Attending a conference (probably as renowned and as recognized as the Java conference by IndicThreads) adds to your muscle – Period. By the way, I have picked up from the same thread — same tone and similar spirit — from March 2011. IndicThreads held the Q11 conference then, which I had a chance to attend and then write a short report on for DZone. If you attended IndicThreads conferences before, your feedback is also welcome — through your blogs or through places like this report hosting page.

Now, you may ask – How Was the Environment This Time?

First and foremost, I would like to say this — you could feel the thought process from Harshad Oak (Owner – IndicThreads – Conference Organizer) all throughout the conference. When I attended the conference sessions, I could see that one presentation simply led to another one. And somehow I could also relate this fact to the earlier Q11 conference; and could see the passion that Harshad has when he arranges these events.

Just as a side note – Harshad is the first Java champion in India and he continues to serve the IT community. He is ably supported by his wife Sangeeta Oak in these endeavors. This young couple gives a lot of attention to detail for the events!

The Conference Agenda in short

The conference agenda included the following topics (Friday/Saturday — Dec 02/03):

• The Java Report (Harshad Oak)
• Scalability Considerations (Yogesh Deshpande)
• PaaSing a Java EE 6 Application (Kshitiz Saxena)
• Solr as your Search and Suggest Engine (Karan Nangru)
• Testing Concurrent Java Programs (Sameer Arora)
• Scala Collections: Expressivity and Brevity upgrade from Java (Dhananjay Nene)
• REST Style Web Services – Google Protocol Buffers (Prasad Nirantar)
• Java EE 7 Platform: Developing for the Cloud (Kshitiz Saxena – yes again! He has awesome topic coverage.)
• Building Massively Scalable Applications with Akka (Vikas Hazrati)
• Simplifying builds with Gradle (Saager Mhatre)
• Using Scala for Building DSLs (Abhijit Sharma)

The presentation slides are hosted at http://j11.indicthreads.com/slides

My Thoughts on the Agenda

On the first day of the conference, I noticed that there are 7 sessions to attend on Friday and 4 more sessions on Saturday. Frankly, I thought there was some kind of mismatch in arranging these sessions. But my opinion changed as the conference went on from Friday into Saturday. The next day was intentionally kept lighter. As an attendee, I now think that your mind probably absorbs and retains more information during the initial parts of a conference. I believe that IndicThreads is getting better overall conference after conference.

What I Wanted to Get from Each Session

I planned on getting 3 things from the sessions (that was my ROI!) — first, how the knowledge earned will apply towards the business domain at my work place; second, my personal interactions with the speaker(s) from networking perspectives; and third, how I can help Harshad and his team and provide helpful feedback. Even with events like NFJS, TSSS in USA, I always received and offered my best to organizers Jay Zimmerman, Floyd Marinescu et al.

I should also mention, I still remember Rick Ross’ keynote speech at TSSS and how it was inspirational to many of us there. Point is that industry leaders like Harshad, Rick, Floyd (and of course some more) are doing everything to lead developers all across the world to be better IT professionals. Sometimes they pay from their own pockets to see results.

The Actual Sessions

I am not going to cover all the details from all the talks, well, it’s not possible. The slides are available for entire content.

The Java Report

In the keynote speech, Harshad mentioned that things moved very rapidly after Sun was purchased by Oracle. He later encouraged participants to have a look at topics such as Java EE 6 Web Profile, Java FX 2.0 (all Java), Java EE 7 and a few more. Harshad raised a point – do you as a Java expert look the same “sexy” today as you did when Java started? The answer is “less sexy”. He also said that Java ME was not offering many new things for quite a while now.

Scalability Considerations

Yogesh covered Vertical Scaling and Horizontal Scaling, and principles behind both techniques. He backed up his presentation with a helpful case study.

PaaSing a Java EE 6 Application

Kshitiz works at Sun/Oracle for last 10 years. He explained PaaS in simpler terms. It was very important to keep things simple. The speech was well accepted by the audience. Just as I was putting this article together, I saw that Javalobby had published a fresh article on PaaS 2.0 — it looks quite relevant to our discussion.

