Great Indian Developer Summit 2008

I should say I was looking forward to attend this developer summit. Last developer conference I attended was JAX Eclipse conference an year ago. So I was keen to catch up with the latest happenings in the java world. I attended the Java leg of the conference (called "Daring Java") on May 22 - 23.

My take on the conference

I generally would like to attend this kind of conferences mainly to know the latest trend, connect with the developers, to get to know the new products from various organizations etc. This one is a very good from this perspective. I thought following were the positives about this conference:

• well organized events
• well known speakers from all around the world
• large number of participants from various organizations
  
• good amount of company stalls

few things didn't go well:

• food was horrible
• the recorded sessions and the presentation slides DVD arrives 45 days after the conference. I think, this is too long

My take-away

Quite a few java topics were being discussed, but the one which caught me this time was Groovy, and particularly sessions from Venkat Subramaniam. I kind of became curious about Groovy and followed Venkat and attended all his sessions. I had a very little information about Groovy prior to this conference and all the Groovy sessions were very good and informative.

Groovy

• has got all the advantages of dynamic languages such as nature of scripting, dynamic types, etc.
• is very expressive - has the power of expressing lot of things using simple statements
• supports closure
  
• less ceremonial code
  
• good choice to write DSLs

As far as Java is concerned, I was bit surprised to hear that many speakers were kind of insisting that Java is not going away and stuff like that. In my view, no matter what happens, Java is going to stay for long time and no arguments about it. Interestingly, few, especially Groovy lovers said that Java as a platform is solid and has got very good library support and is going to stay for long time, but Java as a language is aging. And its place might go to new dynamic languages that has less ceremonial and fluent syntax but takes advantage of Java platform. I personally feel, dynamic languages have got to prove a lot on the aspects of performance, robustness, security, etc before enterprise application developers pick them.

Nevertheless, it does no harm to learn new languages. And I have started learning Groovy.