OOP 2008 lectures

As I promised recently, I'm going to share a couple of thoughts concerning the lectures I had pleasure (mostly) to attended during OOP 2008.

• Model driven development for embedded systems with Eclipse

It was a whole day workshop, where we tried MDSD principles with Eclipse for embedded devices. It had a lot of fun, but it had no real relevancy to my daily work.

• SOA@T-Mobile

4 guys from T-Mobile spoke about implementing a world-wide SOA solution at T-Mobile. Here are some interesting facts. Technically, they took TIBCO products as ESB. Web Services developed in Java and used Oracle BPEL Process Manager from the Oracle Fusion Middleware as a BPEL engine (an were very impressed by it). Unfortunately they told very little about Governance, which is a crucial topic in SOA. After my questions I have learned that the decision to switch to SOA was adopted by top management and pure guys had first to struggle about it. But my personal feeling is it is a happy story and they are on the good way (with top management support I would not expect other result).

• Common Sense over Conservatism – is Ruby on Rails ready for the enterprise?

The speaker (pretty smart) tried for 3/4 h to answer this question without slides. It was tough. He rephrased the question like "is an enterprise ready for Ruby?". And answered both questions in the affirmative. My personal opinion, I won't use it. The pros to adopt another programming language are not persuasive enough to me. Maybe it's a good (even the best) scripting language, but it's still a scripting language - nothing for real enterprise developers.

• MDSD und SOA und BPM – how does it match?

For me it does not match even after attending this lecture. It was not really enjoyable.

• Model driven product line engineering
• Spring or EJB 3.0 - two light weights in comparison
• REST: the architecture of the Web as a basis for SOA

REST is in any case worth a glance. I think it's a very interesting technology, well not really a technology, but rather a way to organize information resources. What REST is can be found in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REST. The speaker tried the whole time to oppose REST to Web Services. Throw away the WS and take REST and the world will get better. I have to disagree at this point. As for me REST has some real handicaps in comparison with WS. Speaking of WS as pure RPC calls, maybe yes, there is too much overhead like WSDL, UDDI, etc. But all emerging supplementary WS-* technologies like transactions, security, reliability, collaboration, etc. is something, that REST does not provide. And there is no clear contract between provider and consumer like with WS. REST simplicity and transparency, that even a child could understand its principles is very impressive. But I think technologically SOA with WS much more progressive and seminal.

• Case Study: The New Guardian.co.uk

For those who want to know - yes it's Java with a broad open source software stack, like Spring, Hibernate and Velocity. It was developed in Jetty and deployed in Resin.

• Panel: what comes after SOA?
• OSGi: Universal Middleware
• Building and consuming RESTful JSON services with Apache CXF and Google Web Toolkit

It was a basic tutorial how to build WS, that can be consumed by Google gadgets - not something really interesting for the enterprise, but rather for hobby developers. (what I also do :-)

• Better software due to AOP
• Java multi threading with multi core CPUs

The core of this lecture are new features in Java 1.5, which were forced in background by generics and co. It's worth to take a look at it for those, who want to benefit from multi core functionality of the new CPUs. Here just a couple of keywords to this topic: JSR 166, java.util.concurrency package.