I'm at the JAOO conference in Aarhus, Denmark. This is the first time I've been to this particular conference, and in fact I'd never heard of it before they invited us to speak, but I'm quite impressed. Aarhus is lovely, the facilities are good, and the selection of talks is excellent.
Contrary to the name (which stands for Java And OO) there's a diverse set of topics. The program says it nicely -- "Historically, JAOO was a Java conference, but times are changing and so are we".
Yesterday I heard a particularly interesting talk from Lars Bak, one of the Self/Strongtalk/Java Hotspot engineers who has now started a company to do small embedded systems in Smalltalk. (He also presented at the ESUG conference). By small embedded systems, he doesn't mean PDA's, which are now looking increasingly like PC's from two or three years ago. He's talking about a 32K VM and full programs that run in 128K. One of his example applications is Bang & Olufsen, who are looking at embedding this sort of program into audio systems -- not in the amplifier, but in the speakers.
Today I listened to Martin Fowler's talk on architecture, which was interesting, but had one particularly nice quote at the end. Someone had asked about Object Databases, and Martin was very positive about them. He'd had a lot of success with object databases in the past, and "I believe that many of the systems we build today in Java would be better built in Smalltalk and Gemstone."
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