Solr as Your Search and Suggest Engine

It was very good to learn from Karan about Embedded Solr Server versus Commons Http Solr Server, and the various “search” and “suggestion” cases. Karan is quite passionate about Solr.

Testing Concurrent Java Programs

I don’t develop as much concurrent Java code at work as I do some other pieces; but learning from Sameer clicked a few ideas in my mind for a business case that we have at work. We (AEGIS) do some case executions in our workflow, and ideas from concurrency can be applied to what we do. By the way, for the intense session that we had with Sameer, fortunately, there was a coffee break after the session. Hats off to Sameer for how much he knows about this topic.

Scala Collections – Expressivity and Brevity upgrade from Java

Although Dhananjay knew a lot, he was addressing a very specific topic “Collections”. To me, the topic could have been broader (or be split in two sessions). Scala is a powerful language and initial learning curve looks longer for a beginner. I should mention that Dhananjay preferred IntelliJ for Scala-based development — rightfully so.

REST Style Web Services – Google Protocol Buffers

Prasad (speaker) has a background from Akron, Ohio (M.S.). He compared content negotiation techniques (JSON, XML, and Portable Binary Content) with focus on Google Protocol Buffers. His comparison of Google Protocol Buffers with Apache Avro was very apt.

Java EE 7 Platform: Developing for the Cloud

Kshitiz explained the terms IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. There are vendors other than Sun that offer PaaS support — but standards are lacking. He explained Java EE 7 focus on PaaS – Elasticity which has progressed from single node implementation to multi-node multi-instance clustering to SLA driven Elasticity. Refer the slides for more details.

Building Massively Scalable Applications with Akka

Vikas writes for InfoQ. He said that if you wanted to learn Akka, then you needed to keep in mind that Akka was designed to make developer’s life easier by addressing concurrency, scalability and fault-tolerance in applications. The founder of Akka is Jonas Boner, and I find Jonas’ article on Akka hosted by Javalobby at this page. As per Vikas, Akka is good for event-based systems, whereas Hadoop for batch-based systems.

Simplifying Builds (Build Scripts) with Gradle

An excellent slide presentation and visual illustrations by Saager. He corrected the name of the topic to “Simplifying build scripts..”. He compared Gradle with Ant and Maven, and mentioned that Gradle describes builds with only as much text as is absolutely necessary.

Using Scala for Building DSLs

This was the only session where there were no questions from the audience! From Abhijit’s (speaker) angle, it was a bit uncomfortable feeling; but I later mentioned to him that the presentation was so straight-forward (note – not an easy compilation) and neatly arranged, the questions were answered even before they were asked. I recommend – just download the presentation, and you will get to see what I mean. Good to learn about Scala in this domain.

Every session was little over an hour. And all speakers covered their sessions very well.

Past Reviews of IndicThreads Conference on Java

Some of the celebrity authors and speakers like Arun Gupta and Vikas Hazrati have reviewed their prior Java IndicThreads conference experiences by writing articles on their respective blogs (you may access the reviews: Arun, Vikas). It is rewarding to learn from such experts in the field.

Lastly, about the Food and Quizzes and Prizes!

I believe, Sangeeta made awesome choices for food at lunch and the breaks! As well as, she put up short quizzes and announced prizes in different categories. IndicThreads have maintained the “Green” theme and I won a prize in that category.

My Top Three Take-away Points

My top three take away points from J11 are – rejuvenating yourself by looking at technical topics from speakers’/attendees’ eyes and adding to your knowledge, networking with experts so that you can offer your best and receive the best from them, and just knowing where the Java industry stands today.

Conclusion

There was an “Unconference” session, where everybody who participated voiced a need for the Java groups in the city to come together. I get a feel that awareness in the industry about such conferences is increasing, and demand for such speakers and quality offered by these conferences is going to increase in few more short years.

Harshad encourages local speakers to come out and respond to the RFPs (and participate). For those who only want to attend can also win a FREE pass to the conference! All in all, it was worth attending the Java conference by IndicThreads.

