OOP 2010: Day 4
My start into the fourth day of OOP was hard core techie stuff again: “REST with Java” by Stefan Tilkov. Great overview what it is about, what are its implications on architecture, available tools & libraries etc. He managed to cover a lot of ground in his talk but even 90 min was too short. Stefan used to be a dyed-in-the-wool web service advocate. However, experience has taught him that web services have some serious issues (e.g. protocol independence) and REST is way better to do SOA. Or maybe as a book author you always have to ride the bow wave… He was very convincing, though. Still, web services are not obsolete all of a sudden. Existing interfaces are easier to expose as a web service but for new interfaces a REST approach should be considered. Last but not least, JAX-RS (the Java API for REST) is a nice example of the power of annotations in Java (much nicer than bean validation annotations).
The second talk was about “Model-driven renovation of a legacy system“. The German flight control has a simulation system for training and evaluation purposes. It is built in C++ and Java, has been devloped over the past 15 years and its architecture has deteriorated to the point that it is hardly maintainable. Using the openArchitectureWare toolset (now part of the Eclipse Modeling Project) they were able to factorize all entity definitions and just generate (semantically equivalent) C++ or Java code. Interestingly enough, they first used MagicDraw to draw UML diagrams which then were fed to OpenArchitectureWare. They soon had to realize that drawing UML was the wrong way and resorted to a DSL (which is the forte of OpenArchitectureWare anyway). The domain logic is still handcoded but clean entity definitions paved the way for substantially improving the architecture.
Robert C. Martin (also known as Uncle Bob) who is one of the most prominent figures in OO and Agile presented two talks today. One was about “The Polyglot Craftsman” and the other was titled “S.O.L.I.D. – fifteen years later“. Listening to Uncle Bob is like watching American TV, very funny, entertaining, but little information. The only obvious difference was the fact, that American TV is more colorful and animated than Uncle Bob (although he keeps walking on the stage during his entire presentation): for the first talk he just used a single slide with the title of the talk. Furthermore, he seems to be an astronomy geek because he started both talks with some astronomy topic (for at least 10 min each) which had hardly anything to do with the topic he was supposed to talk about.
The conference concluded with two more presentations. The first one was a vendor talk by Adobe: “RIA: Productivity by Design“. Awful presentation, confusing and badly prepared demos, hardly scratching the surface of the topic. Quite some people left well before the end of the presentation. The last presentation I attended was about Pattern Testing. The topic was interesting, but I didn’t like the presentation style and he could have told the most essential bits and pieces in less than half of the time he spent. The last day of the conference was not as good as the previous three days.
Overall, the OOP was well beyond my expectations, though: broad range of interesting topics, mostly excellent speakers, perfect venue with great infrastructure and superb food. The only thing to criticize (apart from my rare bad luck in picking presentations) was the lack of Internet connectivity which is a bit of a shame for an IT conference. WLAN was available but at 30 Euros for 8 hours (they must be kidding).
