Mrinal Wadhwa » initRIA

Why we don’t need a MAX in India ..

Mrinal Wadhwa — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:30:26 +0000

Vivek started a very interesting discussion on his blog where he’s questioning Adobe’s decision to not have a MAX in India this year. His post is full of sentiment and disappointment and I totally share the disappointment with him, I was very excited when Ted Patrick hinted that Bangalore was being considered but when the final locations were announced it was a bummer

The discussion in the comments of Vivek’s post has been quite interesting … Abdul expressed that it might not be very practical from an organizers perspective, given that the Adobe community in India is still quite nascent and I kinda agree with him having had the experience of organizing initRIA and several local FUG meets. That said I also feel that its quite a tough judgement call and I hope that Adobe would have given Bangalore due diligence before rejecting it.

Peter Elst also joined the discussion and expressed a very important point that I totally agree with …

Adobe has an opportunity and needs to step up to the plate, failing that it takes little for Microsoft to start actively pushing out their technology to developers and tip the balance of the current â€˜outsourcing ecosystemâ€™.

Its just a matter of time for Microsoft to push more money into it and start promoting Silverlight. I firmly believe Adobe needs to be ahead of the curve here.

Yes, Adobe needs to step up and stay ahead of the curve here in India, before it becomes economically more practical for organizations to build RIAs using Microsoft’s technologies, even though the Flash Platform is a better option technologically.

Now is organizing MAX in India the way to stay ahead of this curve? I don’t think so …. events in general is definitely one area but there are several other things that Adobe needs to spend time and money on, as far events are concerned, we have gone from no events in 2007 to some events in 2008 .. thats not too bad.

So here are the things that Adobe needs to do to stay ahead of the curve and MAX is not what we really need at this point ..

Adobe needs to solve the problem of Books,there are very few Flex, Flash, AS3 books available in India (mostly only the O’Rielly ones)
Adobe needs to solve the problem of Developer Training, there is currently only one company providing professional training on Adobe’s Technology Platform in india.
Adobe needs to fix the problems related to buying Adobe software in India, it takes 4+ weeks to buy a copy of Flex Builder in India
Adobe needs to penetrate the education system better, Microsoft VC++/C# are taught as compulsory subjects in 3rd year Computer Science Engineering in most of the 1200 or so engineering colleges in India. Microsoft also has a very active Student Partners program.
Adobe needs to educate the big Software services players Infosys, TCS, Wipro and the like and have them endorse Adobe’s technologies. Microsoft’s technologies are taught as specialties in the training centers of these companies, which are like universities in themselves and churn out thousands of fresh new professionals every year.

Thus in my opinion Adobe’s time and resources are better spent in the above areas rather than in a big event like MAX . I’m not saying that events are not important, I would totally love it if we had a MAX in India .. but right now that is not my biggest demand from Adobe.

Upcoming RIA events in Bangalore

Mrinal Wadhwa — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 20:11:04 +0000

Last year, many of us RIA enthusiasts in India were kinda disappointed with the lack of RIA related events in India, so very close to the end of last year I with some other members from BangaloreFX helped organize the very first RIA focused event in the country initRIA and it was a big success.

Things are very different this year, from the very beginning of the year I started to feel that RIAs were getting a lot of traction in the local circles and we have a lot of fun in store for India this year. In February all the Flex user groups in the county celebrated the launch of Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 and we now have some excellent events lined up already … here’s a list of events that have already been announced …

Adobe RIA Architects Summit 2008 – April 3rd
Notable Attendees:
- Naresh Gupta, MD, Adobe India
- David Wadhwani, VP of the Platform BU, Adobe
- James Ward, RIA Cowboy
- Ben Forta, the Coldfusion Guru

Colin Moock’s ActionScript 3.0: From The Ground Up Tour – April 29th
Colin Moock is the author of the best ActionScript 3 book there is, Essential ActionScript 3 and a very well renowned expert in the AS3 world.

Great Indian Developer Summit – May 19th to 23rd
Although this is a broader event and is not free like the above two events, there are two speakers on its speaker list that i would love to listen to:
- Jesse James Garrett, he coined the term AJAX
- Yakov Fain, a renowned name in the Flex and Java worlds and I love reading his blog

These are the events that have already been announced, I know there are many others that are being planned … there’s word that we might even have an Adobe MAX in Bangalore this year..

