Wednesday, April 21, 2010

GIDS 2010

This was the third season of the Great Indian Developer Summit and like the previous conferences, this one too saw developers, technologists, evangelists and motivation speakers come from all parts. Yes motivation speaker! Priya Kumar, a dynamic motivational speaker and author of the best selling book "I am another you" was here and spoke on Possibilities and becoming a hero in what you are doing. The talk was refreshing and a welcome break. Being post lunch it was well timed and brought energy back into the dozing audience.

I personally like this conference for the great array of speakers that it calls upon. Being a Java and Web App enthusiast, I attended the GIDS.Web track of the conference. The day started with a keynote by the great Marty Hall from coreservlets. He compared the various approaches to building Rich internet applications with Ajax. He spoke about Javascript libraries like dojo, jQuery available for adding Ajax support to an existing web application vs building Ajax rich applications from scratch using frameworks like JSF. In another session later in the day he juxtaposed the different javascript libraries like jQuery, dojo, prototype, scriptaculous, google closure, and YUI. He rated them against their support for Ajax, UI controls, DOM manipulation, ease of use, javascript features and popularity.

Scott Davis delivered an engaging talk on Deconstructing Web2.0. He impressed upon the audience that Web2.0 is not a thing but a state of mind. It's a dynamic, interactive, collaborative and componentized view of the web. He provided many examples and built a web application using grails there and then to drive the point on dynamic nature of Web2.0, short delivery cycles where applications are always in beta.

There were a couple of sessions on cloud computing by Amazon and Adobe. But they just scraped the surface. We have heard enough about it. Some practical exercises would have been really useful.

The presentations will be up on the devsummit website.

~Ashish.