Nigel Bakker's SOA Soapbox

By Nigel Bakker

23 November 1999

Denver, CO, USA was the venue for OOPSLA’ 99[1], the worlds premier event on Object Technology. It brings together the top practitioners and researchers of Object Technology from around the world.

PASSION!

OOPSLA is about passion. Passion for developing applications following the one-true-way. It’s a time and place where like minded people gather together to talk, debate and explore Object Technology and techniques. Its primary focus is disseminating knowledge and sharing ideas that contribute to improving the quality of software built using object technology.

Thinker, Doers and Teachers

Probably the most striking feature of OOPSLA that differentiates it from other conferences on Object Technology is that it is not a commercial event. It attracts almost equal numbers of top academia and top professionals, including a significant number of the industries gurus. It is an opportunity for those using and implementing object technology to exchange new ideas, challenge the old and push the limits of current practices.

DesignFest

Each year, participants can volunteer to join a DesignFest team. Each team is presented with a design problem that they have never seen before. The team must explore the problem and generate design that can be coded up by the CodeFest team. We joined a team this year with interesting results. The team had 9 people! Talk about too many cooks… It was a thoroughly enjoyable, and somewhat amusing experience. That 9 people, meeting for the first time can produce a coherent design in four hours is questionable at best. We did manage to get enough out for our CodeFest team to work with, although some imagination and courage was required by them. They produced a working version of the system we designed, whether it looked anything like the design under the covers will never be known!

Panels

Panel discussions are a feature of OOPLSA and this year was no exception with topics ranging from “Are Components Objects” to “XML and Object Technology”. Panellists included such notables as Grady Booch, Martin Fowler, Kent Beck and James Odell to name but a few. These panel discussions are interesting since the experts seldom agree. This provides a unique opportunity to hear the arguments for and against and make up your own mind. If you disagree with any of the panellists, there is ample time at the evening social events to buttonhole them and debate the issue with them face-to-face.

Guest Speakers

Each year, OOPLSA invites a number of people, both from the industry and from outside to come and address the conference. This year speakers included Dan Ingalls of Walt Disney Imagineering, Mathew Fuchs of CommercOne who was one of the original specifiers of XML and James Burk, a well known Science Historian and television host/producer.

Tutorials

During the two days prior to the conference proper as well as running parallel to the conference the tutorials are presented. OOPSLA is famous for the quality and depth of the tutorials, where experts in their particular fields come and present a half-day or full-day session. These sessions aim to provide accelerated learning around specific areas of object technology.

This year saw the largest number of tutorials ever presented at OOPLSA, with over 80 tutorials being presented during the 5-day period. It also saw two South Africans presenting tutorials, namely the authors of this article. This was first time South Africans have presented tutorials at OOPLSA in its 14 year history.

Topics included Writing Effective Use Cases, Automating Testing in Java, Distributed Object Programming using CORBA, Design Patterns, Analysis Patterns, Refactoring Existing Code etc, etc.

If you want to fast track a particular area of Object Technology, then this is the place to be.

The BoFs

The Birds-of-a-feather sessions are informally arranged meetings that take place after hours. These sessions are where people with a common interest in a particular topic gather together to talk about issues and ideas. Two of note were a testing BoF where the authors of some of the now famous open source unit testing frameworks JUnit, SUnit and CPPUnit were present to get ideas and feedback from some of the users of these products.

A BoF on Extreme Programming, a new high discipline, low formality development process invented by Kent Beck, Ron Jefferies and others was also held. This one was somewhat less formal than usual and took place at one of the hotel bars!

The Hanging Jury

A good bit of fun was had when the authors of the now famous (in OO circles) book, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Software were put on “trial”. The charges included: Training novices to behave like experts and an utter disregard for academic originality.

Erich Gamma, John Vlissides and Ralph Johnson (Ralph Johnson was apparently serving time elsewhere) were led into the courtroom in chains. The prosecution, led by Kent Beck (and assisted by a less than impartial judge, Neil Harrison) called witness after witness to testify against the nefarious Gang-of-Four in support of the cooked up charges. The defence, led by a harried Martin Fowler only managed to conjure up a few witnesses prepared (or perhaps paid) to testify in the accused’s defence.

The verdict was overwhelming: Guilty and proud of it.

Who’s who?

The thing that makes OOPLSA the premier Object Technology event of the calendar is the calibre people who attend the conference. It is a gathering place for the top minds in the industry, where the gurus come together to thrash out ideas and push the limits. As attendees these people are accessible during the breaks and especially at the evening social functions, where the food is good, the drinks are on the house and the conversations are stimulating beyond belief.

We had the opportunity to have a somewhat rowdy dinner with notables such as Alistair Cockburn, Martin Fowler and Ron Jefferies. Also around and about at the conference were the three amigos, Grady Booch, Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh. Three of the above mentioned Gang-of-Four, were also present throughout.

We were privileged enough to meet and chat to people such as Kent Beck, Robert Martin (Editor of C++ Report), Michael Feathers and Martin Griss (Co-author of a book on software re-use with Ivar Jacobson and an expatriate South African) to name but a few.

South Africa @ OOPLSA

As South Africans, we tend to suffer from a national inferiority complex and have the belief that the rest of the world is ahead of us in the technology game. Not true!

Many South African were at OOPSLA this year as contributors as well as attendees. Miranda Jansen van Rensburg of Techinicon South Africa was a poster this year, with a posting entitled Pitfalls and Guidelines in the Transition to Object Technology.

Judith Bishop of the University of Pretoria and Joshua Okuthe of the University of Transkei were also posters with Performance Comparison of object models for web based distribution.

As mentioned earlier Nigel Bakker and Chris Nel of CCH Sofware Futures, presented a half-day tutorial Automating Software Testing in Java using Beans and Reflection, while Nigel Bakker presented another half-day tutorial Distributed Object Programming using Java and CORBA

In addition to these people, there were several South Africans who came for the experience. We counted 11 in total, though we may have missed some.

Who’s afraid of the year 2K?

The y2k issue was not even on the agenda at OOPLSA this year. The only mention it got in fact was that OOPSLA 2K will be in Minneapolis, Minnesota during October 2000. See you there!

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[1] The Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems and Applications, held under the auspices of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), Special Interest Group for Programming Languages (SIGPLAN). For info on the next event surf to www.acm.org/sigplan/oopsla