The Hindu Business Line : IIITM-K holds Java tech meet

THE Sun Centre of Excellence in E-learning at Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management-Kerala (IIITM-K), Thiruvananthapuram, in association with Sun Microsystems, recently organised a Java technology meet, `JAVA TECH Programme' at Technopark here.

Addressing separate sessions at the meet, Mr Srikanth Ramakrishna, Technology Evangelist and Head of the Architecture Support Team, and Mr Raghavan Srinivasa, Technology Evangelist, Sun Microsystems, demonstrated cutting edge Java technologies including Java Architecture, J2EE, Programming Puzzles and Java on the Desktop to delegates drawn from different companies of Technopark.

The first session was a Java `warm-up' programme by Mr Raghavan Srinivasa, who started off from the development of Java Oak by James Gosling in 1991 to come to the latest development and updates in Java2TM Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 2.1 architecture.

J2EE had now become the mainstream in enterprise computing and EJB was the core component of J2EE platform. Mr Srinivasa talked about recent advances in Java Server Pages (JSP) Technology, XML, Java Servlets and the new J2EE Connector architecture.

In his address, Mr Srikanth Ramakrishna demonstrated certain codes in JSP and EJB and the best practices to be followed with JSP standards.

The second session was on testing Java programming skills with puzzles, which facilitated a closer look into common mistakes committed in programming.

The last session was a demo on Java Desktop systems.

More cost-effective than Windows, the Java Desktop System is an enterprise desktop solution that works with existing infrastructure.

The fully integrated desktop solution is shipped with a client desktop with Linux operating system, including an office productivity suite, e-mail, calendar, browser, instant messaging tools, and more.

It also includes developer and system management tools for remote administration in a single package.

Project Looking Glass effect of Java desktop is a rational approach towards using the latest 3D hardware advances to provide a state-of-the-art desktop environment.

The demonstration featured existing 2D applications spinning and flying about, with transparencies and video running seamlessly as the windows moved.

Star office 7, a full-function office productivity suite, is bundled into the Java Desktop System.

It offers advanced applications for word processing, printing to PDF, developing spreadsheets, making presentations, creating graphics, editing photos, publishing to the Web, and managing data from relational databases.

StarOffice is also interoperable with Microsoft Office. It can read and write Microsoft Office file formats or it can store data in native XML-based open file formats.