So lets get ready to party !!

Indiblogger.in meet, a very interesting evening ..

Mrinal Wadhwa — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 00:09:05 +0000

I spent today evening at IndiBlogger’s Bangalore blogger meet hosted at Microsoft’s Bangalore Office and the meeting surpassed all my expectations… I met some very interesting people from various different walks of life …. people who blog about technology, people who blog about social issues, people who blog about music, people who use humor as their medium of expression and of course people who blog about everything under the sun …. the best part was that the event was extremely interactive, probably more interactive than any other event that I have attended in bangalore … good job Indiblogger, clap clap !!

If you want to know more, Sandil has a nice writeup about the event and what we did at Mutiny.in

One unexpected opportunity that the event presented was the chance of meeting many from Microsoft’s evangelism team in India, I also came to know that there is a Silverlight Evangelist in India and I plan on connecting with him over the coming days …. I wish I knew of him when I was organizing initRIA, anyway its never too late.

All in all, the evening was quite fruitful, thank you Indiblogger for organizing the meeting and thank you Microsoft for providing the venue.

I miss “Creating Passionate Users”

Mrinal Wadhwa — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:58:04 +0000

Every Java developer I know has read her books and visited the Java Community Site she started. My first encounter with Kathy Sierra’s writing was when I started reading Head First Java a few years back, the book completely mesmerized me, It was unlike any other technical book I had ever read. I was not reading this book because I needed to know something but instead I was reading it because it was a lot of fun .. this is very unlike me and its very unlike technical books.

Later, I was introduced to her blog Creating Passionate Users and I was totally hooked … well technically the blog wasn’t just her’s but I was passionate about it mostly because of Kathy’s posts … her captivating style of writing and extensive knowledge on the subject was an excellent combination and the cleverly chosen supporting images were the icing. I was so passionate about her blog that every time I noticed a new post on it, I got goose bumps (Seriously !!).

About 10 months back, in early April of 2007, due to a very sad and alarming incident Kathy decided to discontinue writing her blog … I felt her pain and was very sad, I hope she has recovered from that incident and is enjoying life. I miss her blog a lot and even today I spend a good amount of time in its archives, there’s tons of knowledge in there and anyone who is in the business of creating stuff, software or otherwise, should read her articles.

Creating Passionate Users has inspired me in many ways … looking back at 2007, I realized that 2 of her posts played a very important role in my life last year. Most part of last year I was extensively involved in the Adobe Flex community in India .. the motivation of course was that I love Flex and I want the whole world to use it … the source of inspiration were two blog posts by Kathy Sierra …

Just like all Creating Passionate Users’ posts these posts also had some powerful pictures, in the below pictures Kathy explains the importance of “Being Friendly” on community sites … this is one of the key principles that Flex-India has followed over time ..

This is just one example of how much I have been inspired and influenced by Creating Passionate Users … It’s very sad that because of a few disoriented people so many young aspiring individuals like me will loose out on loads of knowledge we could have gained from Kathy’s writings. I am going to leave you all with some of my favorite posts and images from CPU … but before I do that, I would like to thank Kathy for sharing her wisdom with us and I hope that someday she would write again.

Here are a few posts from Creating passionate Users that I love …

Creativity on speed

One of us is smarter than all of us

What comes after usability?

Just-in-time vs. Just-in-case learning

initRIA: Round Up

Mrinal Wadhwa — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 15:25:57 +0000

Last sunday, we from the bangalore flex user group organized initRIA, a conference for Rich Internet Application developers. This was the first RIA focused event in India aimed at giving the RIA community an opportunity to interact and learn. 65 RIA enthusiasts from various parts of the country came (we had registered a 115 people, but I guess many changed their minds, given it was a Sunday morning and the event was free )

My day looked something like this ….

8:00 am: I reached the venue, Anupam, who came all the way from pune had already reached. Saurabh, from Honeywell, the man behind our venue reached soon and we started getting the big conference room at Honeywell set up.

