I was at Gnunify, a conference on Free / Open source software, last weekend. ThoughtWorks had recently opened a new office in Pune, and it was great to catch up with ThoughtWorkers old and new.
I did a talk on the Google Web Toolkit, an Java framework for developing Ajax applications. We’d built one of the first GWT applications at ThoughtWorks India, and the second half of the talk was mostly about lessons learned from that experience.
The presentation is here
Some of the talks that I’d attended were:
Anant Narayanan on ‘Extending Python with Ctypes’
Anant spoke about how Python can be integrated with C libraries via ctypes, a pure Python mechanism for wrapping C libraries.
A. Sundararajan on ‘Java – always Open, now Free’
Sundar covered Sun’s roadmap for open sourcing Java. The plan seems to be to provide the entire JDK as open source (under GPL 2) around April this year. The javac compiler and the Hotspot virtual machine are already available. There are apparently a few legal knots that remain to be resolved around third party software that the JDK uses. The JCP will continue to exist, and Sun will still continue to control changes to the Java language.
Vijay Khambalkar on ‘Open Laszlo’
Vijay did a short talk on Open Laszlo, an open source, Flash/DHTML based Rich Application platform. Laszlo’s programming model is a mix of XML and JavaScript, and the compiler can output either Flash or DHTML. There are a couple of demos showcasing the kind of applications that can be built on the Laszlo platform here and here.
Marco Jansen on ‘Agile Project Management’
Marco’s talk was an overview about how we run our projects at ThoughtWorks. The audience really got into the thick of things, and there were quite a few good questions around introducing Agile to teams.
Narayan Raman on ‘Testing Web Applications with Sahi’
Narayan spoke about Sahi, his Open Source web testing tool. Sahi was originally created as a means to automatically reproduce bugs, and it was later extended to become a full fledged Web testing tool. According to Narayan, around 12 projects are actively using Sahi, and another 40 projects are evaluating it.
Sidu and Ram on ‘Continuous Integration’
Sidu and Ram spoke about the motivation for using Continuous Integration, along with strategies for migrating towards CI. Their talk was well received, and there were a few questions around optimizing slow builds (I do hope to blog about speeding up slow builds sometime soon, BTW). A short demo would have definitely have helped drive the message home.
Tony Wasserman on ‘How to run a successful Open Source project’
Tony’s talk was an entertaining look at what makes Open Source projects successful. His fundamental message was that successful Open Source projects have a lot in common with successful companies:
- A strong core team.
- Good management
- A strong community
- Clear goals
Dibya Prakash, Ruby on Rails workshop
Dibya did a Ruby / Rails workshop – the lab was packed to capacity, and it was great to see the level of interest in Ruby / Rails at Pune. Interesting, I got to meet quite a few students who’d been doing their projects in Rails.
Here are a few pics from the conference:
