JavaPolis 2005 - Day 5 - Final Day
Okay, well here is my summary of the final day of JavaPolis. As with most conferences the final day is rather short, only 4 sessions and no keynotes. This is because there are lots of people that have to travel in order to be home for the weekend. And actually, as you’ve been attending sessions as religiously as I did, you have so much information overload already, that you can’t wait to get home and start experimenting with all of the stuff that you’ve seen and learned in the past week. In my case, returning home is not an option yet, as my wife comes over to Antwerp and we will be spending the rest of the weekend there! Normally on vacations, or short holidays, I never bring a laptop (or should I say: am not allowed to bring a laptop ;o) so for my wife’s sake I hope I can stay off the ‘java’ for a few days.
Anyway here are some of the highlights of the sessions that I attended today:
Web Service Architectures by Dennis Sosnoski – I already went to the university session that Dennis did on Monday, but in this session he concentrated on differences between SOAP and REST and gave lots of good advice on how to implement XML based Web Services in a SOA from a developer’s point of view. As I have been giving this kind of talks myself I was really interested in what Dennis had to say and fortunatelly its good to see that we agree on most subjects. Make sure you grab a copy of his slides when they become available on the wiki, because this is good stuff! (Even if you’re not a Java developer)
Agile Model Driven Development by Scott W. Ambler – this was one feast of a presentation with Scott Ambler (equipped with a cowboy head) ranting about BRUF or Big Requirements Up Front. On his first slide he warned about being ‘blunt’, and indeed there were some great soundbites that could get you into big trouble if you let them loose on a typical customer ;o) However, if you read between the lines, there is a lot of truth in what Scott is trying to bring to our attention. I was actually amazed how ‘agile’ I work already! I will definitely look in more detail at the Agile methodology, as there are lots of things in it that are appealing to me. Lately I have been doing mostly RUP-based projects and unfortunatelly with mixed results. Some of those projects are just a big pile of documentation. As RUP is all about tailoring the methodology to your needs, I guess I will put in some more agile concepts in my next project.
Database Refactoring by Scott W. Ambler – in fact I liked Scott’s first talk so much that I stayed for the next one, that introduced the concept of database refactoring. Mostly he talked about data-world and objects-world impedance mismatch, which was entertaining but really about reality in many ways. Once again, some stuff to think about for my next project.
Web 2.0 with Macromedia Flex by Waldo Smeets – at first I wasn’t really sure whether I would like to attend a vendor specific session, but once in the session and seeing the impressive RIA demos I had no regret whatsoever. Waldo also showed the new Flex Builder plugin for Eclipse that can be used to develop applications for the Macromedia platform. Although its not exactly my cup of tea, this kind of RIA stuff might come in handy as a front-end for some applications one day, and being an architect its simply my job to know about this stuff’s strengths and weaknesses.
Allright and with that the JavaPolis 2005 has officially come to an end. So will my reporting. Gotta run to pick up my wife from the railwaystation…