The 6th Annual IndicThreads.com Conference On Java will be held on 2nd & 3rd December 2011 here in Pune. Sessions at the conference discuss topics like JavaEE 7 & the Cloud, Java EE 6 PaaS, Scala, Scalability, Concurrent Java, Gradle, JavaFX, REST Web Services, Google Protocol Buffers, Solr Search, JavaFX, Akka & more.

IndicThreads has been running a Java Conference in Pune for the last 6 years, and claims to be the oldest vendor-neutral Java conference. It is a great place to learn & discuss Java. You can check out PuneTech’s previous coverage of IndicThreads conferences to get an idea of our opinion of these conferences.

This Java Knowledge Contest will give two PuneTech readers the chance to attend this conference for free (which otherwise costs Rs. 3500 (2500 for students)). The contest is open to all, and all you need to do to enter is take one of these Java Knowledge tests:

• IndicThreads Java Knowledge Objective Questions Contest
• IndicThreads Java Knowledge Subjective Questions Contest

Quick rules:

• Complete the challenge on or before 6pm on Monday, 28th November, 2011.
• Each of the above two challenges will have one winner who gets a free ticket. You can enter both if you so wish, but you will be allowed to win only one.
• The ticket is not transferable. If you don’t want the free ticket, let us know, and we’ll give it to the next highest scorer
• Names of judges (for the subjective questions contest), and tie-breaker rules (for the objective questions contest) will be announced soon.

For more details about the conference see: http://Java.IndicThreads.com

(Disclaimer #1: PuneTech has a policy of not promoting paid events, except under these circumstances:

Pune’s http://IndicThreads.com has been holding Java conferences since 2006 and the feedback on their conferences has generally been good. You can check previous PuneTech coverage of IndicThreads to get an idea.

The conference itself is paid, but becoming a speaker is a good way to get into it for free.

Suggested topics are:

• Java Language Specs & Standards
• Enterprise Java
• Java For Mobile Devices
• Java for Multi-core Computing
• Optimization, Scaling, Caching and Performance Tuning
• Cloud Computing for Java
• Rich Internet Applications
• Languages for the JVM
• Frameworks
• Enterprise Architecture
• Spring
• Virtualization
• Social Networking
• Security
• Agile
• Java RIA
• New and emerging technologies
• Case Studies and Real World Experiences

For more details see the conference webpage

As to why you should bother to submit a proposal, see this post written for an earlier CFP which gives the reasons. And go for it now.

Note, there is also a call for speakers open for the ClubHack conference. So that gives you two avenues to showcase your work.

Harshad Oak started things off by pointing out that Java has a bit of ups & downs in the past couple of years. Hopefully Java 7 will reverse the trend. He also encouraged people to join the Pune Java User Group to stay connected with other Java users in Pune.

Then, we moved on to the main speaker: Chuk-Munn Lee (chuk-munn.lee@oracle.com). Fun fact – Chuk-Munn is a fan of Futurama and called out the fact that he is wearing a “Bender the Robot” T-Shirt.

These are the highlights of Chuk-Munn’s presentation:

The last Major release of Java – Java 6 was in 2006-7 and no major releases since then. JavaSE7 has a lot of gestation period. The big release of 7 is now broken down into 2 incremental releases Java 7 and Java 8 to get something out of the door faster and make it more manageable.

Reading is more important than writing for Programming Languages. Programs should be a Joy to read. Counter example PERL a Write-Only Language, or Looks Same Before and After AES Encryption. A Camel is a horse designed by committee. Very difficult to read and maintain. So very difficult to collaborate in large teams or large codebases where readability is important. This is where Java shines but it has sometimes got too much boilerplate code needed.

Applications in the commercial world compete on the basis of features – same should not apply to programming languages. In languages you want fewer features but they should work consistently. So it is difficult to add new features to Java consistently.

