No, you didn’t miss the day 1 and 2 entries. I didn’t write any. Rather than trying to go through each particular session I attend, I’d rather give a general overview at nearly the halfway point. It’s subject to revision by the end of the conference though.
It’s been my observation that OOPSLA is a great place to come to get a feel for where software development is going on a 5+ year horizon. I recall back at the 2000 OOPSLA in Minneapolis getting a hallway demo of AspectJ from Gregor Kiczales after a BoF. This year, AOP is much more prevalent and has progressed well beyond the typical logging example. I attended a tutorial by Ron Bodkin and Nick Lesiecki that focused on real enterprise applicability of Aspects. They had examples of using it to transition a system from EJB Entity Beans to Hibernate. I was intrigued by an example of adding JMX management to a system via Aspects. I do believe AOP is in the mainstream’s future.
Another topic I’m seeing in various places, tutorials, practitioner reports, etc., is an analysis of what Architecture really is. One tongue in cheek definition given by Douglas Schmidt at a tutorial about the Forgotten Craft of Software Architecture is that architects are those people whose development skills are too oudated to still be developers, but don’t look good enough in suits to be managers. I’m following the thought that architects act as a bit of an O/R mapping layer. Their main job is to handle the impedence mismatch between customers and developers. They work at the highest layer of abstraction, and delegate much of the intra-component design to experienced developers.
That brings up another point — I’ve heard the best definition of the difference between a component and an object here. A component can have more than one interface, while an object has only one. I like that.
More later. Alan Kay’s Turing lecture is this evening. There’s also a BoF about Michael Feather’s Working Effectively with Legacy Code book that I plan to attend. Then there’s also a “party” celebrating the 10th anniversary of the GoF Design Patterns book.
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