOPER community. What can be a better platform to publicise/announce initiatives such as Sun's support for Open Source or showcase technologies that are still in the nascent stages such as EJB 3.0 specification, or Mustang (J2SE 6.0) for that matter.
Here are some interesting statistics and mind boggling numbers --
- As we all know, this is the 10th birthday of Java.
- 320,000 Java developers of an estimated 600,000 Software developers in India.
- Over 3000 developers present at the conference this year as against 176 in 1999.
- 26 sessions this year spanning over 2 days.
- Over $300 million spent on Solaris at an estimated effort of 3000 people years and today it is free! 20 million lines of code of Solaris - the largest donation ever made by any company to the Open Source Community.
The event as such was fun and very informative. A chance to meet Jeff Jackson. Wondering who he is? Yea I know he is not as famous as James Gosling,. But Jeff happens to be Gosling's boss! A lot of people got a lot of goodies as gifts such as hundreds of dukes, a few t-shirts signed by James Gosling, a Java leather Jacket to the most talented person and the best of all - a red Electric Guitar autographed by Joe Satriani. Aint that cool? There was a contest for people with weird/extraordinary talent and whoever won got the Leather Java Jacket. Unlike the developers in Brazil who played soccer on the stage or those in Canada who juggled, Indian developers either sang or danced!
There were times when the crowd got out of hand and at one point the facilitator even commented "you guys are scaring me!" and "do you want me to call the security guard?". I thought that was cheap on part of the crowd to fight for a duke...well unfortunately education does not mean civilization!
Read more for info on the tech sessions ...