I just came back from the prestigious Spark IT 2010 event at Bangalore. It was a great time meeting so many reputed personalities there. This is the most sought after conference in India where software developers, software programmers, Project Management Professionals and Web Developers were invited. The topics in this event covered .NET, JAVA, Project Management and Web Technologies.
It is a prestigious mega developer conference hosted by CIOL and PCQuest at the prestigious campus of Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore on March 18th and 19th 2010. This event is a joint initiative of CIOL, India's largest IT portal and PCQuest, India's leading magazine for IT professionals.
I was also one of the speakers and I delivered two sessions - one on the new features in C# 4.0 and the other on the new features in ASP.NET 4.0.
The other notable speakers included:
- Dr Venkat Subramaniam \\[Founder, Agile Developer Inc.\\]
- Simone Brunozzi \\[Amazon Web Services Evangelist for Europe/APAC\\]
- Shashank Tiwari \\[Managing Partner & CTO Treasury of Ideas\\]
- Rohit Bharadwaj \\[Principal Software Engineer Kronos Incorporated\\]
- Arun Gupta \\[GlassFish Evangelist\\]
On March 18th 2010, PCQuest editor Anil Chopra and Cyber Media India senior vice president Anil Kumar set the ball rolling at Spark IT 2010 with their welcome addresses. In an informative talk, Dr Venkat Subramaniam, founder Agile Developer Inc., discussed the nuances of the software programming. He spoke under the title, ‘It could be hell or it could be heaven.
He pointed out: "When you switch the way in which you write codes, your design is heavily influenced by the language you know. Using just one type of language is of significant disadvantage. Multiple languages make you think and perceive differently. Using one language helps in problem solving on the technicality only in the same language. It’s not easy for one language - which is 15-20 years old - to be effective in all areas." Dr.Subramaniam added: "Java has become the weakest link in the ecosystem. There has been language explosion in the past six to seven years. There are around 200 languages in Java virtual machines. You got to pick and choose what makes sense for you."
Simone Brunozzi, Web Services Evangelist, Amazon Europe and APAC, discussed the best strategies and techniques for architecting for the cloud. In an informative talk, Simone Brunozzi said: "In real world, a lot of architecture designs are built looking at the enterprise needs like high availability, scalability, reliability, security and management. Security for example is a very important aspect for the enterprises like banks, healthcare, and financial businesses." In a quick downpour of knowledge, he discussed topics that included, designing for failure, loosely coupled system, design for dynamism, security, physical constraints, storage options and AWS community and partners.
In another informative talk, Shashank Tiwari, managing partner and CTO, Treasury of Ideas pointed out: "Rich Internet Applications (RIA) is the way ahead for enterprises." He added: "RIA in mobile applications is a trend that is quickly catching on, however it will take some time to come to the forefront. Though RIA doesn’t impose any connectivity requirements, it requires bandwidth to an extent. However, it won’t be an issue since bandwidth is catching on in the global level, as well as in India."
I discussed on the new enhancements to .NET Framework 4.0, the new features in C# 4.0 and the new features in ASP.NET 4.0. I also discussed the new Dynamic Language Runtime environment that enables you to have static and dynamically typed languages reside side-by-side in the managed environment.
The major sponsors for this prestigious event included: Yahoo India, Pearson, Airtel, Naukri.com, ADP, Microsoft, PMI, Manipal University, etc. There were four tracks in the conference. These included: Enterprise Trends, Client Technologies, Web Technologies and Project Management. To provide hands on experience to the delegates, Workshops were organized on both these days. The detailed agenda can be found from this link: http://www.ciol.com/sparkIT/2010/inc/agenda.asp
References
Here are a few links to the Spark IT event:
http://www.ciol.com/sparkIT/2010/
http://www.ciol.com/sparkIT/2010/inc/speakers.asp
http://www.ciol.com/Developer/SparkIT/News-Reports/Architecting-for-%E2%80%98cloud%E2%80%99-in-hot-summer/133283/0/ http://www.ciol.com/Developer/SparkIT/News-Reports/Spark-IT-2010-off-to-a-flying-start-in-Bangalore/133279/0/
http://www.ciol.com/developer/feature/open-source-slowly-gaining-momentum-in-india/1310132375/0/
http://www.ciol.com/Developer/SparkIT/News-Reports/As-programming-languages-get-more-dynamic/133372/0/
http://blogs.bigadda.com/pcq5032662/2010/03/17/top-technologies-to-gear-up-for-future/
Summary
Events of this kind would definitely be a boost to the development community in India. The developer community in India can be helped with such seminars, conferences, etc, where they can participate. They can participate in events, conferences and seminars so as to better develop their skills and awareness. Happy reading!
