Google Developer Day Madrid 2008

Yesterday I went to the Google Developer Day in Madrid. I was lucky because some colleagues filled the request form but they were not accepted by Google. A pity because the event was very interesting. 

The event took place in the Parque de Atracciones de Madrid, which is a popular amusement park.  Some might think that this kind of place is not very appropriate for a technical event, but I think the main auditorium and the small conference rooms were good enough. I saw some people on the rides in the park but I don’t know if they were people attending to the event or not.

The event started at 10.00AM and began with an introduction by Javier Rodriguez Zapatero, the CEO of Google in Spain. He gave a short introduction about how proud he was to be working in Google (he was a former Yahoo Employee) , how he admires engineers and how hard his team has been working to set up the event. He left the stage to Chris DiBona, a editor of slashdot.org and open source evangelist and guru. Chris promotes several projects in code.google.com and he also manages the Google Summer of Code. Just like all the speakers he gave an excellent speech of why Google supports open source and will support open source more and more in the future. The argument he gave was: “Google has grown to what it is thanks to a vast amount of opensource code, so Google wants to give back to the community part of their success opening the code of projects and offering open platforms”. He also mentioned that the bigger the internet, the better for Google. He also introduced the people from Chrome, Android and AppEngine.

Note: I was surprised that more than 50% of the people did not need a translator from English to Spanish to understand the conferences. And this is really, really good for us Spaniards.

I decided to attend to the AppEngine Workshop in the morning, and ‘Startups mentoring’, ‘App Engine’, ‘Android’, and ‘Future of Webapps’ in the afternoon. The AppEngine Workshop was a three hour workshop called ‘The Hackaton’ where we try to develop something using the AppEngine. I have never developed with Python before, so this Hackaton was like a crash course for me in Python and AppEngine technology. The AppEngine is a development framework for python and a runtime environment that can scale ‘a-la-google’ because it uses what makes Google a scalability beast: Big Table and other technologies. If you are familiar with any MVC framework you will get how to develop the web applications with it (because you can only develop web applications: so forget about running your batch processes here!). The access to Big Table is wrapped with a direct mapping of Python database model classes. It’s possible to create 1:1, 1:N and N:M relationships, and all relationships are bi-directional by default. As Mano Marks told me, forget about ORM, there is no relational database underneath, just plain access to Big Table. As a Java Enterprise architect most of the time I’m tied to one or more relational databases in my projects, so it sounded to me like something risky (explosive growth of objects in ORM is quite normal) but he told me it was not a problem. Well, until I can test it in details this is will be a question of faith in the Google Engineers.

After the workshop came the lunch and then I realized how big the event was: hundreds of hungry developers fighting for french fries and meat like it was the first time they had eaten in days. Probably next year it would be a good idea to schedule several groups for lunch time. BTW, less than 40′ of lunch time in Spain? Imposible! And without an expresso afterwards? No way!

My first event in the afternoon was the ‘Startups Mentoring’ performed by Eduardo Manchón, co-founder of Panoramio. The room was incredibly crowded and I had to stand up at the back of the room. The conference talk was focused on how to make your web site or community to become a successful product. The goal is ‘let people use your site to create a community, don’t try to drive them, they will drive you’. And believe me that Eduardo is one of the most incredible Spaniard speakers I have met in years (the conference was in spanish and english). He said that there is room for ‘micro-companies’ of two or three people that can live thanks to adsense.

Later on I went back to the main auditorium to listen to the AppEngine speech by Mano Marks. The speech focused on the capabilities of the AppEngine and the future. Google will charge a small fee for more processing power, storage and hits therefor allowing successful projects to grow. As I mentioned, AppEngine currently only supports Python and people kept asking Mano which languages would be supported in the future – the Spanish members of the audience were especially interested in Java. He did not say which languages will be supported, but he said that there is a language that it will be not supported: COBOL

The next talk was performed by Mike Jennings and was about Google Android. The first part of the speech was about the architecture of Android. Android is a Linux based platform for smartphones that implements a Java Virtual Machine named Dalvik which allows the execution of vast set of applications in ‘User mode’ on any device. It comes to fix the problem of fragmentation of operating systems and JVM implementations of the mobile market. The platform is opensource and it is given for free to any device manufacturer. The second part of the speech he showed a demo of the SDK (1.0 was released this week).  If you are familiar with Java and Eclipse developing for this device looks really easy, specially compared with the nightmare of Java ME development.

And finally in my opinion the jewel of the crown, the best presentation so far: The future of Webapps by Dion Almaer. Dion Almaer is one of the gurus of web development and founder of the site of reference Ajaxian. He said a lot of interesting things, but he emphasized on how interactivity and visual design come hand in hand, and you have to consider both to have a successful project. If you are a developer you should delegate the visual design and interactivity to experts and focus on the technicall stuff. He also talked about the evolution of the browsers and how their improvements will bring a new age to the web after ten years of darkness. He also gave an overview of some of the key JavaScript libraries.

There was a party later on but I could not attend: a pity because everything everybody was in a hurry during all day and looked like the perfect place for networking. Did you go the party?