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.