23rd April , 2009. The day was so cool and in Bangalore it was hot in politics. It was the Election day at Bangalore. GIDS had announced that the events will be started only by 10:00 AM. I reached at the event spot by 9AM. Event was held at JN Tata Auditorium, IISc, Bangalore. Its very hard to see greenery in Bangalore, even though its called as Garden City. But this place was cool, with all the trees waving as if dancing and monkeys all over the tree and the fences. They too were enjoying the climate. As soon as I reached the spot, I saw many peoples were waiting on the steps, corridor etc. Many of them were busy in checking mails in their laptops. The whole event area was WiFi enabled...... What else does a software engineer need ? Around 9:50AM , the event coordinators reached there. All the participants were waiting for registration to be done. They took less than 20 mins to setup everything. And we entered to the event.
It took sometime for registration and after that I went to see the booths setup on the main entrance itself. There was a lucky dip if we visit all the booths and stamp the Expo Passport sheet. I started from IBM (which was my company itself :) ). Then it was Sony Erickson Booth. They were explaining about their developer network and there was a contest. They were collecting ideas for Mobile Applications, and the selected idea will get Xperia X1 (Awesome mobile man ..........). I tried it too. Guess what happened ... Nothing. After that booth , it was Adobe Booth.................... My favorite......................... I'm a fan of their softwares. They are the master of Imaging Applications and now the same technology taken to build web applications. There I got an interesting overview about their new product which package mobile apps that can installed in any mobile. Then came the overview about Flex. I had attended a session conducted in 2007. Flex had changed like anything in last 2 yrs. It was awesome.............. You can see what they have done in this site. http://flex.org/showcase/ By that time it had become 11AM. Time to attend the sessions.
The first session which i selected was "Re-architecting the web with HTML 5 Communication" by Jonas Jacobi. He was one of the guy behind the Oracle JDeveloper and ADF. Also he is the co-author of the book "Pro JSF and Ajax". The session was very nice he had explained about the HTML 5 communication and the power of WebSockets.
The next session which i attended was "Architecting Next Generation RIA with Flash, AJAX and ColdFusion" by Hemath Khandelwal. This session was OK OK because very few were interested in ColdFusion products. But the session was proving that still ColdFusion is an alternative for Web Application Development. The hall was too small that people were sitting on the stairs.....
Then came my another favorite area : Lunch .... :) Lunch was good. Hotel Chancery is already a known Hotel in Bangalore. Had a great lunch and then came the villain. I started feeling sleepy. Then i went for a walk through the campus. The climate was very good, because of the trees................
The next session which I attended was "Functional Mashups: Building Desktop Applications in Plug-n-Play Fashion" by Jon Aizen. He was explaining some of his ideas which can implemented in the desktop application area. He was planning for a mashup in the desktop area. So many ideas were explained, one of them was incorporating the related search results for the document read in MS Word. Other one was , when you read an email, the related stuff will be shown beside. If the mail is containing airline number, it will show the current schedule of the flight....... Those ideas where fine , as long as the data is secured......
In between i had visited several booths in the exhibition area and completed my Expo Passport. (Do not tell anyone, again i was not lucky. ) One of the booth was Qwest Software. There was a quiz conducted by them on the database topic. I written that too........... Don't think like that ............. This time i won a Qwest Mug. :) Other interesting booths were Microsoft which came with a helping hand to starting companies, Taroby with a Web Email Client... etc.
The next session I attended was "How to Maximize your Business with Sony Ericsson" by Jens Greve. That was about the future plans of Sony Ericsson. They announced the Mobile Idea Contest winner there. The idea was that when you travel to a place where you don't know the language. This mobile application will help you in converting your english question or statement to corresponding local language and that too in an audio format...... (I liked the application. Language won't be a barrier anymore).
Ya.... Again ............... Refreshments...... I had tea and snacks and then went for another walk over the campus. Thanks to GIDS for finding a wonderful place in Bangalore.
The next session which i selected was "Developing RIAs for the Enterprise using Adobe Flash Platform" by Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan, and Reddy Gurrala. As this topic was my favourite one, i was excited to hear the session. I got an overview of all the applications. But because of the time constraint...... the demos was not finished properly :( But still overall the session was nice.
The next session which I attended was "Reusable Components for Building Killer RIAs" by Anirudh Sasikumar. The topic was about customizing the components in Flex. The session was very nice that he explained the concept and then he also show the demo of how to get it done. That was one cool session and was final session also.
Now the day came to an end. I was about to leave the event area, then i remembered about the feedback forms lucky dip for technical books. Again Lucky Dip only , still I went and checked the list. Wow......... My name was there in the list. I got a book "Struts 2.0 Web Projects". I just tried to change the book with my favourite topic "Flex 2". But she told me that think this as wrapped gift............... Anyway no issues..... Even Struts is also not bad. Then i had a quick walk through the campus again and left home..............................
Thanks to GIDS Team for providing an opportunity for us to attend an great event.........