8:30 am: The room was all set, more people started coming in, I was amazed at how many came from outside of Bangalore, I met so many people, we had some very interesting discussions on various RIA related stuff. The video guy arrived and we were all set to record all the talks (i’ll share the videos when ready)

9:30 am: We had about 50 people in the room, we decided we will start in 10 minutes

9:40 am: I introduced my self and requested Abdul to talk a little bit about his experience with Rich internet Applications and were he sees them going in the future.

9:50 am: Raghu started his talk on Data Visualizaions in Flex,he showed some cool examples, you can check out his presentation here

10:50 am: More people had come by now, the room now had about 65 people, Rakshith started his presentation on AJAX titled RIAjaxified, he shared his experince with developing RIAs in AJAX, he explained different techniques of achiving richness and the different frameworks that he has used. I’ll ask him to share his presentation soon.

11:40 am: During the QnA of Rakshith’s session the inevitable question came up, someone asked what is better Flex or AJAX …. many had differnt experiences to share, most experts seemed to have the consensus that both Flex and AJAX have pros and cons, use the right tool for the job, use them together if you need to.

12:00 noon: Yash Mody, who also came all the way from pune, presented an approach to developing RIAs that they follow at Teknopoint Multimedia. I’ll get him to share his presentatiion as well.

1:00 pm: The topic of testing Flex applications came up and Anupam did an impromptu demo of FunFx a flex testing tool that he has been using.

1:15 pm: We broke for lunch, I met more people … Vivek and Mariam from the flashlite world …. Harish from One Big Web … Poonam from Indiagames … Saran and Charan from Redd …. Sumanth, Adarsh and Punnuswamy from InstaColl … Sameer form the flex team … Imai and friend two students who came all the way from Tamil Nadu and many others.

2:00 pm: Now came the highlight of the day, a demo of Live Documents by InstaColl CEO Sumanth. This just blew our minds, it was so good that I’m going to do a whole other post on the Live Documents presentation.

2:40 pm: Bhavin started his presentation on Flash for Flex developers, he explained how he used to make RIAs in Flash before Flex came around, he then showed how flash could still be very usefull in RIA development, he then had a very cool demo of the Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3 … he showed a home designer application that helped customers visualize their future home, the application used both Flash and Flex.

3:40 pm: I started my presentation on Optimizing Flex Applications, you can check out my presentation here. i hope people found it useful.

4:40 pm: Debabrata started his presentation on Caringorm … He explained why he found caringorm helpful, he then went into a detailed description of the architecture, his presentation was very insightful.

5:40 pm: We commenced the Birds of a Feather session and people were invited to propose topics they wanted to discuss.

5:45 pm: Deepak shared an example project and showed how he had used Caringorm and why he found it useful.

5:55 pm: Ravi demoed Zephyr, which is test management system built in Flex, you can get more details of his presentation here

6:15 pm: We were having some very interesting discussions, Harish brought up Bubble Mark, its results are very interesting, he was trying to figure out if the results mean that Silverlight is better at computations than Flash Player .. I am still trying to understand what these results really mean. if you have thought on this subject, do share them.

7:00 pm: We finally called it a day

This was my first time organizing an event and I made many mistakes along the way and I hope to learn from them, if you have feedback do send it to organizers@initria.org

Many others have shared their experiences from initria here, here, here, here, here and here

One last time, I would like to thank our sponsors TeknoPoint Multimedia … Honeywell for the venue and Adobe for the video arrangements.

I’ll keep everyone posted on the status of the video recordings we made, meanwhile check out the pictures Abdul took ….

initRIA: 15 more seats added on public demand

Mrinal Wadhwa — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 18:14:09 +0000

As this is our first time organizing a conference, we are trying to keep the scale of the event in control and hence we had originally planned to have only 100 attendees. We ran out of these seats very quickly … and since then there have been many people who have approached us wishing they could register… so we have now decided to add 15 more seats … if you haven’t registered already, go do it now before the seats run out again.

Note: If you had earlier registered and now cannot attend due to some unforeseen reason, please un-register so that someone else could attend in your place.

