Experience @ sun tech days 07

Tough to write the first line for my Sun tech days 07 experience ... so could think of just one word
!! AWESOME !!
It really was .. although i was not quite satisfied with the technical coverage of JSF nad Ajax session ...
may be coz i have been trying my hands on them for past 6 months ... on the flip side demos were same as the ones available on sun's web site that was a little discouraging and unexpected ..
but other sessions were really informative
and really am impressed with the NetBeans IDE .... best feature according to me Embedded Java DB ..
initially it was not easy to try out all tutorials that had DB interactivity ... but now guess one can... pretty easily

It all started with a grand welcome session ... and it was really the best i have ever been attended...
I was surprsied to know that the sessions in hyderabd were being broad casted LIVE in bombay , pune , and delhi
and also wondered why not in Banglore ??
I guess as far as IT is concerened the communities are more active there than anywhere else in India
And there were 10,000 attendee in all

after the session by Bhaskar Pramanik, President – India GEM, Sun Microsystems, India.
B. Ramalinga Raju, Chairman, Satyam Computer Services Ltd.
and last but not the least Rich Green, Executive Vice President, Software, Sun Microsystems, Inc. and then the much avaited show started IN STYLE .. some technical demos that were truly amazing and out of world

On stage came up Two teams of Java evangelist ... Each one trying to outshine other with kind of Killer demo0 they had
Team A
they 1st showed us mp3 player with great features like
the user could search music for track having a similar melody like the one playing .. that too on just click of a button moreover one can represent all the albums on one's hard disk in a 3D world and then make a play list by choosing two points ( i.e. albums ) in the space .. for example .. user chooses song 1 which happens to be a fast track and another end point as song 2 which in could be a slow song and the player will automatically make a list that will start from the fast track and move towards the slower one ...
how ever they didn't mention the name of the player .. but i guess it might be on open-solaris .. if not present then may be in upcoming version

Team B
They were a little slow on there first demo
they build a jsf + ajax application ... in which one could use Google's JSF component and directly pin point a location on Google earth ... just key-in the name of city and press enter and there you go .. get Google map on the city staright away , cool but not so impressive .. as they used a JSf component that was built by Google ...

Team A again
they showed us a tool on open solaris called " performance analyzer " .. they had a simple scenario .. Fibonacci in java .. Fibonacci in C .. using the tool one can see the time taken by both programs to run .. and also the machine code genertaed by these two ..

Team B
Now was Team B's turn they had too be good or else Team A would have won ... and they didn't let that happen .. they told us about a new technology called "Form follows function" in short f3 .. the kind of applications that one can build with f3 can have similar interactivity like Flash
more about it on
http://blogs.sun.com/chrisoliver/resource/f3.html
Must try demos
http://blogs.sun.com/chrisoliver/category/F3

Team A
How can they be left behind ... They showed us a demo of SPOT ...
more about it on http://research.sun.com/projects/dashboard.php?id=145
what they had on stage was three wheely robots ... and using a GUI interface they made robot 1 chase robot 2 and robot 2 chase robot 3 and robot 3 chase robot 1 again .... on pressing the go button all three robots started chasing each other ... i had often seen such things on discovery but this was the first time i had a chance to see that in person ... although i didn't understand how was Java related to all this ... may be i should have attended SPOT session , but there were other better sessions .. i didn't wanted to miss those

Team B
VRML ... VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) more about it on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML
Demo was cool one ... the screen was divided in two parts the first one containing objects like cone , sphere and backgrounds .. and section below it containing a screen .. the user would just say words like "cone" .. "sphere" on mic and the corresponding objects appeared on screen !! ..
cooooolll application .... the concept behind it was even better ... Ajax application in general are supposed to process text request and give text responses ... but here ajax was taking voice request and sending it to server via scrpit and modifying DOM accordingly .. that too in a 3D world
I wonder how would they do something like XMLHttpRequest.send() ??

Big question .. Who won ??
Well i guess the audience ... it opened our minds !!
:)
More later ...