TechMarathi is a special interest group of PuneTech and focuses on bringing the latest tech information to students and professionals in Marathi. Click on the logo to see all PuneTech articles about TechMarathi

Trends In Software Development For The Java Platform.

Harshad Oak is the founder of Rightrix Solutions & editor of http://IndicThreads.com and the author of 3 books and several articles on Java technology. For his contributions to technology and the community, he has been recognized as an Oracle ACE Director and a Sun Java Champion.

Harshad will talk in Marathi about what the next 5 years have in store for the Java Platform

How to type (email, blog, doc etc.) in Marathi?

Mandar Vaze has 15+ years of experience in IT industry. He is currently working as Senior Module Lead at Avaya India. Mandar will talk about how to type in Marathi using Baraha, or Quillpad, or Google Transliterate

Using Lipikaar to type in Marathi

Lipikaar is a Pune-based startup that takes a very different approach to typing in Marathi. It uses a “sms-style” typing rules, and they claim this is much easier for people who are not very comfortable with English, compared to the other styles of marathi typing.

Neha Gupta and Praman Shetye of the Lipikaar team will talk about the how and why of Lipikaar.

About TechMarathi

http://TechMarathi.com is a forum that aims to bring all information about software technology in Marathi to technology professionals who are still more comfortable with Marathi than English. The website contains articles that are translations into Marathi from sources all over the world, and also original Marathi content. TechMarathi also holds technology events where the primary language is Marathi.

TechMarathi was started by Nikhil Kadadi and Pallavi Kelkar and is a Special Interest Group of PuneTech.

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Google Wave

Pune GTUG presents a Seminar on Google Wave – The new communication and collaboration platform on the web. Seminar Topics:

• Introduction to Google Wave
• Building Extensions to Google Wave
• Building Gadgets – Walk through of building a Gadget
• Building Robots – Walk through of building a Java based Robot
• Using GWT (Google Web Toolkit) and EXT GWT to create polished Gadgets

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• Seminar on Google Wave: Intro, Gadgets, Robots – Pune GTUG Meet – Sept 12 (punetech.com)

The annual indicthreads.com java technology conference is Pune’s best conference on matters related to Java technologies. I looked forward to attending the same and was not disappointed a bit. The last one was held about 3 days ago on Dec 11th and 12th, and this post reviews my experiences at the same.

As with any other conference usually something or the other isn’t quite working well in the morning, so I soon discovered we had a difficulty with the wireless network being swamped by the usage. There were some important downloads that needed to be completed, so my early morning was spent attempting to get these done .. which meant I missed most of Harshad Oak’s opening session on Java Today.

The next one i attended was Groovy & Grails as a modern scripting language for Web applications by Rohit Nayak. However I soon discovered that it (at least initially) seemed to be a small demo on how to build applications using grails. Since that was something I was familiar with, I moved to the alternative track in progress.

The one I switched to even as it was in progress was Java EE 6: Paving the path for the future by Arun Gupta. Arun had come down from Santa Clara to talk about the new Java EE6 spec and its implementation by Glassfish. Arun talked about a number of additional or changed features in Java EE6 in sufficient detail for anyone who got excited by them to go explore these in further detail. These included web fragments, web profile, EJB 3.1 lite, increased usage of annotations leading to web.xml now being optional, and a number of points on specific JSRs now a part of Java EE6. Some of the things that excited me more about Glassfish were, (a) OSGi modularisation and programmatic control of specific containers (eg Servlet, JRuby/Rails etc.), embeddability, lightweight monitoring. However the one that excited me the most was the support for hot deployment of web apps for development mode by allowing the IDEs to automatically notify the running web app which in turn automatically reloaded the modified classes (even as the sessions continued to be valid). The web app restart cycle in addition to the compile cycle was alway one of my biggest gripes with Java (second only to its verbosity) and that seemed to be going away.

I subsequently attended Getting started with Scala by Mushtaq Ahmed from Thoughtworks. Mushtaq is a business analyst and not a professional programmer, but has been keenly following the developments in Scala for a couple of years (and as I later learnt a bit with Clojure as well). Unlike a typical language capability survey, he talked only about using the language for specific use cases, a decision which I thought made the presentation extremely useful and interesting. The topics he picked up were (a) Functional Programming, (b) DSL building and (c) OOP only if time permitted. He started with an example of programming/modeling the Mars Rover movements and using functions and higher order functions to do the same. Looking back I think he spent lesser time on transitioning from the requirements into the code constructs and in terms of what he was specifically setting out to do in terms of higher order functions. However the demonstrated code was nevertheless interesting and showed some of the power of Scala when used to write primarily function oriented code. The next example he picked up was a Parking Lot attendant problem where he started with a Java code which was a typical implementation of the strategy pattern. He later took it through 7-8 alternative increasingly functional implementations using Scala. This one was much easier to understand and yet again demonstrated the power of Scala quite well in terms of functional programming. Onto DSLs, Mushtaq wrote a simple implementation of a “mywhile” which was a classical “while” loop as an example of using Scala for writing internal DSLs. Finally he demonstrated the awesome power of using the built in support for parser combinators for writing an external DSL, and also showed how a particular google code of summer problem could be solved using Scala (again for writing an external DSL). A very useful and thoroughly enjoyable talk. (Here is a link to the code used in this presentation. -PuneTech)

The brave speaker for the post lunch session was Rajeev Palanki who dealt both with overall IBM directions on Java and a little about MyDeveloperworks site. In his opinion he thought Java was now (post JDK 1.4) on the plateau of productivity after all the early hype and IBM now focused on Scaling up, Scaling down (making it easier to use at the lower end), Open Innovation (allow for more community driven innovation) and Real Time Java. He emphasised IBMs support to make Java more predictable for real time apps and stated that Java was now usable for Mission Critical applications referring to the fact that Java was now used in a USS Destroyer. He referred to IBMs focus on investing in Java Tooling that worked across different JRE implementations. Tools such as GCMV, MAT, and Java Diagnostic Collector. Finally he talked about the IBM MyDeveloperWorks site at one stage referring to it as the Facebook for Geeks.

The next session was Overview of Scala Based Lift Web Framework by Vikas Hazarati, Director, Technology at Xebia. Another thoroughly enjoyable session. Vikas dealt with a lot of aspects related to the Lift web framework including various aspects related to the mapper, the snippets, usage of actors for comet support etc. I was especially intrigued by Snippets which act as a bridge between the UI and the business logic have a separate abstraction for themselves in the framework and how the construct and functionality in that layer is treated so differently from other frameworks.

I subsequently attended Concurrency: Best Practices by Pramod Nagaraja who works on the IBM JRE and owns the java.nio packages (I think I heard him say owns). He talked about various aspects and best practices related to concurrency and one of the better aspects of the talk was how seemingly safe code can also end up being unsafe. However he finished his session well in time for me to quickly run over and attend the latter half of the next presentation.

Arun Gupta conducted the session Dynamic Languages & Web Frameworks in GlassFish which referred to the support for various non java environments in Glassfish including those for Grails/Groovy, Rails/JRuby, Django/Python et. al. The impression I got was Glassfish is being extremely serious about support for the non java applications as well and is dedicating substantial efforts to make Glassfish the preferred platform for such applications as well. Arun’s blog Miles to go … is most informative for a variety of topics related to Glassfish for both Java and non Java related aspects.

The last talk I attended during the day was Experiences of Fully Distributed Scrum between San Francisco and Gurgaon by Narinder Kumar, again from Xebia. Since a few in the audience were still not aware of agile methodologies (Gasp!), Narinder gave a high level overview of the same before proceeding down the specific set of challenges his team had faced in implementing scrum in a scenario where one team was based in Gurgaon, India and another in San Fransciso, US. To be explicit, he wasn’t describing the typical scrum of scrum approaches but was instead describing a mechanism wherein the entire set of distributed teams would be treated as a single team with a single backlog and common ownership. This required some adjustments such as a meeting where only one person from one of the locations and all from another would take part in a scrum meeting in situations where there were no overlapping working hours. There were a few other such adjustments to the process also described. The presentation ended with some strong metrics which represented how productivity was maintained even as the activities moved from a single location to a distributed model. Both during the presentation and subsequently Narinder described some impressive associations with senior Scrum visionaries and also some serious interest in their modified approach from some important companies. However one limitation I could think of the model was, that it was probably better geared to work where you had developers only in one of the two locations (offshoring). I perceived the model as a little difficult to work if developers were located across all locations (though that could end up being just my view).

