the last part...

Summit day #2 had more lined up and had more than just eclipse to talk about. Also, deciding on sessions/workshops in advance allowed us to space out that little time in between to meet/talk/catch-hold-of.

Once again, the day began with the compère extraordinaire [:)]. However, she ended up repeating precisely what she said the previous day [:(]. The first "sponsored" session was by Oracle - by Dhiraj Bhandari who was going to speak about the eclipse plug-in to rapid deployment on weblogic. And this is what I recollect / found interesting:

1. Starting off with Oracle strategy for Eclipse and other development tools [a key question was asked towards the end. Now that Netbeans is in the kitty, how does the priority for Eclipse change - and Dhiraj stressed that JDeveloper and Eclipse are the order in which their priorities remain - big point?]
2. Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse [OEPE] and it's component structure
   
3. All the features of the above mentioned plug-in and relevant tools
4. A very interesting new feature 'Fast Swap' - which aims to cut the Edit>Build>Deploy>Test to Edit>Test!! This was illustrated with an example
5. With a concluding demo + some good Q&A - Oracle finished well

Unfortunately for the next "sponsored" session, the previous session had overshot it's time. This did not deflate Bharath K from IBM who spoke on Enhancing the productivity of RAD using Websphere. I, however, spent most of the next 20 minutes filling the feedback form.

Once done [!!] with the sponsored sessions, we were back to the 3 parallel tracks. While Ilya's workshop on Design Patterns Used in Eclipse garnered much interest, there was one track which had 3 sessions.

The first was Google AppEngine for Java and Eclipse Developers and the speaker for this was a Google AND Microsoft evangelist [how? just how??] - Janakiram MSV! Lot of pluses for this one - very good topic, exceptional presentation and even better presentation/visualization skills! He concluded with a great demo - showing the hands-on role of Eclipse while jumping on the Google AppEngine / Cloud Platform. It was fairly certain that his audience would return for his next session later in that track.

I skipped the next session and went about to mingle with the Eclipse junta and visit the stalls. Thanks to our "sponsored" sessions overshooting the time given to them, everything was running pretty late. It was time for Janakiram's second session - Lighting up Java Web Apps with Silverlight. Now Janakiram brought a Mac with a dual boot for Windows and well, as per the unwritten rule, Windows crashed :) It was a two-pronged attack really - M$ being M$ would always crash and Apple being Apple [when it comes to going against M$] would ensure that there was no recovery!

To add to his woes, there were some Adobe flex supporters who posed some interesting questions to Janakiram. All-in-all his session was fairly interesting!

By-the-way, all this trouble allowed for the early delay to be covered up and saltmarch were back again to their punctual best. In the last part of the summit, I went for the track with a short session on OSGi packaging and Eclipse as a framework of frameworks. No bias against Progress Software but both their sessions [previous day's case study and today's OSGi packaging were VERY boring!]. The speaker, who was originally listed on the schedule, missed out and someone else filled in for him. Unfortunately though the compère was not aware/informed and she went on to thank the missing speaker! [:D]

The final session I attended at the summit was Anshu Jain's Eclipse as a Framework of Frameworks. Anshu came in a breezy manner and had a large audience [with no offense to his topic/knowledge, this large audience was partly because the test automation tools workshop in the second track had failed big time!]. He encountered more technical issues while simultaneously doing both - troubleshooting + interacting with the audience. His premise was simple but the way he took us to that was very powerful. His session was not as much about getting to know new things but more about realizing the power of what you already knew!

I skipped the last BIRT session and went to get my all-black-tee. With the last few business cards getting exchanged, we bid adieu to two-days-of-really-well-organized-knowledge-sessions!

Considering that the eclipse community is pretty niche in India as yet and there is comparatively lesser buzz around the same; Saltmarch & Ancit did a pretty neat job of making things interesting and insightful.

With that and an early flight, the terribly short trip to Bengaluru also came to an end.. and we returned to base camp.

the eclipse summit.. din kramaank ek...

as the last line in the previous post said, the summit posts are being continued! :)

so, wake early - we did and set out. on asking the highly-dignified concierge [with funny gloves!], we were given the suggestion to take a rick or preferably walk down, since the venue was barely a km away. we were not sure of the road/location and hence decided to take the rick. however, thanks to speaking in hindi and thanks to our general misfortune in bangalore, no one was willing to come! so, again, walk - we did and were very kindly led in the wrong direction by this apparently-very-helpful-person, who we later realized was confused between 'the chancery' and 'chancery pavilion'! :)

anyway, we reached the venue and after a very brief security check, we registered. the folks at the registration desks were very friendly and dealt with a brisk pace - as a result keeping the queue short. we were given the basic welcome kits with material for the event [and some raddi / promotional material from the sponsors :)].

scheduled @ 930 was a session by one of the 'platinum' sponsors - microsoft (yes, you can gasp @ microsoft coming for an open source event + paying for its presence there!!).. sharp @ 930 the compere took to the mic.. and this i must write about.. i, for one, really admire elocutionary skills and the compere for the summit had an absolutely b-r-i-l-l-i-a-n-t voice!! she started off with a cheeky idea to make people switch off/silent their cell phones and then went on to introduce the event, sponsors, organizers.. she soon finished her speech [:( :(] and on came microsoft talking about interoperability and how they are really working in the open source community since 2004. his speech was more of a 'sachhi-believe-me, we do work for free/others too!'

