Sun Tech Days 2008 Hyderabad

I recently attended Sun Tech Days event at Hyderabad. I was told that this event one of the biggest event Sun has after the Java One with respect to its attendance with 5000 people attending the same. I was told that around 30% are repeaters. One thing is clear its the biggest developer Tech Days of all with respect to attendees as well as sessions.

There might be couple of reasons for the same the first and foremost the kind of facilities which are excellent at the Hyderabad International Convention Center (HICC) and the other one Java is very popular among the services industry here.

The following are the interesting keynote sessions.

• First day keynote is from Rich Green went on with JDK, acquisition of MySQL, xVM, happenings with
  GlassFish,
  NetBeans, Solaris and many
  other similar offerings provide a comprehensive suite of products that
  cover the entire portfolio of software. One thing he clearly missed is regarding 'SOA' offering of SUN though it offers a complete SOA stack, when there were many Program managers from the industry.
• Second day keynote was by Oracle and it has done a beautiful presentation of its SOA Suite -- Fusion. There was one more keynote from David Axmark
  - MySQL
  co-founder. He explained about the following innovations which are a kind of revelations..
  
• Storage
  Engine Innovation (Falcon,
  InnoDB,
  PBXT
  & others)
  
• "Free" Time Innovation (MySQL proxy,
  Language Connector)
  
• Buying Innovation (MySQL
  Cluster
  from Ericsson)
• Business Innovation (open source in 1996, work with driver support from host of languages, on any platform, all compiled from one
  source code, designed with portability in mind, simple recompile for
  64-bit portability) and other different kinds of innovation give MySQL
  66% of market share in enterprises. Google, Facebook,
  Wikipedia,
  Yahoo, YouTube are some of the prominent names.
• Thirdday there was a give away for the University students who's shown their mettle at the contest by Sun 'Code For Freedom'. This enthused the participants on the University Day.

I will be talking about the few of the sessions I attended and my feedback on the sessions soon

NetBeans 6.1 Beta now available

Good news for the NetBeans lovers is that NetBeans 6.1 Beta is now available for download at http://download.netbeans.org/netbeans/6.1/beta.

The most interesting portion for me is the startup time and its has come a long way on that. The other notable features for me from a developers stand point are

• MySQL support in Database Explorer
  
• From documenting the code perspective Javadoc code completion is good
  
• JSF 'CURD' Generator is back because of Popular demand
• Update center modules for AXIS and SOAP UI
  

The availability of the following plugins makes NetBeans the leader in the RIA+SOA era

• Visual Web Pack
  
• the support for server side scripting with Project Phobos plugin
  
• SOA Enerrpise pack with
  
• BPEL editing and debugging
  
• WSDL Editor with WSDL extensions for file/ftp/jdbc/sap etc.
• XSD support
• JAX-WS plugin making the development of Java based webservices easy
  
• Integration with Sun's enterprise application server Glassfish + Open - ESB
  

I guess Eclipse is also catching up with the RIA+SOA world but NetBeans
still has a say there with its editors and BPEL Debugger etc.

Having said tht I feel that one thing that is not so good in NetBeans for making it 'The only IDE
you need!' is the debugger. I see that its the 'vulnerable' place in NetBeans where Eclipse still holds it.

The following things make Eclipse Debugger more attractive

• Ease of use - even naive user can debug
  
• Multi thread debugging
• Feasibility to attach the source
• Does not break when there is no source is available rather it does a 'jad' or 'javap' for you and gives the possible structure of the source file
  
• If we give the project references it can locate the source file for you.