The second day started with a Panel Discussion on the topic Turning the Corner between Arun Gupta, Rohit Nayak, Dhananjay Nene (thats yours truly) and moderated by Harshad Oak. It was essentially a discussion about how we saw some of the java and even many non java related technologies evolving over the next few years. I think suffice to say one of the strong agreements clearly was the arrival of Java the polyglot platform as compared to Java the language.

The next session was Developing, deploying and monitoring Java applications using Google App Engine by Narinder Kumar. A very useful session describing the characteristics, opportunities and challenges with using Google App Engine as the deployment platform for Java based applications. One of the take away from the sessions was that subject to specific constraints, it was possible to use GAE as the deployment platform without creating substantial lockins since many of the Java APIs were supported by GAE. However there are a few gotchas along the way in terms of specific constraints eg. using Joins etc.

I must confess at having been a little disappointed with Automating the JEE deployment process by Vikas Hazrati. He went to great depths in terms of what all considerations a typical J2EE deployment monitoring tool should take care of, and clearly demonstrated having spent a lot of time in thinking through many of the issues. However the complexities he started addressing started to get into realms which only a professional J2EE deployment tool writer would get into. That made the talk a little less interesting for me. Besides there was another interesting talk going on simultaneously which I was keen on attending as well.

The other talk I switched to half way was Create Appealing Cross-device Applications for Mobile Devices with Java ME and LWUIT by Biswajit Sarkar (who’s also written a book on the same topic). While keeping things simple, Biswajit explained the capabilities of Java ME. He also described LWUIT which allowed creation of largely similar UI across different mobile platforms. He explained that while the default Java ME used native rendering leading to differing look and feel across mobile handsets just like Java AWT, using LWUIT allowed for a Java Swing like approach where the rendering was performed by the LWUIT library (did he say around 300kb??) thus allowing for a more uniform look and feel. He also showed sample programs and how they worked using LWUIT.

Allahbaksh Asadullah then conducted the session on Implementing Search Functionality With Lucene & Solr, where he talked about the characteristics and usage of Lucene and Solr. It was very explicitly addressed at the very beginners to the topic (an audience I could readily identify myself with) and walked us through the various characteristics of search, the different abstractions, how these abstractions are modeled through the API and how some of these could be overridden to implement custom logic.

How Android is different from other systems – An exploration of the design decisions in Android by Navin Kabra was a session I skipped. However I had attended a similar session by him earlier so hopefully I did not miss much.

However Navin did contribute occasionally into the next session Java For Mobile Devices – Building a client application for the Android platform by Rohit Nayak. Rohit demonstrated an application he is working on along with a lot of the code that forms the application using Eclipse and the Android plugin. A useful insight into how an Android application is constructed.

As the event drew to a close, the prizes were announced including those for the Indicthreads Go Green initiative. A thoroughly enjoyable event, leaving me even more convinced to make sure to attend the next years session making it a third in a row.

(Comments on this post are closed. Please comment at the site of the original article.)

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Details

Pune GTUG presents Android Jumpstart Seminar. A seminar where we would get people excited, thrilled and ready on Android Platform.

The objectives of this seminar are as follows: introduce Android, introduce the building blocks and architecture, talk on building an Application on Android comprising of all the building blocks.

Lucky draw winner wins an HTC phone from the sponsors of this event Quick Office and Synerzip Softech.

PuneTech has detailed coverage of last year’s IndicThreads Java conference. For even more details, you can see the list of speakers and the slides used in their presentations at the conference website. That should give you an idea of what this conference is about.

Here is the call for speakers reproduced from the conference website:

Call for Speakers

IndicThreads.com invites submissions for the 4th IndicThreads.com Conference On Java Technology to be held on 11th and 12th December 2009 in Pune, India. The conference is the premier independent conference on Java technology in India and is the place to be, to learn the latest in the Java world while meeting with like-minded individuals from across the industry.

IndicThreads welcomes submissions from subject experts across fields, geographic locations and areas of development. Topics of interest include new and groundbreaking technologies and emerging trends, successful practices and real world learnings.

