The Sun Tech Days Singapore started earlier this morning - over 1100 developers, an outstanding audience!!!

The kick off had a good local flare when the Gods of Longevity, Fortune, and Prosperity (Fu Lu Shou) showed up to start the event ;-) The build up to their appearance was really exciting as evident from the video below:


This particular event will also be recorded in Singapore Book of Records for the largest numbers of Sun developers playing a rattle together :) Here are some pictures from the event:


A Toshiba laptop and an iPod was raffled to the audience and the lucky winners are:


And found another loyal reader of my blog:



Gosh, he even took my autograph ;-)

The steps to reproduce the different GlassFish demos shown during the key note are explained below.

1. GlassFish v3 OSGi-compliance and quick startup time
   
   Download GlassFish v3 Prelude from here, unzip, and start the server as
   
   

   glassfish/bin/asadmin start-domain --verbose

   
   to see a message something like:
   
   

   INFO: GlassFish v3 Prelude startup time : Felix(1732ms) startup services(1091ms) total(2823ms)

   
   The GlassFish v3 container starts up fairly quickly, 2.8 secs in this case, without starting any application-specific container. The container is using OSGi R4 APIs and Apache Felix as the runtime. This allows any standard OSGi bundle to be easily deployed in GlassFish v3. The underlying OSGi runtime can be easily replaced with Knopflerfish or Equinox because standard R4 APIs are used. As you notice, Felix start up time is explicitly shown in the startup message.
   
   The quick start up is possible because containers, such as Web container that serves web applications, is started only when the first Web application is deployed. No web application, no web container - simple! The same is true as other types of applications are deployed, for example a Rails application. The containers are started and stopped on demand giving a higher utilization of resources.
2. Auto-deploy of Servlets and preserving servlet session state across multiple re-deploys using NetBeans and Eclipse. This feature is really useful as it tremendously reduces your development time. Focus on what you are good at i.e. adding business logic and let NetBeans and GlassFish together take care of your deployment worries. And why should you loose your session state just because the application is re-deployed!
3. Modularity and Extensibility of GlassFish v3 by running/debugging a Rails application. GlassFish certainly supports traditional Java EE applications. But starting with GlassFish v3 the newer Web frameworks like Rails can also be deployed natively. The screencast #26 shows how to develop, run and debug a Rails application natively deployed on GlassFish. And this capability of deploying a Rails application is added as an OSGi module and also demonstrates the extensibility of GlassFish.
   
   It provides future protection as well because any other Web framework can be easily deployed as a standard OSGi module.
4. Extensibility of GlassFish v3 by dropping a JAR in the "/modules" directory. The admin console is a one-stop interface for the administration of your GlassFish instance such as deploying WAR/EAR, creating JDBC/JMS resource, and creating clusters. Starting with GlassFish v3, even the admin console is extensible. There are clearly defined extension points that allows you to write a "admin console module" and extend the capability of your admin console. The demo showed dropping a JAR in the standard "modules" directory and admin cosole recognizing the module. A sample project that shows all the integration points to GlassFish v3 Admin Console is available here.
   

Other demos showcased JavaFX, Open Solaris and jMaki Webtop technology. I particularly enjoyed the JavaFX demo by our "resident mad scientist" - Simon Ritter :) It was an interesting use of technology to create something fun. Enjoy the demo below:



Also met Colin Charles, Community Relations Manager for MySQL at Sun Microsystems. It was certainly great to know that similar thought process is applied for promoting both GlassFish and MySQL - state the facts, offer an alternative, and let the customers decide. Both MySQL and GlassFish are open source offerings with complete enterprise support available from Sun Microsystems. And together with OpenSolaris, NetBeans and many other open source offerings they make a killer platform for developing/deploying any kind of web applications.

And if you have not signed up for Cloud Camp event happening in Singapore tomorrow at 6pm, register here!

Here is the complete photo album so far:




Follow the latest updates on twitter.com/arungupta.

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