Sun Tech Days 2009 Report
I only made it to the conference on the second day (April 9), and regretted not being able to come on the first… This is probably the most interesting conference held in Russia. Or maybe I’m saying that because I love Sun? Either way, the conference earned an A+, leaving me with a sea of positive emotions!
This year Sun Tech Days was held only in Russia, and only in St. Petersburg, though it was only ever held in Moscow once, in 2006. By the way, compared with last year, there were significantly more girls… ;)
They were handing out pens, notepads, key rings, caps, T-shirts, and backpacks bearing the Sun and Sun Tech Days logos, and raffling off Toshiba laptops, iPods, and much more…
I liked the food better this year, but Russian people, as always… still haven’t got over their savage rush for freebies, so there was no queue to speak of, just a scramble.
You could also watch live conference broadcasts on Rutube; here are the links:
The Beginning
So, let’s start at the beginning. It started with me running late, as usual (though I wasn’t actually late). In the metro I met a guy I didn’t know who had a “Sun Tech Days” backpack. I walked up to him, shook his hand, and asked, “Off to Plumber Days?"—a pun on Sun Tech Days in Russian. He gave a definite “Yes,” and we rode up the escalator.
I was lucky to run into him, because he showed me where the bus Sun had hired to transport conference attendees was waiting. Otherwise I’d have slogged there on a minibus and worried about being late. We entered the LenEXPO building, I dropped my jacket off at the cloakroom and got my badge… (This year I was representing pyha.ru ;)
Keynote
First up was the keynote by Bob Porras, and sitting next to me was a guy in a very cheerful mood—more like he’d smoked quite a bit of weed or swallowed some amphetamines.
He was nicknamed “DTrace” because he asked a question about DTrace that Bob didn’t understand. To be honest, neither did I, because the question was off-topic.
Next came a contest for unusual and strange talents, where “DTrace” showed himself in all his glory :) He jumped around and danced, and it took a long time to get him to settle down and calm down.
The MySQL Booth
Then, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., I spent most of my time at the MySQL booth, asking various questions that interested me (NDB Cluster, MySQL-Proxy, etc.). We talked about related subjects, such as Memcached and running MySQL on FreeBSD/OpenSolaris/Linux.
The guys told me about plugins and how all the storage engines in 5.1 are plugins, even MyISAM (though it can’t be disabled). They talked a little about the PrimeBase XT, SphinxSE, and Maria engines, and also told me about Drizzle, a lightweight version of MySQL.
I arranged with Svetlana Smirnova, whom I’d already seen at PHPConf 2008, to discuss licensing rights for posting MySQL manual material from mysql.com on pyha.ru ;)
At 2 p.m. there was a mini-talk on DTrace in MySQL by Alexey Kopytov. I’d actually already listened to a mini-talk about DTrace last year, also by Alexey… However, this year’s talk was a little different: it covered the D language (NOT the same D) and two ways of creating trace points: dynamic and static.
And here is the presentation itself:
Since I missed the first day of the conference, I begged the speakers for the presentation on MySQL 5.1: A Look into the Future, which I’m sharing with you too.
The OpenSolaris Booth
I also visited the OpenSolaris booth and picked up a couple of distributions, one from SPBDev with a LiveDVD + software, and another with a LiveCD and Resource DVD. I’ll be installing it on my laptop over the weekend.
Before installing, check your hardware for compatibility:
- Go to http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/
- Download and run Sun Device Detection Tool 2.2
And you’ll find out how compatible your hardware will be with OpenSolaris… While standing at the booth, I got interested in a Sun keyboard (Unix version). I’m thinking of buying one…
The JavaFX Booth
I picked up a CD with JavaFX, introductory courses, documentation, and NetBeans and Java on board… Plus a whole bunch of related software. I’m really keen to play around with JavaFX :) I was also introduced to JavaFX contests and the website http://www.electricjungle.ru/ where they’re held—pretty engaging!
The Books.ru Booth
I bought books at low prices. Their prices are low already, and they had discounts on top of that. For example, I bought Joel’s book More Joel on Software for 690 rubles at Dom Knigi (St. Petersburg), but they sell it for 370 rubles! By the way, they have physical shops in St. Petersburg and Moscow. So I recommend buying there, and I’ll be doing my book shopping there myself. Places like “Bukvoed” and “Dom Knigi” have completely lost their minds with those prices…
Project Kenai
I learned about Project Kenai, a developer portal being developed by Sun Microsystems where you can host open-source projects, as well as communicate and collaborate with like-minded people. Something along the lines of Google Code, GitHub, or SourceForge. Project Kenai features:
- Code hosting
- Bug tracking
- Wiki
- Mailing list
- Forums
- Downloads
- Support
- Build system
- Web hosting
- Code review
- Shell Server
Here’s a more detailed description of the features and a comparison with other systems.
Developing High-Performance Multithreaded Applications in Java
Presented by Simon Ritter.
I nearly fell asleep there… Well, first of all, I’m not particularly interested in Java multithreading yet, since I’m not really programming in Java yet. Second, I must have been coming down with something, because my temperature and blood pressure were rising.
I didn’t really listen to the talk, and plenty of people were actually asleep.
Virtualization: From the Desktop PC to the Enterprise
Presented by Nikolay Igotti.
Overall, I liked it. There were lots of jokes—in short, the show earned full marks! It was mainly about VirtualBox, often compared with VMware, and the new features in VirtualBox 2.2.
Then he talked about the architecture of VirtualBox and virtualization systems in general.
I’ve known VirtualBox since before Sun bought it from Innotek, and I really like it. It certainly wasn’t bug-free at first, but it was free!
Developing Revolutionary Web Applications Using Comet
Presented by Doris Chen.
An interesting talk about AJAX and Comet. Doris talked about combining:
To use Comet technology.
The photo is clickable ;)
Doris is constantly promoting JMaki (at the last conference too), but however much I look at it, I don’t see any particular advantages over similar tools. The only thing that interested me was GlassFish. I’d like to study it in more detail and work with it if I get the chance.
Cloud Computing
They also talked about Cloud Computing, but I don’t even have a link to more detailed material… In short, it’s the virtualization of any number of servers, with any system and any software on board—much more convenient than buying additional servers.
You could even say it’s the return of mainframes, their second incarnation. And a very sensible incarnation at that!
In a few minutes, or even seconds, you can assemble an entire cluster, regardless of the architecture—even SPARC—and do it all through a web interface (which you can see in the photo). You’ll have the OS of your choice available to you, with access to both a graphical terminal and a text terminal (ssh).
Personally, I liked this solution, and the conference as a whole ;)
I’ll definitely be attending future Sun Tech Days, and I hope you will too!
UPDATE: You can also read about the first day of the conference on Charnad’s blog.
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