OOPSLA - Day three

The morning keynote on creativity was okay but marred by a couple of gratuitous political comments. The wikipedia talk provided some interesting insights into what is free like images of art work from museums.

But Sussman's talk sparked my old love of Lisp and Scheme. One of his ideas is getting children exposed to programming as a language for expressing ideas is interesting. He also thinks more like an engineer in that creativity does not just spring out of nowhere and solve a problem but it needs some training to help the mind focused. Later Foote talked about the history of programming in a way only he can do. Again the idea of dynamic versus static languages came up. I too miss Lisp and Smalltalk. And I have to say, for well trained software engineers the type system seems could be more overhead that it is worth. Now off to a another meeting on sharing past OOPSLA memories.

OOPSLA 2005 - Day two

Well, I am falling behind on updating my thoughts. Mainly because it more fun to network here than to write. This day was two tutorials - one on type systems and one on domain driven design (DDD). Both good - I now know more about type systems and the problems inside Java than I did before. Also, DDD is something I believe in easily from a mentoring a OO project many years ago. There we spent a little extra time up front learning the domain and then wrote the domain later first. The team, at the end of the project, commented that if we had not done this they would still be coding.

Now back to the Wikipedia talk.

OOPSLA 2005 - Day one

Well, things are looking up. The tutorial by Joseph Yoder on Adaptive Architectures was very good and just-in-time. My client wants to add some a new feature and this technique is very good fit. The downside seems to be the lack of tool support and the use of hash tables (something I personally don't like) but the upside is the addition of additional items could be user controlled.

The roots of the adaptive architecture seem to stretch back to the analysis patterns from Fowler which I read back in '98.

Also seems to be some similarities with the Cocoa framework that I will look at in later blog.

OOPSLA 2005 - Day zero

This was my travel day and it had lots of mishaps. Security at our airport does not post any signs stating you should take your computer out of its brief case and put it in a separate bin and they only get you when the screener sees it on the x-ray. So my stuff got another round trip through scanning. Good thing we had lots of time. Then the rental car pickup took almost 30 minutes and the first car had a slow leak in the tire. All toll it took 2 hours to get from the airport to the hotel - about 10 minutes with a cab. Then the hotel had suffered a power outage during the day and their computers where still down. Big line at checkin and we got the wrong room.

I have had good things come from bad starts. So I am hopeful.

EJB3

First impression of EJB3 -> This can make enterprise programming fun again. But ...

We have been using EJB3 on a project now for about six weeks. it has saved us a lot of time compared to hand coding or using XDoclet but it still not a cake walk. The @Entity is the easy part. The harder part is figuring out exactly how we want the @OneToMany and @ManyToOne relations to work. Also debugging is a bit tricker. We are using the JBossIDE which is not as nice as eclipse JSR220 plugin but it did not support our DB - Postgres. JBoss 4.0.3 final just came out we are hoping it does solve some of the problems or that we get a better insight. More thought later ...

OOPSLA 2005

The 20th anniversary of the OOPSLA conference is this year. This is a great conference for any one interested in object oriented programming. I started OOP with Lisp and then moved to Smalltalk then to Java. I dabble in Ruby and a long time ago in Neon (Forth). It is great to be at a conference is not about a language as much as about the concept and also about how to do it better. Great research reports and great presentations from people in the trenches. Lots of good tutorials from basic to advanced topics. I will be there - see my schedule.

First Ramble

Well it is high time I started a blog. I just downloaded ecto for creating entries. Hope this works - I have seen a lot great recommendations and the price is good. I wonder if this software has RSS feed feature?