Gaelyk: Lightweight Groovy on the Google App Engine

You love Groovy and you're a believer in cloud computing. For a larger project you might choose Grails and hosting on Amazon EC2, but what if you want to take advantage of the nearly massless deployments of a cloud provider like the Google App Engine? You could make Grails work, but it's not always the best fit. Enter Gaelyk. Gaelyk is a lightweight Groovy web application framework built specifically for the Google App Engine. In this session, we'll talk through the simple abstractions it offers, then show how easy it is to code and deploy a useful application to the cloud. Tim Berglund

Building RESTful Applications with the Open Data Protocol

Applications today are expected to expose their data and consume data-centric services via REST. In this session we discuss what REST is and have an overview of WCF Data Services and see how we can REST enable your data using the Open Data Protocol (OData). Then you will learn how to leverage existing skills related to Visual Studio, LINQ and data access to customize the behavior, control-flow, security model and experience of your data service. We will then see how to enable data-binding to traditional ASP.NET controls as well as Silverlight and Excel PowerPivot. This is a very demo intensive session.

jQuery at Work: A Beginner's Guide

You've seen lots of articles and web sites about jQuery, and it looks promising. You'd like to try jQuery on your next web project, but you have questions: Where do I start? Where does jQuery fit in my web application? How will jQuery improve my web application? Where does jQuery fit architecturally? What about AJAX? This presentation provides an overview of jQuery and covers: jQuery / JavaScript Basics jQuery Intro Unobtrusive JavaScript Just Enough CSS - Selectors Selecting and Manipulating Elements Event Handlers Using AJAX XML JSON Adding sizzle with jQuery UI Sliders Progress Bars Date Pickers Useful jQuery plug-ins Tooltips jGrowl Sortable tables We'll walk through practical examples using jQuery, core JavaScript, and CSS. Attendees will learn how to leverage jQuery to reduce the amount of code in their web applications, and develop Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Speaker- Tom Marrs

JavaScript Improvements in IE9

Modern day websites use thousands of lines of JavaScript to deliver functionality similar to traditional desktop applications. Internet Explorer 9 introduces a new JavaScript engine, codenamed Chakra, which fundamentally changes the performance characteristics of JavaScript inside Internet Explorer 9. We'll dive into what's new in Chakra, including the new compiler that compiles JavaScript source code into high-quality native machine code, a new interpreter for executing script on traditional web pages, and improvements to the JavaScript runtime and libraries like ECMAScript 5 support. Speaker - Rajashekaran Vengalli

Decision Making in Software Teams

Alistair Cockburn has described software development as a game in which we choose among three moves: invent, decide, and communicate. Most of our time at technology conferences is spent learning how to be better at inventing. Beyond that, we understand the importance of good communication, and take steps to improve in that capacity. Rarely, however, do we acknowledge the role of decision making in the life of software teams, what can cause it to go wrong, and how to improve it. In this talk, we will explore decision making pathologies and their remedies in individual, team, and organizational dimensions. We'll consider how our own cognitive limitations can lead us to to make bad decisions as individuals, and what we might do to compensate for those personal weaknesses. We'll learn how a team can fall into decision-making dysfunction, and what techniques a leader might employ to healthy functioning to an afflicted group. We'll also look at how organizational structure and culture can discourage quality decision making, and what leaders to swim against the tide. Software teams spend a great deal of time making decisions that place enormous amounts of capital on the line. Team members and leaders owe it to themselves to learn how to make them well. Speaker - Tim Berglund

JavaScript - There's a Real Language In There

JavaScript is one of the most widely used languages on the web and yet, it is the most misunderstood. If you've wondered about the strengths of JavaScript or how you can be effective with it, this presentation is for you. This presentation will demystify JavaScript and help you make use of its capabilities. Speaker - Venkat Subramaniam

PlayBook - Change the Game!

Tablets are being billed to change the level of mobile communications. A new ground comes with its own challenges and oppurtunities. Andrew will talk about the BlackBerry PlayBook which is the world’s first dual core, multi-processing, multi-tasking, ultra-thin, enterprise-ready, professional tablet. Perfect for either large organizations or an “army of one”, the PlayBook is designed to give users what they want, including uncompromised web browsing, true multitasking and high performance multimedia, while also providing advanced security features, out-of-the-box enterprise support and a breakthrough development platform for IT departments and developers. Excited!!

Interview with Sunil Rao, Head of Nokia Developer, India

Sunil Rao is Head of Nokia Developer, India. He is responsible for evangelizing new technology platforms, strategy and growth opportunities with Nokia's third party developers to create a vibrant Nokia ecosystem. Sunil was heading the ecosystem development for Symbian Software that was acquired by Nokia in 2008. Sunil's areas of expertise are mobile, BFSI and logistics verticals as well as mobile consumer experiences and smartphone lifestyles. Sunil speaks about latest trends in mobile consumer experiences, the new Symbian Belle, the latest on Nokia's battle to retain its community of developers, how its Windows-based smartphone creates a better experience for the user, the current status of Forum Nokia Champions and the latest on Nokia’s strategy, ‘Internet for the Next Billion’.

Value for Money System Integration is Teleca’s Strategy

Teleca is a supplier of software services for all industries where mobile and wireless solutions are used. The company offers world class operations and execution capability, both on-site and offshore. Teleca aims to help the industry offer users great mobile experiences using turnkey, cost effective solutions with faster time to market. It is increasingly using Open Source Software components and software created by its strategic partner network to make our offerings even more comprehensive.

Santosh Xavier, Head of Delivery at Teleca India spoke to Saltmarch Media of how Teleca aims to set global standards for its operations in India and be a true system integrator. He speaks about firsts -- setting up a concept center with  multimedia and 3D technology to showcasing a connected home to customers and porting Android onto the CDMA platform. Santosh details how Teleca is setting itself apart from competitors in India like Sasken, Wipro, L&T and Aricent by offering true system integration. He also puts on his futuristic hat and holds forth on the latest market trends for mobile devices based on Linux platforms.

Security Architectures for the Rich Web

While Web 2.0 technology and services have been common in the public sphere for a number of years, their uptake into the Enterprise has been relatively slow. Rich Internet Applications and Social Networks introduce new ways to allow users to interact with their applications, data and indeed, other users. They do however, bring with them significant opportunity to expose sensitive information. Whether breaches in security are due to unforeseen use of components of the application itself, or simply, by inappropriate information dissemination; through the use of Social Networking tools, Enterprise Web 2.0 introduces security trapdoors that should be addressed as part of the development framework and application design. In this talk recorded at Saltmarch Media's Great Indian Developer Summit Oracle's Barry Hiern looks at the various points of exposure in building Web 2.0 based applications for the enterprise, and some of the ways developers and administrators can secure their applications before data exposure becomes an issue.

Barry Hiern is Senior Principal Architect, APAC Channels Enablement at Oracle Corporation. With over twenty years in the software industry and more than a decade in leading roles within the Oracle Development organization, he has extensive experience in the areas of product development and delivery, enterprise architectures, business development, partner enablement and sales consulting.

The Entire Game Should Move Onto the GPU, says Rev Lebaredian

As the computing functionality and horsepower of GPUs has grown over the last few years, the role of the GPU is rapidly expanding to game tasks beyond rasterization-based graphics. Now GPU computing can be used for solving a variety of problems in game computing including game physics, artificial intelligence, animation, post-processing effects and others. Rev Lebaredian, Director of Engineering in Nvidia, says that as GPUs grow and become more general purpose, more and more of the game is going to be shifting over to the GPU. The final goal is to have the whole game run on the GPU.

Rev Lebaredian leads a team of engineers developing APEX - a middleware library and tools for integrating realistic and scalable physics simulation into games. APEX is a new technology that empowers artists to quickly create fully interactive in-game clothing, destruction, particles and vegetation. APEX is a middleware library and artist-oriented tools, built on top of Nvidia's PhysX software. The APEX framework streamlines the integration of new effects into games.

Saltmarch Media spoke to Rev Lebaredian during his recent visit to Bangalore, India. The discussion began with a topic close to Rev's heart – APEX. "APEX is trying to handover the power of game physics to the artists directly as they are the biggest section of employees in a game development company. By achieving this, an artist need not depend on a programmer to achieve every task and this in turn will enable the creation of a lot of creative content which the user of today has come to expect from games," says Rev.

Read on to know Rev's thoughts on moving the entire game to the GPU starting with graphics and physics, how video applications are tapping the increasing computing power of GPUs, optimal Direct X 11 support, and advancements in the graphics and digital media processors industry. Rev also shares his experiences with using Optimus technology that addresses the performance/battery life balance by automatically selecting the right graphics processor-between an Nvidia discrete GPU or an Intel integrated GPU

Q. Please introduce yourself to our readership and talk in a bit about your role at Nvidia.
 
Rev Lebaredian: I am the Director of Engineering within the Content and Technology group within Nvidia. This is the group that deals primarily with application developers. My responsibility right now is leading the group that develops a product called APEX.

APEX is a middleware solution we have been creating and implementing in actual games that enables game developers to put hi-fidelity simulation and dynamics into their games with minimal amount of work for the quality that they get out of it.

The goal is to make APEX scalable across platforms and allow game developers to put as much of it as possible in their games by leveraging their artists, instead of just a few programmers in their group who know game physics.
 
Q. One of your talks at India Game Developer Summit specifically revolved around APEX, a middleware library and tools for integrating realistic and scalable physics simulation into games. Can you explain APEX in a bit?
 
RL: What we found while integrating physics with the GPU was that for many years, the bottleneck in most game productions was the fact that most of the actual employees within any game studio are artists and the ratio of artist to other employees remains big because games are getting bigger themselves.

So in order for us to get more content in games we need to address the issue at the artist level and allow and enable them to create physical content without having to depend on a programmer to do everything.

Currently within development companies there are around one or two artists who are experts at doing physics programming and that is not sufficient for us to really enable games with the kind of content everybody wants.
 
Q. APEX is built on top of Nvidia's PhysX software. PhysX was designed by a company called AGEIA, which was acquired by Nvidia in 2008. What do you see as the benefits of the acquisition?
 
RL: AEGIA was a great acquisition for us. We knew that as GPUs grow and become more general purpose, more and more of the game is going to be shifting over to the GPU. The final goal is to have the whole game run on the GPU.

The next natural step after graphics is physics. It is very parallelizable and it is scaleable. There is lots of computation so it is in many ways a good fit for GPUs. So we evaluated and found out that it would take a lot of time to build up a physics library just at the rudimentary level and that it was much better to do an acquisition.

We were lucky as AEGIA were willing to do this and they have also had a lot of experience with accelerating physics on the hardware. So in many ways it was a perfect match for us. What they were trying to do with their products matched our business model and hence the expertise that they had gained matched us perfectly. This also has ramifications in the future.

What we learn from moving physics over to the GPU will apply to everything else we try to move over to the GPU as well. Physics is a great real-time application to try to move to the GPU so it is critical for us to have technologies like this in-house that we can use as beacons for where our architectures need to go in the future on the whole.
 
Q. More and more processing is now being done on the GPU. And video is the killer application for the GPU. What are the new kinds of video applications that are tapping the increasing computing power of GPUs?
 
RL: Encoding and transcoding are already big on the GPU and we are seeing many compute based applications that take advantage of the raw horse power of the GPU. As and when people create more and more digital media, there is an insatiable appetite for computing power in order to process this and archive it and store it in ways that are convenient for people. So we definitely have a big need for this sort of computation abilities.

In addition there are lots of problems with video that are naturally suited towards massively parallel architectures. Motion estimation, doing optimal flow, and these sort of image processing problems map very nicely onto the GPU.
 
Q. Nvidia had earlier pioneered a technology called switchable graphics to address the performance/battery life balance. But it was cumbersome to use since users had to manually switch between the two display adapters. Recently Nvidia released the Optimus technology that automatically selects the right graphics processor-between an Nvidia discrete GPU or an Intel integrated GPU. Have you used the Optimus technology and what is your feedback about it?
 
RL: I think its fantastic and it is much better than the switchable stuff that we had before. Optimus is extremely elegant and I think what you will find in the reviews and in the press will confirm this. Everybody loves this and I think it is the ideal solution to this particular problem and it is the sort of thing that we are actually good at.

It has taken a lot more than just developing hardware and the driver in order to produce something like this. We have to go through all the applications people are running, create a profile and invest a lot in QA and there are things we have to do in an ecosystem to create a product like this. So it makes me proud when we actually deliver something as elegant as this as a company.

Q. Will optimal Direct X 11 support be a deciding factor in terms of GPU sales in the next few years?
 
RL: History has always shown that to be true with respect to GPUs. We are not done with graphics. There is obviously a long way to go before we get to photo realism. And with games we are not even close to where film has been for many years now. DirectX 11 is a large step towards that.

We have had a lot of texture complexity for a long time and we have hit the limits of it and it looks kind of weird when the geometric complexities of games do not match the shading and texture complexity that we have become accustomed to. So as soon as we have some games out there that take advantage of DirectX 11 features, it is going to become obvious that all games need to increase their geometric quality to match this.
 
Q. What are the advancements you see in the graphics and digital media processors industry in the coming years?
 
RL: We are at an inflexion point in this industry. The whole parallelization thing was something the world was forced to accept when CPUs started going to dual core. We are not able to depend on the same speed ups that we were getting year after year with traditional CPU architectures. So GPUs happen to be at the right place at the right time.

With the level of programmability we have now, we are slowly converging towards the limits of what CPUs will eventually become. So now it is a race to see who can create the massively parallelizable architecture for the future. My hope is to see applications as complex as games completely running on the GPU.
 
Q. What are Nvidia’s ambitions for the next decade?
 
RL: In the coming years we have a lot of work to do in integrating physics properly onto the GPU. Then we need to ensure that all of it is running in there and it is optimal as possible and coexisting with all other parts of the game that we want to run on the GPU as well – including artifical intelligence (AI) and various sorts of scripting and all the various processes that happen within a modern gaming engine.