The main features new in Java 7 can be grouped into these categories:

Small Language Changes (Project Coin)

• Binary Literals with underscores for clarity
• Strings in Switch statements
• Inferring types with <>
• Varargs Warnings @SafeVarargs fixes problem of Heap Pollutions JLSv3 4.12.2.1
• Multi-Catch – very useful in reducing boilerplate code if used properly!
• Copying Streams – try-with-resources

NIO2

• NIO2 (JSR -203) java.io.File does not work consistently across platforms, missing basic operations like copy, move, etc.
• Path Class (Async I/O)
• Features – Filesystem and Filestore support
• Symlink support
• Basic File operations
• File attributes and Permissions support enhanced
• Other interesting features
  • Watch files directories

Invokedynamic

Java may or may not be the first choice of everybody but JVM is massively popular and many, many languages are adopting it. The VM spec is from 1997 – fairly generic and not specifically wired to Java except for the 4 key bytecode instructions – invokespecial (constructor invocation), invokestatic (statics), invokeinterface (interface), invokevirtual (methods)

Java 7 is introducing a new instruction for Java 7 invokedynamic that will allow for late binding in languages such as JavaScript to be natively supported on the JVM.

Other Features

• New Fork-Join framework
  • ForkJoinPool and ForkJoinTask along with fork keyword to natively support fork-join semantics
    natively on the VM
• New decorators for Swing – Jlayer and LayerUI
• Infiniband support – using a sockets direct protocol (SDP) over the wire
• Utility methods for java.util.Objects

That was end of the main presentation.

Time for Audience Q/A

(All Questions/Answers paraphrased to best of my recollection)

• Java 7 seems like an underwhelming release. Why?
  • There was a very long gap between Java 6 and Java 7 because of the inability to move things thru to conclusions fast enough in the JCP. All the big features were not done yet so it would have taken a lot longer to get everything finished. Oracle polled the community and the result was two releases – one with all the finished features and one with all the big features -Java 8- to follow shortly thereafter.
• Will Oracle make Java more “restrictive” in terms of licensing etc.?, What is Oracle’s commitment to Java?
  • A very large part of Oracle’s internal codebase is on Java so Oracle has excellent commitment to Java and will move it forward Will it make it more restrictive license wise – this question has been comin up over the years and the answer is always NO. Most of Java is under a GPL-like license anyway so cannot be really made more restrictive.
• With the departure of Apache Software Foundation from the JCP and the Lawsuit over Android against Goolge what is the future of JCP and the Java community?
  • Cannot comment on the lawsuit. If the situation with the ASF worries you personally then you should consult a lawyer. I (Chuk-Munn) ask myself this question – does it personally affect me in any manner? If not then I do not worry about it.
• Is the support for dynamic languages increasing or decreasing with Java 7?
  • Increasing with the introduction of invokedynamic etc.

The PPT that was used by Chuk-Munn Lee is available from here (see attachment at the end of that page)

About the Author – Amit Naik

Amit Naik works as an Architect with BMC Software. He builds performant cloud solutions with a focus on heterogeneity and monitoring across different virtualization and provisioning vendors in the cloud computing space. His main focus is the Architecture and Design of BMC solutions with emphasis on building highly-scalable systems with REST and other SOA interfaces.

Amit has a Bachelor’s degree from College of Engineering Pune and a Master’s degree from Purdue Univ., West Lafayette. He has more than 15 years of experience in the IT industry, much of it in the USA, across a variety of Technical and Techno-Managerial roles.

Everything else remains the same – Chuk-Munn Lee will be speaking. And there will be goodies given away.

The event is on 16 July, 5pm, at Symbiosis Vishwabhavan, SB Road. The event is free and open to all, but registration is required

Java 7 Launch Event Details

Harshad Oak writes:

Java 7 is an upcoming major update to Java and is expected to be released (GA) on July 28th, 2011. A detailed list of features & a developer preview is available online.

Wouldn’t it be great if even before the actual general availability of Java 7 there was an event where we could learn & discuss exactly what’s coming in Java 7?

So, supported by Oracle, the Java Pune google group is hosting a great big launch event & celebration right here in Pune! Join in to learn & to celebrate the launch of the newest release of JAVA!

