Google Developer Day 2009

Introduction

Yesterday I visited Google Developer Day in Moscow. It is a conference held by Google every year.

This year it took place in movie theatre "October". It is a big cinema situated on the New Arbat street. I got there at 9:00 while the registration had already started. 

There was a huge crowd of people queueing at the registration desk. I immediately noticed that the most guys in the queue were as old as I am. There were many students, they were discussing their teachers and examsessions. Also there were many conversations about Linux, iPhone, netbooks and phones. Thus the conference had already begun here, in queue before registration desk.

To my mind the registration process was the only thing that had been organized badly. Five or six girls were executing registration of participants. After registration each participant received a badge, a pen, a schedule of the conference and a map of cinema. And the map was necessary because "October" has 4 floors and 9 cinema halls.

Having succeded with registration I went to the second floor. There were many different and tasty cookies offered to participants. Also one could drink a cup of tea or coffee. At 11 o'clock everybody was invited to the 1st cinema hall where the Opening ceremony was about to begin.

Opening ceremony

Google Developer day is a conference for developers, for programmers who had come there to improve their skills. And Google clearly understands it. So on the Opening ceremony there was no music, no songs, no dancing, etc. In the beginning some greeting words were said. The rest of the ceremony was dedicated to an overview of the modern Web and Google development technologies. Here are my impressions of this overview.

• Web is a platform
  

At first, my notification. There were many people with mobile devices: laptops, nettops, iPhones, Android phones, etc. I don't understand what are these devices for on the conference. On sessions many people were browsing Internet instead of listening to the speaker. On the first session I attended there was a girl sitting next to me and investigating Moscow's restaurants. Others were using QIP Infium, Skype or Twitter. It seemed that these people had come to a party not to the developer's conference. But... I want to say another thing. 

All these people were using different operating systems. Somebody had Vista or Windows 7, somebody was running Ubuntu and of course there was a handful of MacBooks. What I noticed is that the amounts of Windows, Linux and MacOS users were quite the same. And everybody was using Internet.

This proves one of the Google's statements. The war of platforms is over. And the winner is ... Web. It is better to develop a web-application that is usable on any platform than to create it for a particular platform and lose users of other ones. So Web is a platform. Moreover, it must be the goal platform for modern developers because it has been growing for last years with a great speed. And Google provides developers with many very powerful and flexible tools.

• HTML 5

One of the tools mentioned is HTML 5. Two Googlers had told us what's new in HTML 5 and shown some examples.

• AppEngine & Google Web Toolkit

Participants were shown an example how using these two tools one can create a simple Echo-server with a few mouse clicks in Eclipse. AppEngine and GWT help users create rich and scalable web-applications.

• Google Wave

Very powerful collaboration tool. It lets users to communicate with instant messages and messages like e-mails, publish images by dragging and dropping them onto a wave-form and edit a file together at the same time. Two funny Wave-developers presented us all these features.

What's new in geoservices

After the ceremony had finished the sessions began. Here is a program of the conference. Unfortunately the halls in which the sessions had been held had different capacity. So at some sessions people had to sit on the floor.

The first two sessions I attended were "What's new in geo-services" 101 and 201. Jean-Francois Wassong told about what Google Maps API gives to a developer. It is really exciting, what powerful geo-applications one could create with such an API.

Also there were presentations of 2 Russian projects: Wikimapia and GdeEtotDom. These presentations were interesting but didn't impress me a lot.

How to create your own business on the Internet 

It was the session I had been looking forward. Limvirak Chea was going to give some advices to those who is organizing own start-up. Unfortunately, he didn't give us a recipe how to become a millionaire tomorrow. 

I didn't hear anything new to me. All the things he was talking about I had already known. But it doesn't matter. This session was very useful for me because it was a comprehensive description of a start-up creation. To hear about known things in complex is much more useful than to learn them separately.

Mobile & Web

For me the most exciting sessions were those held by Reto Meier. He is a Google's developer advocate and one of the leaders of Android development team. He wrote a book "Professional Android Applications Development". His first report was about modern relations between Mobile and Web technologies. He tried to answer what is better: to develop web-applications or to develop applications for a mobile platform.

The main advantage of web-development is that web-applications could run on any mobile device. If you created an application for a mobile platform you would have to write another version of it to support another one.

The other issue of the session was the description of the difference between mobile phones and laptops. During last months I often have been hearing an opinion that now there is no difference between a small computer and a big phone. But on the session there was another statement announced. Mobile phones and laptops ARE different. And the differences are (unfortunately I don't remember them all):

• laptops have large screens and on a mobile device one has to think of each pixel;
• usually we work with a laptop in quiet situations sitting at a table or holding it on knees, mobile is often used in motion when one is going somewhere and could use only one hand to operate with it;
• as a consequence of the previous statement when a laptop's battery is discharged one could usually use a plug and continue working; when mobile's battery loses it's charge we rarely have a charger and a plug ready at hand;
• modern mobiles have GPS-chips, compass and a connection with cell-towers while laptops don't; this lets a mobile to be a powerful navigator;
• when you are working with a laptop you are anonymous because you can always say that in a particular moment not you were using it; when you are using a mobile you always can be identified with your SIM-card.

The last statement caused much arguing and I don't understand it completely. But all of them do show that mobile devices are not tiny laptops. 

Due to described differences one can decide that mobile applications are not just lite versions of PC's ones. They open a new world for developers and users.

Android

My major goal on the conference was to learn about modern state of Android applications development, to know what the perspectives are and to meet active Android developers. I can say that I have accomplished this goal.

There was an exhibition stand with Samsung's Android phone called Galaxy. Everyone could try it. After getting some experience with Galaxy I put it back on the stand and decided that it is the slowest and the most unintuitive phone I've ever used. I was discouraged and disappointed. The mobile platform I thought would be the best in future is absolutely unusable.

Fortunately, my disappointment was temporary. Guys that also were trying Samsung Galaxy showed me their HTC Hero, HTC Dream and T-Mobile G1. These devices are wonderful. They have convenient home screen and very responsive. I saw some cool 3rd party applications on these devices and returned to think that Android is future. Probably, Galaxy phones are good too but those presented on the stand were not fine-tuned.

I was happy to have a conversation with Reto Meier. I complained that SDK reference documentation is sometimes poor and doesn't describe how to use some classes. His answer was: "OK, thank you for your message. I know the documentation is not perfect and is being developed further. The more developers complain on the documentation the faster it will be improved".

To my mind he was the most popular man on the conference. There were no vacant seats on his reports. When the conference had been finished a dozen of developers were following him asking questions and listening to his answers. His was happy to have such a hot conversation. And I was among that dozen of guys.

I also learned that there are many Android developers in Moscow. I met with real fans that have ideas and plans about what applications would improve Android. I took their contacts and plan to get into connection with them in the near future.

Conclusion

I am happy that I attended Google Developer Day. For me this day was as long as a week. I've known about the modern state Web and Mobile development and met interesting people. Such events are very useful because they give an opportunity to share experience with others and find  people that think in the same way as you.

Thank you, Google for organizing such an exciting event. Thank you, Mikhail for giving me an opportunity to visit it.