Java is everywhere. It’s perhaps everyday that this technology touches us in one way or the other. But it’s certainly not everyday that you get to hear the Father of Java speaks out his thoughts, live. James Gosling’s presence for the Sun Tech Days 2009 at Hyderabad is undoubtedly the main highlight of this edition of the event, kick-started today at Hyderabad International Convention Center.Day one was very informative and it promises to get better in the next two days.
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At Tech Days, you would see anchoring at its best. This morning it wasn’t any different. With a really cool MC on stage, boredom failed to find its place. “Namaste India,” we screamed loud and clear, all of us standing up, as instructed by the Master of Ceremonies, whom you see on left. That set the tone for the rest of inaugural proceedings.
And when the youngest drummer of India showed up on stage, producing some magical moments with his tender hands for minutes at stretch, our energy levels went rather high. It was superb!
What followed then were some useful demonstrations on technologies like OpenSolaris, JavaFX and Java TV.
Anil Valluri,VP and Managing Director of Sun India, gave the inaugural address, briefing about Sun, its business model and other related topics, and concluded his speech by inviting James Gosling on to the stage. It wasn’t surprising to hear a loud round of applause as Gosling walked his way up on to the stage.
Gosling covered a wide range of topics: the evolution of Java from a slow interpreted language in the mid 1990s, its performance improvement over a period of time, the latest release in the form of Java 6 Update 12, the new JavaFX technology, the Glassfish, the Netbeans 6.5 and much much more.
He mentioned the staggering statistics of 15 million downloads of JRE a week, talked about the Java enabled Oyster cards (he pulled out one from his pocket while talking about this) being used in the London Underground by every single train passenger, his work with the rocker Neil Young on the Java-enabled, hybrid-electric Lincoln convertible, why a virus free Java is a preferred choice for applications that require secure transactions over the network and performed a number of demos on JavaFX.
It was quite a charm when he said he was the guilty party behind developing Emacs editor 32 years back or so, which later became GNU Emacs, but urged all present day Emac users to stop using it, as things are not the way it was three decades back and that present day IDEs are intelligent enough to know a lot about the programs that programmers write. Well, here is an IDE worth trying: Netbeans.
Gosling’s keynote, needless to say, was an absorbing session.
Several break out sessions on various Sun Technologies followed James Gosling’s keynote. It was a good first day and it’s only going to get better.