Topics appropriate for submission to this conference include but are not restricted to the below, stated in no particular order -

1. Java Language Specs & Standards
2. Optimization, Scaling and Performance Tuning
3. Cloud Computing
4. Rich Internet Applications, Ajax and Web 2.0
5. Scripting languages for Java like JRuby, Groovy, Rhino, JavaFX.
6. Open Source Frameworks
7. Enterprise Architecture
8. Spring
9. Virtualization
10. Social Networking
11. Security
12. Agile Techniques, Extreme Programing, Test Driven Development
13. New and emerging technologies
14. Case Studies and Real World Experiences

Submission

• Please note that marketing-oriented submissions aimed at promoting specific organizations or products will not be accepted.
• All sessions will be between 50-90 minutes. One / both of your proposals might be accepted.
• The audience consists mostly of senior developers and project leads. Before submission consider how your submission can provide best value to this target segment.
• Submissions will be accepted only on the website and not through emails. Please complete the entire form including the two session proposals.
• The decision of the conference team as regards sessions, durations, timings, speaker benefits and all related aspects will be final and binding.

Speaker Benefits

• Complimentary Full Conference Pass
• We will arrange for your hotel stay and cover the room tariff. Please note that hotel incidentals will not be covered.
• We will reimburse up to Rs 5000 from the air fare or the actual, whichever is less.
• Speaking at an IndicThreads event gets you recognition as a subject expert.

Write to [ conf AT rightrix DOT com ] in case of any other queries.

Important Dates

• Submission Deadline – 31st August 2009
• Conference Dates – 11 and 12 December, 2009

What: TechWeekend featuring “What makes Google Android different from other systems, and from regular Java” by Navin Kabra, “Maps, GPS and sensors in Android” by Rohit Ghatol, with a demo on an Android G1 phone, and more
When: Saturday, 1st August, 4:30pm
Where: Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Atur Centre, Model Colony. Map.
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. Please register here.

What makes Google Android different from other systems – Navin Kabra.

Google’s Android is a brand new platform for mobile phones, and has been created from scratch specifically for this purpose. This means that it is a “modern” system that does not suffer from any legacy issues, and has taken the best ideas from various other projects to build a system that is arguably better than any of the other, competing, systems. Thus, for example, it uses the Java language as the development language, but has rejected the rest of the Java ecosystem. Specifically it uses a compeletely new virtual machine (Dalvik) which is redesigned with mobiles in mind – and has a number of very interesting design decisions that we will discuss. Similarly, the Android application framework represents a departure from the traditional way of doing things, and has a learning curve, but once you get used to it, it is great, especially for allowing different apps to share data, code, and in general co-operate.

We will explore and discuss this and various other design decisions in Android.

Maps, GPS and Sensor Capability – Rohit Ghatol

Rohit Ghatol is a co-founder of the Pune Google Technologies User Group (PuneGTUG), and one of the early adopters of the Google Android platform. He has already built a number of applications on Android, and is working on some interesting ideas in this area. In this talk, he will be discussing the mapping in the Android framework, and how the GPS and sensor capabilities can be combined with it to give powerful and rich experiences to users. He will be using his Google Android G1 phone to demonstrate these capabilities.

There will be one more speaker, but unfortunately, the details of that talk were not ready in time for this announcement. Please check back in a day for that update.

Also check out Dhananjay Nene’s slides from the first TechWeekend: “REST Explained.”

What:

Details
Agenda for this meet:

• Brief History of Android
• Android Phones
• Android Experiments
• What is Android?
• What’s in new SDK
• Android Architecture in detail
• Application Fundamentals
• User Interface
• Resources and Assets
• Data Storage
• Content Providers
• Security and Permissions
• Developing Android Applications In Eclipse, with ADT
• First Android Application
• Further Reading

About the Speaker: Sushrut Bidwai

• Leading a team of 15+ programmers in Nasik.
• Works mainly on Java centric technologies and that too specifically Google centric like GWT, Android, GAE for Java.
• Provide information content to fellow developers through our blogs like androidcompetencycenter.com.
• Worked with Persistent Systems and YagnaIQ (Pune based startup) at the start of career.
• Rest of the things can be found on http://sushrutbidwai.com/about

For more information about PuneGTUG, see the PuneTech wiki profile of PuneGTUG. For other tech events happening in Pune, see the PuneTech calendar.

