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I hate people repeating themselves. This was the case even from my school going days. My teachers at the convent School always advised us; very often they uttered the same piece of advice again and again. We would pretend to listen to them and when they disappear, we would laugh over it. It took me years to realize how foolish of me to have neglected those words of wisdom from my experienced teachers. Had I listened to them, I would have done better in life. That’s okay, I can’t go back and fix my past. Mind you, I am not going to repeat those mistakes either. I still hate people repeating themselves. But I make an attempt to listen to all, listen carefully; especially to the great visionaries. Sun’s World Wide Developer Conference a.k.a Sun Tech Days is one among a handful of opportunities to hear the Executives of Sun speak.
Rich Green had lot of slides to cover in his keynote. He blamed it on the developers to have put him through a bit of trouble to talk a lot. He covered so many things in just over sixty minutes and it was done pretty fast. He had a wide range of technologies to cover in his talk that included but not limited to Java, OpenSolaris, GlassFish, Virtualization solutions and how-can-I-not-mention MySQL, which is fully and completely a part of Sun, an announcement that was made only yesterday. But for all sections of the technologies that Rich Green talked about in his presentation, he had carefully inserted a common slide (almost), which carried the a title as follows: ‘Participate, Learn and Thrive.’
I believe that slide, by and large, summarized Sun’s strategy of open sourcing all its softwares and inviting the developer community from all around the world to participate and learn. The result: when a large number of people participate, Sun gets to know what’s good in its offerings, what’s not and what’s missing. Certainly, It’s good for business; it’s good for all. Imagine if someone from a corner of this worlds can join you in solving your puzzle, wouldn’t you be able to focus more on your actual job, not re-invent the wheel, but innovate and thrive?
Rich appeared quite excited about the Virtual Box software and had one of the folks from the Engineering team take the platform to perform a demo of making use of the power of Virtualization by running Ubuntu and Solaris SXDE on a laptop ‘hosting’ Windows Vista. It would be damn convenient for a developer to test his application across various platforms using a single machine. That’s exactly what was demonstrated this morning.
One another slide that I saw this morning and can memorize is the one that lists the features of Java SE Update 10. I am going to try and list down all that I can remember from the slide that Rich used. A word of caution though: this list isn’t complete and the words used here may not be exactly the same as in the slide.
*Multimedia Support
*Easier Installation
*Faster Startup
* (Even) Faster Graphics
* Faster version detection
When Rich talked about the HD DVD format war between Sony and Toshibha which ended in favour of Sony, I wondered why he ever talked about it in a Sun event. And if you nurture similar thoughts, I recommend you read this.
There was no stopping Rich from talking passionately about Netbeans and its support for other languages like Ruby, which isn’t a language developed by Sun. Again, the point that he was trying to make clear was Sun’s willingness to offer the developers what they want. So if you haven’t tried your hand at Netbeans yet, download it now.
After the keynote, two teams of three members each, demonstrated a few cool things. As far as my thinking goes, the entire show, which lasted for about half an hour so sent at least the following messages, very clear and loud, to the audience:
* You can create some really cool games in the mobile device using the Java ME.
* JavaFX Scripting is fun and can be used to create some funky stuff. More details about JavaFX in here
* Solaris Express Edition Desktop (on supported hardware) is supercool. Believe it or not, it looks similar to the Mac OS X.
* Java Swing is NOT all that bad to create some amazing user interface.
An SMS poll was conducted to figure out which team performed the most cool demonstration. In my opinion, it all looked great.
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Sun has a culture of balancing some real serious stuff with lots of fun. I’m certain it shall remain so into the future as well. While there is also lot of learning at Sun Tech Days 2008 here at Hyderabad, the organizers were very particular about the delegates having some fun. And know what, the popular band Euphoria came and rocked the Sun Tech Days venue tonight. I wouldn’t be surprised if I see some of the delegates limping their way to attend the keynote tomorrow. 
People who danced to the tune of Euphoria may limp, but would still be able to make it for the keynote tomorrow. But if I keep myself awake any further to this, I would miss the second day of Sun Tech Days 2008 for sure. So, I’m leaving now. Good night!