talk on tuesday 4/29

[william....@gmail.com]

The Mathematics and Computer Science Department presents a joint
colloquium with the CompCore BrownBag SeminarSeries:


Applications For the Masses, By The Masses

Tuesday, April 29, 2008, 12:00 pm, VBT 217
Prakash Narayan, Sun Microsystems
Prakash Narayan has responsibilities as a Senior Engineering Manager
at Sun Microsystems where he has been looking at enabling a social
networking paradigm for application development. Prakash was employed
at Sun Microsystems for 15+ years. At Sun, he initially worked on
providing solutions for High Performance Computing - debugging and
analysis tools for multi-threaded and multi-process applications.
Subsequently, Prakash worked on Enterprise Java tools. Prakash has
filed for several patents and is a co-author of a book on Service
Oriented Architectures published by Prentice Hall. Prakash holds a
Masters in Computer Science from IIT, Delhi and a Bachelors in
Electrical Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology & Science
(BITS), Pilani, India.
ABSTRACT
When software engineers normally think of applications, they think of
elaborate technology that takes weeks, months, or years to develop and
debug by highly trained developers. In this era of lightspeed boom and
bust, the demand for technology is higher than ever before, and
engineers and their traditional development techniques simply can't
keep up. What are needed are "disposable applications", applications
so quick and easy to write that they are cheaper to throw away than to
maintain, and which the increasing numbers of casual technologists can
consume and even create themselves.

Fueling this demand in recent months have been the release of high-
profile Web platforms (like Facebook, Ning, Meebo, and others) where
increasingly non-technical users can compose mashups and other social
and situational applications out of widgets and RESTful-style Web
services, all built using lightweight technologies, and composed right
from the browser.

In this talk, we describe how these factors are coming together to
produce a new paradigm of application development, where hordes of 16-
year-olds are in charge and software engineers are overwhelmed by the
flood of applications created by tech-savvy novices. We'll also
examine the roles of high technology versus technology for the masses,
and show that they are actually complementary and a boon to both
engineers and non-engineers alike.

Throughout the talk, we will illustrate our perspective by using
cutting-edge, browser-based development tools to build widgets,
services, mashups, Facebook and OpenSocial applications, and more. So,
Web 2.0 is a critical part of the DNA of this product, not just in
terms of AJAX UIs, but in its development and application models.

Most importantly, we'll give you a first look at a new website backed
by Sun and a partnership of high-profile Web companies, that allows
masses of casual technologists to build applications for themselves,
in minutes or hours, from the comfort of their browser.

Refreshments will be served.