At the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium in Arlington Heights, a Chicago suburb not too far away from where I live. Quality of speakers and selection of topics generally excellent. Some things I have learned so far:
- Message-Driven Beans are not that hard to write and may be more useful than their overhyped counterparts (*cough* entity beans *cough*). They should only be considered if the client does not care when it happens (as long as it does) and security is not a huge concern.
- Hibernate looks like a kick-ass persistence framework. (It's another case of how well reflection can be used to configure infrastructure code for a particular application
- EasyMock makes it easy to add mock objects to enable unit testing on code that would otherwise be too closely coupled with something awkward.
- Learning tests are possibly the most natural way for a programmer to learn a new API, a new technique or even a new language. Diving into an unknown API with a good IDE such as Eclipse can produce surprisingly good results and if you keep your tests you have your knowledge in executable form.
- Naked Objects are in some ways a return to the roots of object-oriented programming. By avoiding extra layers (such as Model-View-Controller), the Naked Objects approach also avoids the diffusion of business logic through those layers. It looks promising for exploring the domain with fairly sophisticated customers and the effort looks low enough that you could call it prototyping.
- [This is more opinion, but something I can agree with.] The other engineering disciplines, the ones that we envy for their rigour and standardization, are not necessarily as far ahead as we might think. For example, the engineering models of bridges were grossly deficient as recently as the 1940s. (However, attempts to make software engineering a profession with certification are grossly premature.)
Inevitably, the subject of Outsourcing/Offshoring came up during the first panel discussion. Ted Neward had an interesting angle. He reckons this is one of the cycles the industry goes through, where management tries their version of a sliver bullet, something that will make everything cheaper with no nasty side effects. (The last time it was contracting: every company tried to staff projects with contractors only.) In a couple of years management will see the side effects for themselves. (In the case of contractors, the side effect was the pain of losing institutional memory inside the company.) At this stage, it becomes less of a bandwagon and companies decide based on more rational criteria when it makes sense to do development offshore and when it doesn't.