Worldwide Developer Conference in Manila (Summary)

Last June 17-19, I attended a Worldwide Developer Conference in Shangri-la, Makati, Philippines. Organized by the Sun Microsystems, the event gathered 15 selected countries. Such event only happens once a year, and our country was selected to take part and host the 3-day convention.

The highlight of the conference was the Open Source Technology and the language Java. Companies like AMD, Oracle, Elixer and Nokia were sponsors to the event. Formidable speakers were also invited, all of which came from Sun. Experts like Aisling MacRunnels, Chuk-Munn Lee, Sang Shin, Matt Thompson, Carol McDonald, Michael Li, Peter Karlsson, Geertjan Wielenga and many others all shared their expertise and knowledge. The three day conference was attended by more than a thousand IT specialists and students.

The first day of the convention was an interesting start since we were introduced and shown a demo of new version tools to build Java base application called Netbeans 6.1. What was more interesting was that the creator of the language themselves gave us a free tool to boost and extend the language to its fullest. The free tool was made possible to use either on a desktop, mobile and raging web based applications. Likewise, the tool is not limited to Java language alone since it can be used to create different types of UML, SOA, scripting for Ajax, C/C++, Python, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, JRuby,Groovy and Scala

The convention continued on its second day with the discussion of Java EE’s new feature and the Web Server called Glassfish V2, the open source version of Sun Java System Application Server. Demos followed for Web Rapid development using language Ruby and JRuby on Rails framework. We were also introduced to the new feature on Groovy, implementing the Grails framework.

For the Desktop development side, they made a demo on Rich Client Programming (RCP) technique using Netbeans as a base platform. There was also a demo on the new declarative extension language of Java called JavaFX. A discussion also followed on the Top 10 feature of Java Standard Edition 6(SE 6) and some hot features of unreleased Java SE 7. Oracle also had its technical session about Coherence Distributed Memory Data Management Solution.

During the course of the discussions, each of us participants was given the chance to ask questions and share to everyone our views and opinions to the topics being discussed. It was indeed an interactive experience for all of us. The day wrapped up with a final discussion on Java EE support on Spring and Seam web frameworks.

Although the third and last day for us participants came, it did not kept us from being too excited and eager for more discussions and information sharing. The last day of the conference was filled with more exciting interactive discussions starting from Web 2.0 stuff building Rich Web Application using JMaki 1.0 and some Ajax related web toolkits. We also covered Java development for mobile platform, programming for cool devices using open source Java Mobile Edition (Java ME) and Phone ME stack. After we had our lunch, Elixer technology also gave a demo about their new Repertoire Business Intelligence (BI) 2.0 plugin support for Netbeans. New feature of Java Server Face (JSF 2.0) and Ajax with project WoodStock for web development was also discussed.

AMD also had their technical session about Optimizing for Quad-core Solaris Systems based on AMD Platforms. We were given a break for a few minutes and afterwards discussions started again. It included building Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) using OpenESB, BPEL and Netbeans as well as presentation of MySQL’s new feature.