The event is free for all, however the seats are very very limited. So register early, but we do request you to register only if you are sure you will be able to make it to the event. We definitely do not want to waste any of the few seats we have on offer.

Psst: Apart from the learning there would be some goodies as well

What’s new in Java 7

The feature set for Java SE 7 is driven, in large part, by a set of themes. The themes describe the main focal points of the release. Some themes are fairly abstract guiding principles; others are more concrete in that they identify particular problem areas, significant new feature sets, or specific target market segments.

The themes are not prioritized, except that the first one is the most important.

Compatibility: As the platform has matured, yet continued to evolve, many community members have naturally come to expect that their investments in Java-based systems, whether large or small, will be preserved. Any program running on a previous release of the platform must also run-unchanged-on an implementation of Java SE 7. (There are exceptions to this general rule but they are exceedingly rare, and they typically involve serious issues such as security.)

Productivity: Java SE 7 will promote best coding practices and reduce boilerplate code by adding productivity features to the Java language and the Java SE APIs. These features will increase the abstraction level of most applications in a pragmatic way, with no significant impact on existing code and a minimal learning curve for all developers. We propose to enable, among other improvements, the automatic management of I/O resources, simpler use of generics, and more-concise exception handling.

Performance: The Java SE platform has traditionally offered developers a range of features for writing scalable multi-threaded applications, for example with monitors in the Java language and VM and the concurrency utilities defined in JSR 166. To keep up with the inexorable trend toward multicore CPUs, Java SE 7 will add new concurrency APIs developed by Prof. Doug Lea and the JSR 166 community. These include, in particular, a Fork/Join Framework which can adaptively scale some types of application code to the available number of processors. Java SE 7 will further enable I/O-intensive applications by introducing a true asynchronous I/O API as part of JSR 203.

Universality: Building upon the initial work in Java SE 6 to support scripting languages, Java SE 7 will introduce, via JSR 292, a new “invokedynamic” bytecode instruction and related APIs which will accelerate the performance of dynamic languages on the Java Virtual Machine.

Integration: The Java SE Platform provides developers with a wealth of capabilities, but Java applications do not operate in isolation. A specific pain point for many years has been that of interacting with native filesystems, where a good user experience often requires exposing some details of the underlying platform. Java SE 7 will include a new, flexible filesystem API as part of JSR 203 which will provide portable access to common filesystem operations yet also allow platform-specific code to be written when desired.

About the Speaker – Chuk Munn Lee

Chuk Munn Lee has been programming in the Java language since 1996, when he first joined Sun Microsystems in Hong Kong. He currently works as a senior developer consultant and technology evangelist for Technology Outreach at Sun in Singapore. Chuk’s focus is in: Java APIs, Java EE, Java SE, and Java ME. Chuk worked with key Asia-Pacific independent software vendors (ISVs) during the last six years to helped them design, prototype, develop, tune, size, and benchmark their Java applications. Chuk is also an avid gamer; he shares his enthusiasm for Java technology adoption with other game developers. Chuk graduated in 1987 from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, where his favorite subject was compiler theory.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

This GeekNight features a talk “JRuby for the win” by JRuby Core Developer Ola Bini.

JRuby is an implementation of Ruby for the JVM. It gives you unprecedented integration with the Java ecosystem while still having access to great Ruby libraries such as Rails, RSpec and many more. The last year has seen lots of uptake for JRuby, many new committers, thousands of bugs fixed and lots of new functionality.

This talk will give a short introduction to JRuby, and then provide more information about where the project is now and where it is going.

About the Speaker – Ola Bini

Ola Bini is a core JRuby developer and is the author of the book “Practical JRuby on Rails”. He works for ThoughtWorks in Chicago. His technical experience ranges from Java, Ruby and LISP to several open source projects. He likes implementing languages, writing regular expression engines, YAML parsers, blogging, and other similar things that exist at the border of computer science.

