GIDS Day 2.

"Small Cap, Mid Cap, Large Cap .. it doesn't matter what cap a stock is, add it to your portfolio as far as it brings a value to you."

This is a promo line of a popular stock market analysis program on Television.

My take from GIDS is quite similar..

"Presentation tier, Application tier, Data tier.. it doesn't matter which tier a technology is, add it to your knowledge base as far as this knowledge brings your software a value".

Few years back when one attend a web conference one would only hear 10 presenters giving 100 different definitions of Web 2.0 and Ajax . But today I saw the same presenter discussing flash in one session and power of cloud computing in another. Google and Ajax has made the end user so demanding that it has forced a developer to move beyond his comfort zone and learn jQuery and cloud computing concepts at the same time.

Coming back to GDIS it started with Marty Hall's session on "Rich Internet Application" where he started with what is ajax and then went on to give example using plain jQuery, JSF 2.0 and GWT.

Scott Davis then decided to move beyond the curly braces and discussed Web 2.0 concepts. It was a great and enjoyable presentation but to be honest I wanted to see some grail code within those hated curly braces. But he promised there will be enough of it tomorrow.

These were followed by parallel sessions and one can choose to attend those one like the most.

I attended one of the less crowded presentation on "Longevity of Scalable System" by Yahoo's Nishad Kamat. He covered how to increase the shelf life of a software in the current competitive and dynamically changing technical echo system. Presentation covered how one should overcome the familiar dilemma between home grown and imported technology.

Matthew McCullough's Hadoop's intro was another good thing to follow. A good intro to Map Reduce Algo and the problem it is designed to solve. Not sure if I understood all of it but I am sure very soon I am going to download Hadoop and try to develop some simple searches on my tomcat log files.

I wanted to attend the "NoSQL:The Shift to a Non-relational world" presentation but thanks to the volcano ashes, the presenter could not make to Bangalore. Ramesh Srinivasraghavan from Adobe who earlier talked about flex took his slot and gave introduction to cloud as an environment and the challenges it brings to web development.

McCullogh ended the day with the important session on web debugging tool. He discussed tcpdump, netstat, curl, wireshark, MODI, Jmeter, JASH etc. I was surprised that he didn't talk about fiddler and our so simple live httpheaders.


Looking from the kind of presentation and audience responses, one can say that developer curiosity has shifted from how to build web 2.o application to how to scale a web 2.0 application.

Organization of the even was very professional.. I just wished there was more time given for questions and networking. I would try to put a detail plus and minus post after tomorrow's presentation. But I am happy to have spent my time and money on event like this.