Thursday, November 06, 2008

EclipseWorld 2008 Highlights

Here are the highlights of my attendance of EclipseWorld 2008:

Day 1:

Gave a lightning talk about Glimmer and attended Patterns Epiphanies JET tutorial

Day 2:

Demoed Glimmer and attended "Developing AJAX Applications for iPhone and iPod Touch", "Java EE Architecture Shoot-Out", and Ivar Jacobson's keynote speech.

Ivar is by the way the father of "components" and Unified Process. Right now, he is promoting the idea of practice-based development. The way I understand it is it's a methodology that encourages developers to gradually improve their process by adapting practices from XP, scrum, unified process, and any other process that may have helpful practices. This is a departure from the prescriptive nature that most of software development processes had in the past.

Other points mentioned by Ivar Jacobson:
  • The software industry is very fashion oriented. 2 yrs ago companies wanted XP. Today it's Scrum. They are missing the point.
  • Mr Supposedly Agile does no architecture; just code and refactor later. FAIL! Mr Enterprise Architect architects everything up-front. FAIL! A little bit of architecture is important, but not too much.
  • But, architecture without executable code is a hallucination. Start with small code and refactor the architecture in small increments.
  • Whatever you do you are not done until you have verified that you did what you wanted to do.
Day 3:

Gave my two long talks: "Looking Good! Polishing Eclipse Applications" and "Practical Design Patterns for Rich Client Development"


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