About GeekNight

GeekNight is an informal meeting for technologists to exchange ideas, code and learning. It is held periodically at ThoughtWorks offices in Bangalore, Pune, Chennai and Gurgaon.

Venue, Time, Fees and Registration

The event is on Wednesday, 25th May, from 6:30pm, at ThoughtWorks Technologies, Panchshil Tech Park, Yerwada. This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

Vayana Services and TechWeekend Pune presents a detailed session on Functional Programming this Saturday, 18th December from 10am to 1pm, at Sumant Moolgaonkar Auditorium, MCCIA in ICC Trade Tower (A Wing, Ground floor), S.B. Road. You must attend.

Object-Oriented Programming is now passe, and all the cool kids (i.e. the star programmers) have started looking very seriously at functional programming languages like Clojure and Erlang. The more visionary ones (like our speakers this week: Dhananjay Nene, Bhasker Kode, and Baishampayan Ghose) are building the next generation of products in these languages.

Find out the What, the Why and the How on Saturday.

There will be three talks, listed below, and some time for general discussions around this topic.

Why you should care about functional programming – by Dhananjay Nene

This talk will focus on important characteristics of functional programming and the current landscape in terms of variety of languages and its adoption. The talk will also refer to how leveraging it can help you in terms of brevity, concurrency, better abstractions, testability, economics and particularly enjoyability. A small part of the talk will also focus very superficially on the Scala programming language.

About the Speaker – Dhananjay Nene

Dhananjay is a passionate programmer and a consulting software architect. He loves to learn, research, prototype and deploy new technologies and languages even as he is strongly focused on ensuring that the choices are made consistent with the business objectives and landscape. He currently writes code for and advises Vayana Enterprises in his role as its Chief Architect.

An Introduction to Erlang – by Bhasker Kode

While ideating hover.in towards the end of 2007 Bhasker soon become an ardent evangelist of Erlang and it’s fault tolerant nature traditionally intended for use in telecom & messaging circles. Following it’s rising use in building real-time and low-latency applications at web scale Bhasker has presented Hover’s erlang growth stories at Commercial Users of Functional Programming Conference in Edinburgh along with Facebook, Erlang Factory in London, and Foss.in in Bangalore talking about the role of functional programming. Hover’s engineering efforts can be tracked at http://developers.hover.in

About the Speaker – Bhasker Kode

Bhasker is the CEO and Co-Founder of Pune-based Hover Technologies, a user-engagement platform that allows web publishers to add a new channel of earning ad revenue through the use of in-text “tooltip” based ads. He has always been captured by the potential of the internet as part of the core team behind several destination portals and startups from his college days in Chennai. His introduction to functional programming came from his stint as the first few developers at Bangalore based Tutorvista where he built the calendar, syndication, whiteboard among other products used by thousands across the world everyday.

Clojure & its solution to the Expression Problem – Baishampayan Ghose

The “Expression Problem” arises when we want to add new functionality to a library that we don’t control. Most popular programming languages accomplish this task by Monkey Patching, Wrapper Classes, etc. In this talk, BG will discuss the demerits of traditional approaches to the problem and how Clojure solves this problem using Protocols. This talk is intended to show-off the real power of Clojure in solving complex problems.

BG has chosen to talk about a particular feature of Clojure in depth instead of skimming over many things in a hurry because he believes that Clojure’s approach to solving the Expression Problem clearly demonstrates the thought process that has gone into designing the language and shows how it’s different from most other programming languages. I will also cover the very basics of reading Clojure code in just a few minutes which will also demonstrate the simplicity of the language itself.

About the Speaker – Baishampayan Ghose

Baishampayan Ghose (mostly known as BG) is the co-founder & CTO of http://Paisa.com. He has been a career Functional Programmer and has programmed professionally in Common Lisp, Clojure & now Erlang.

About the Sponsor – Vayana Services

Vayana Services offers an easier option for small and medium enterprises to obtain working capital financing from banks by electronically sourcing, transferring and tracking digitally signed trade documents across trading parties and banks. It is a financial service backed by a cloud based offering with its development and operations management team based in Pune. With a strong belief that healthy businesses are greatly assisted by using healthy technology, Vayana Services looks forward to an increasingly frequent and high quality interaction within the software technology community in Pune and welcomes you all to Techweekend 5.