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What: An overview of the features of Java Persistence 2.0 with JBoss/Hibernate Guru Emmanuel Bernard
When: Wednesday, 22st April, 4:30pm
Where: Red Hat Pune 6th Floor, East Wing Marisoft-III, Marigold Premises, Kalyani Nagar, Pune
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. No registration required

Details:

This will be the second presentation by Emmanuel Bernard, who is visiting Pune currently. The first presentation on “Hibernate Search” will be on Tuesday, 21st April. This one is at the same time, same place, but on Wednesday.

Java Persistence has standardized Object Relational mapping in Java and Java EE and has been hugely adopted. This presentation will introduce you to the new features of Java Persistence 2.0 as most requested by the community and specified by the expert group. These include the new Criteria API, support for collections of simple type and Map support as well as support for Bean Validation.

To connect with others in Pune interested in JBoss, Hibernate and relatives, join the Pune JBoss Users Group. For more information about Tuesday’s talk (Hibernate Search), see this post.

What: A deep dive into Hibernate Search with JBoss/Hibernate Guru Emmanuel Bernard
When: Tuesday, 21st April, 4:30pm
Where: Red Hat Pune 6th Floor, East Wing Marisoft-III, Marigold Premises, Kalyani Nagar, Pune
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. No registration required

Details:
As we had reported last week, Emmanuel Bernard, JBoss and Hibernate guru, the founder and co-founder of all annotation related projects in Hibernate, is in Pune and the Pune JBoss Users Group has arranged two lectures by Emmanuel for the benefit of the Java community in Pune.

The first of these lectures is on Tuesday, 21st April, and the second is on Wednesday 22nd April. Details of the second talk will be covered in a separate post.

On Tuesday, Emmanuel will talk about Hibernate search

Abstract: Adding search “like Google” to your Java applications

How many times has a customer told you they want to search in their application “like Google“? How many times was the search engine in your application too slow? Hibernate Search brings full-text search
capabilities to a persistent domain model, providing Google-like search capabilities while avoiding the traditional cost and difficulties to set up such solutions.

In this session, you will learn what problems Hibernate Search can solve and you will follow the steps of adding it to a Hibernate based application. You will build your own application specific full-text search engine. We will also explore advance subjects such as clustering and the underlyings of phonetic approximation.

To connect with others in Pune interested in JBoss, Hibernate and relatives, join the Pune JBoss Users Group.

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Emmanuel Bernard, a JBoss Guru, and founder/co-founder of all the Hibernate annotations projects is visiting Pune next week. The just-formed Pune JBoss Users Group is planning on arranging an event for Pune’s JBoss/Hibernate developers to interact with Emmanuel. The details have not yet been decided and will be put up on the PuneJBUG mailing list. Or, simply subscribe for PuneTech updates.

Stay tuned for details of the event that the PuneJBUG is planning. If you want to meet Emmanuel separately, you can try to get in touch with Jaikiran, the creator/moderator of PuneJBUG, or you can directly message Emmanuel via twitter.

About Pune JBoss Users Group – PuneJBUG

This is a community for JBoss developers in Pune (or any other part of India). The group will soon be starting regular events related to JBoss community projects. Feel free to suggest an event that you would like to organize or participate with other JBoss community users. Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/group/jbug-pune

About Emmanuel Bernard

Emmanuel is a Lead developer at JBoss, a division of Red Hat. After graduating from Supelec (French “Grande Ecole”), Emmanuel has spent a few years in the retail industry where he started to be involved in the ORM space. He joined the Hibernate team 4 years ago. Emmanuel is the lead developer of Hibernate Annotations and Hibernate EntityManager, two key projects on top of Hibernate core implementing the Java Persistence(tm) specification, as well as Hibernate Search and Validator. Emmanuel is a member of the EJB 3.0 expert group and the spec lead of JSR 303: Bean Validation. He is a regular speaker at various conferences and JUGs, including JavaOne, JBoss World and JavaPolis and the co-author of Hibernate Search in Action from Manning.

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