See you Sunday.

initRIA: seats exhausted in less than 3 days

Mrinal Wadhwa — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:26:20 +0000

The preparations for initRIA have been going great, we exhausted our 100 seats in less that three days of opening registrations … actually due to a technical glitch on the website we overshot the limit by 7 seats .. so we now have 107 registrations (don’t worry we can handle that) ….. thank you every one who helped spreading the word.

I’m now getting the topic proposals sorted out and planning the schedule out. I’ll keep everyone posted.

initRIA: registeration now open

Mrinal Wadhwa — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 21:36:43 +0000

The much awaited initRIA website is now up and running and registrations are open. As announced earlier, the event has limited seating so hurry up and register.

Incase you haven’t heard of initRIA yet, it is the first of its kind Rich Internet Applications developer conference in India. We, the members of the Bangalore Flex User Group are organizing this conference with the hope of providing a platform for RIA enthusiasts around the country to interact and learn.

The lists of talks is not finalized yet, we will be accepting topic proposals till the 11th of December, so if you have a topic in mind that you would like to talk about, become a speaker at initRIA by sending your topic proposals to organizers@initria.org. You can get more info about this at our FAQs page

The goal is to attract speakers and audience who are interested in different kinds of RIA technologies although till now all the topic proposals that we have received are about the Flash Platform, probably because I personally do not know many experts on other RIA technologies .. so if you know any RIA gurus do try and convince them to share their knowledge at initRIA. If you need any kind of help with this, do write to us at organizers@initria.org.

Lastly, please spread the word, you can use this image that I have used in this article as a promo badge.

See you at initRIA

Introducing initRIA ‘07

Mrinal Wadhwa — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 14:58:33 +0000

What is it?
initRIA is a day long developer conference of Rich Internet Applications enthusiasts organized by the Bangalore Flex User Group. This is the first conference dedicated to Rich Internet Applications in India.

When: ~~Saturday,15th December, 8.30 am onwards~~ Sunday, 16th December, 8.30 am onwards

Where: Honeywell was kind enough to sponsor the event location ..
HoneyWell Technology Solutions (opposite IIM Bangalore)
151/1, Doraisanipalya, Bannerghatta Road,
Bangalore 560076

What topics can be talked about?
The talks can be about any RIA technology … AJAX, Flex, AIR, Silverlight, JavaFx or others. We are hoping to get a good mix of talks on different technologies. The nature of the talks has to technical in nature … this is not a marketing event so no marketing mumbo jumbo please.

How long can a talk be?
55 minutes max … including setup and questions. If you wish you could have talks that are shorter in length.

How many talks?
We are currently looking at 1 track of 8 talks, althought this may change if we get a good number of interesting proposals . Send your topic proposal to organizers@initria.org After we receive your topic a panel of experts will decide if your talk has been selected

Who can speak?
Anyone can submit topic proposals by sending a proposal to organizers@initria.org . After we receive your topic a panel of experts will decide if your talk has been selected. In your proposal please describe in detail the nature of your talk.

Who can attend?
Anyone who is interested in development of Rich Internet Applications. We will soon have a registration website up and running that will allow you to register to attend. As this is our first attempt at organizing something like this the number of attendees is capped at 100. Registrations will be on a first come first serve basis. If you register and later feel that you cannot attend please unregister so that someone else can attend.

To keep track of the registration announcement , subscribe to my blog via rss or email.

How much is the fee to attend?
Its FREE, thanks to our sponsors: TeknoPoint Multimedia and Honeywell

What do I get if I present at the event?
Self satisfaction, a lot of applause, and the gratitude of the community.

Can I blog about this?
Yes of course, although it may be easier for people to find us when our website goes live in a couple of days.

How can i contribute?

1. Become a speaker: share your knowledge with the community

2. Make a logo if you are one of the artistic kinds we are looking for a logo for initRIA, send it across to organizers@initria.org and if we like it we will use it as the official logo of initRIA.

3. Spread the word Tell the whole world about it, get experts on al sorts of RIA technologies to speak and attend.

For suggestions please write to organizers@initria.org

With regards,

Mrinal Wadhwa
Manager, Bangalore Flex User Group

Update: There was a slight change in plans, the event is now on Sunday the 16th
instead of Saturday the 15th, sorry about the confusion.