Logistics

This event is free for all to attend, but please register here. The event is in MCCIA’s Sumant Moolgaokar Auditorium, ICC Towers, Wing A, Ground Floor. From 10am-1pm. The hashtag for the event is #tw5

Details

The Pune Java Meetup Group hopes to bring together Java professions in Pune for a meeting every 2nd Saturday. Click on the duke to see all PuneTech articles related to Java. Image via Wikipedia

The Pune Java Meetup group hopes to meet on the second Saturday of every month. This group is a free/open group. Anybody interested in Java can join the group. Anybody can propose a meeting.

Join the group by going to the Pune Java Meetup Group on meetup.com.

This month’s meetup, on Saturday, will feature Kiran Narasareddy talking about his experiences with Modeling Frameworks – specifically their (bad) experiences with the EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework), and good experience with JaXB. The talk will also cover the various different plugins available for JaXB, and what all you can achieve using them.

After that Atul will talk about using struts unit testing framework. It is a very effective way to decouple the Action Layer from the Business Layer – No need to wait for UI development to test your code. Very appealing – and addicting.

Why bother? Here are the reasons:

IndicThreads organizes a numbers of good conferences in Pune every year. The call for speakers is a good opportunity for techies to highlight their achievements, get some visibility, and networking. The call for speakers is open until 31 August. Click on the logo for more PuneTech articles about IndicThreads

IndicThreads organizes good conferences. To get an idea of the quality of the conference, see Dhananjay Nene‘s report of last year’s Java conference, where he writes:

The annual indicthreads.com java technology conference is Pune’s best and possibly one of India’s finest conferences on matters related to Java technologies. I looked forward to attending the same and was not disappointed a bit.

He has written a fairly detailed post, including overviews of the sessions he attended, which is worth reading.

Here is a PuneTech article about the IndicThreads Java conference 2 years ago.

Earlier this month, IndicThreads had the first edition of their new conference on upcoming technologies, this one being focused on cloud computing. You can see PuneTech’s coverage (also see this article), the report by Janakiram, a senior technical architect at Microsoft, and this one by Arun Gupta, a technical evangelist at Sun (aka Oracle). That should give you an idea of the kinds of talks that go into IndicThreads’ conferences.

Here are some other reasons I had given earlier as to why you should apply for a speaker spot. The reasons are still valid today, so I’ll simply cut-n-paste here:

• If you’re accepted as a speaker, you get a free pass to the conference.
• Become famous: being a speaker at a national conference is good for visibility, and all engineers should strive for visibility. It’s very important. Almost as important as being a good programmer. (Maybe more?)
• Help out a good Pune initiative. More submissions will improve the quality of the conference, and having a high quality conference in Pune improves the overall stature of Pune as an emerging IT powerhouse.

And finally, I also said this:

I’m willing to bet that many people reading this will think – but I am not an expert. Not true. If you’ve spend a couple of years working on some specific aspect of testing, chances are that you’ve acquired expertise that you can present and add value to the understanding of others. You don’t have to have done groundbreaking research. Have you adopted a new tool that came out recently? Talk about it, because others will not have experience with its use. Have you used an old tool in a new way? Definitely submit a proposal. The others in this field would love to hear of this new wine in an old bottle.

To submit a proposal to the Mobile conference click here and to submit a proposal for the java conference, click here. You have 5 days.

(Disclaimer: In the past, a couple of times, PuneTech has received a complimentary pass from IndicThreads (sort of a “press pass”) for attending their conferences. There are no strings attached to this – and we try to be objective in our coverage of the conference. As per PuneTech policy, we don’t promote the actual conference on the PuneTech blog, since it’s a paid event, but we do promote the call for speakers, since that’s free, and we do reporting of the event itself whenever possible, since a significant fraction of it ends up highlighting technology work being done in Pune.)