JavaZone 2003

I have just recovered from JavaZone 2003. This year was quite good. A lot of good speakers this year.

I had great fun holding my presentation. I didn’t get through my whole program, but I do think people were entertained, and that was all I hoped for. It is a real rush to present for such a crowd.

eXtremeProgramming.no god off to a good start. Along with the other funders, I got to meet Kent Beck. His presentation was very entertaining, and I really wish my boss heard it too.

A lot of the presentations seemed to be on the subject on how to get the domain model back into programming. The two approaches presented were MDA, and a more Aspect-Oriented view. The advantage of MDA is that there are actually working tools supporting it. The problem is that it adds a lot of complexity, and was obviously standardized by people who don’t understand programming! The AOP-related approaches are marred by fact that there is no coordination of the efforts of a lot of different people. But it occurs to me that proponents of the AOP-related approaches understand programming, but the MDA people really don’t. But MDA might be the most complete framework available today.

The “AOP-related” speakers included Richard Öberg (using AOP), Totto (a collection of patterns to avoid obscuring the program by infrastructure code), and Jon Bratseth (the Simplest Possible Infrastructure Framework – spif uses strategically placed interceptors to decouple infrastructure code). Kevlin Henney’s presentation also included a lot of strategies for simplifying programs.

I am hoping to be able to show a more visionary presentation of the full story behind both the MDA, and AOP-based approaches in the future. I feel this is something all developers should care about.

About Johannes Brodwall

Johannes is Principal Software Engineer in SopraSteria. In his spare time he likes to coach teams and developers on better coding, collaboration, planning and product understanding.
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