after this forceful session, we were going to have 3 interesting tracks running in parallel with a large set of workshops/seminars to choose from. so the 5 of us split up and i went to ilya shinkarenko's - plug-in development. this workshop [??] had 9 labs where he gave basic tips and quick tricks on UI principles, basic OSGi, adapters, data-binding, extension-points and then scrammed through presentation & provisioning APIs. honestly this would have been an *amazing* workshop had it been a bit longer and ilya would have had the time needed to cover it all. but you can't blame ilya / organizers as well, since they had just as much time to fit it all in! in the other tracks, folks liked the 'gef & zest workshop' which had the ever-popular [and erstwhile rockstar] malai giving the session! :)

for the second part of the day, i decided to jump between the halls and first went to attend the 'design case study of a complex development tool [soa space] built on gef' - which IMHO was very boring :( i guess it made sense from the speaker's point of view to talk about their company requirements, development challenges, general abstract points about gef; but it didn't tell you anything new really!

i then went for 'eclipse 3.5 pde - target platform story' by ankur sharma. unfortunately for him there were some technical issues on account of which he had initiate a without-mic informal interaction with the crowd to talk about eclipse UI and requirements and complaints and general ranting.. his session was very useful for folks like me who yet weren't on 3.5 and hence, got to know about the useful cool new features in the galileo release of eclipse [i did not use API tooling earlier but thanks to ankur, this has become an inclusive part of all my work now!]..

and yeah in between all this, we had some greaat food [a *MUST* for any good event] and met a lot of interesting folks from the indian eclipse ecosystem! the organizers were always there if you needed some help or information and all the events were dot-on-time! at the end i also saw the traditional long queue for t-shirts [the signature saltmarch all-black-tee!!!].. and with all of this, came day one to an end [at the summit]!

and 'explore bangalore' began [which by-the-way will go in another post that just doesn't have the word *Eclipse* in it! :)]..

eclipse [the non astronomy one]...

this last week a small village in bihar - targena - garnered a lot of interest all of a sudden... firangs with their fancy photographic instruments, astronomers with their study and scientific material and behind all of them, running late, our government babus scurrying to provide facilities to all... the village which apparently did not have sufficient drinking water and general electricity earlier was overnight well stocked with mineral water and gensets! of course the reason was very good visibility of the event of path-crossing of the grand-daddy of our solar system - the sun and our good old moon... and to make it special, this total solar eclipse was one of those seriously long ones and one which comes after a seriously long time! [by-the-way an overcast sky played spoilsport causing an anti-climax for all enthusiasts!]

anyway, i am not so fascinated by celestial bodies and i was rather keen to attend another 'eclipse' event - ASIA's first and annual eclipse summit - organized by the all-black-tees saltmarch team. before i go ahead, this event was a symbiosis between

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saltmarch, who are the folks that organized the immensely popular 'great indian developer summit' and


ancit consulting, the only real eclipse community representation in the indian sub-continent...

• 
  

so for those, to whom i have *never* bragged about my work [:) honestly many!], this eclipse refers specifically to a platform/framework/IDE - all in computer and programmatic terms! now if that puts you off - well, don't worry, because i am not going to write all technical!

this 'eclipse summit '09' was organized in bengaluru [bangalore] at the chancery pavilion [which by-the-way is a pretty neat hotel situated right in the centre of bangalore's business district - or so i was told]! so with 5 of my colleagues from tibco, i trudged along to listen to sessions/seminars for the first time after college...

i was visiting bangalore after a really long time and my last memories of the place were mostly of using "kannada bara tilla" or something-that-sounded-similar whenever someone quickly talks to you there... then bangalore was this moderately paced city which had probably one big shopping mall and my cousins used to take me to mg road [that cliched road in every indian city], which was supposed to be amongst the buzzing places in town... this time around, mg road [and it's cousin brigade road where we stayed] were still the most buzzing places of the city but in general the place had changed a LOT! the airport for example is fairly impressive and more impressive are the roads from the airport to the city... however, it is painfully far and the traffic is well, worse than my home town! :) however, the bus service, of whatever little i used, was great! and yes bangalore has this ubiquitous presence of software folks... of the 11 random people i met in those 3 days [in the bus & or at the bus stop / one chai shop / in the hotel] - all of them were software professionals, all of them were programmers and all of them wrote java!!! one can be amazed at probably what are the odds of finding at least 1 normal non-technical person in this city!

so 16th night we made it to our hotel and were supremely hungry... so we set out to find a decent place to eat and our patience was really running short... we found this shisha place called 'soul' off mg road that looked just about fine... it had some people when we entered and well as soon as we made the first order, almost all the guests had left [it was almost as if they were waiting for us to take the bait!]... anyway, we had a pretty lacking dinner... mainly because:

• because of lack of other guests at the restaurant
• lack of items served from the menu and
  
• above all, lack of the manager's basic maths skills!

at the end, after much clarification the bill was corrected with the surprise prized winner being paneer lababbbbbbdar [as the mongolian import kept calling the dish] over all the other meaty items!

Anyway, it was about time we hit the sack... we used to consistently get the friendly reminders from the devmarch/saltmarch guys of the registration timings and prizes and events... i, for one, find any activity before 10 am a challenge and these folks kept hammering the deadline of 9 am! :(

is being continued...