Hitchhiker's Guide to Software Architecture and Everything Else - by Michael Stal

Saturday, January 24, 2004

OOP 2004

OOP 2004 was fine
I am back again after a long time. To be honest, I really had no time left for maintaining this site. Now, it is time to continue my blog.
Last week I attended OOP 2004 conference here in Munich. I heard different opinions about the event: some told me they found it excellent while others were a little bit "surprised" by the hot topics this year. There were a lot of talks on issues such as agility, UML 2.0, design, architecture, MDA. The ratio between technology based talks and those dealing with modelling and processes had its focus on the first area this year. Yes, I have also been involved giving talks and moderating a panel. I gave a full day tutorial on explaining .NET to Java programmers, and further talks on Patterns in .NET as well as EJB 2.1. The panel dealt with XML and Web services Standards. It addressed the issue of benefitting from the standards while avoiding the pitfalls. David Booth (HP, W3C), Jon Bosak (Sun, OASIS), and Richard Soley (CEO/Chairman of OMG) were the panelists. The panelists agreed that it is still difficult for programmers and managers to rely on existing standards. Points addressed were among many others IPRs, the lack of standards for semantic information, and the problem of conflicting standard organizations. Anyone interested in more details may just send me an e-mail. I personally could only attend a few other talks. My highlights were definitely Kevlin (Henney) talking about interface design and Martin (Fowler)'s Keynote where he addressed the design issue of implicit and explicit dependencies.
BTW: If you are interested in meeting me this year. I'll be PC member (tutorial chair) of WICSA taking place in parallel with this year's ECOOP in Oslo. And I am PC member of Middleware 2004 (Toronto) which means that I will also attend OOPLSA 2004 in Vancouver one week later.