Recap JSpring 2009
June 18, 2009Keynote – Agile@Atlassian – How do we do it?
Good keynote by Sherali Karimov that not only told how Atlassian employs agility, but also gave some pointers on how to implement it in your own company. (Unfortunately I can’t find any slides, but their website seems to offer some of the same content.)
Het modelleren van een canoniek datamodel mbv XML Schema (Modelling a canonical data model using XML Schema)
Dutch presentation by Linda Terlouw about what a canonical data model is and how to implement it with XML Schema. In short a canonical data model is a shared data format for exchanging data between services. It is meant to prevent the rise of lots of translations between all the individual data formats, allowing you to only need to translate your own data to the canonical format. We were also warned that a canonical data model, which models only what is necessary to share information, isn’t the same as a corporate data model, which models all information in the company. A distinction was made between hierarchical and relational models, and it was explained how XML Schema supported both of these options, along with all the pros and cons.
Geef je code wat liefde (Give your code some love)
Dutch presentation by Rob Westgeest and Willem van den Ende from QWAN about how code becomes more maintainable if you give it some love by refactoring. The bottom line is that with small refactorings in the order of ten minutes work, can save you the five minutes you need to read a method. (Which you would need to do again and again.) Presentations by QWAN are always highly entertaining and informative.
Keynote – Mod4j: Open Source Modelling for Java Developers
Another good keynote that introduced Mod4j, presented by Jos Warmer. I was almost surprised to hear that a partner at Ordina still got his hands dirty on code. So it was the right kind of sales pitch, and for an open source product too! Mod4j stands for Modeling for Java, and it is an open source DSL-based environment for developing administrative enterprise applications. (Again there were unfortunately no slides, so I had to take that quote off their website.) At the time of speaking the product wasn’t finished yet, as they weren’t offering all the functionality they wanted, but they had a working version and it looked cool.
Software Quality Automatically Measured
Nice presentation by Gert-Jan Schouten about a cool Maven2 plugin to measure quality and express it with a number. Too bad about the small font of the slides. And the code that was shown was completely illegible due to the small font. But the worst letdown was that the code that was shown wasn’t open source or even for sale. Fortunately somebody from the audience mentioned Sonar, which does more or less the same.
Pragmatic model driven development in Java with smart use cases and domain driven design
This presentation by Sander Hoogendoorn and Rody Middelkoop was slightly too slick for my taste. But as I say, it’s a matter of taste, I bet lots of other people loved it for the exact same reason. In fact, the presentation went so fast, that even with the slides, I can’t quite figure out all that was said.
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I skipped the last session, as I was pretty tired and didn’t see anything that I thought could hold my attention during this last track. Instead I sat on the lounge chairs on the first floor and talked with some people until they opened the bar. (And kept right on talking afterwards as well of course.)
Dinner
It’s become quite a tradition already that the ladies of Duchess have dinner afterwards, and so seven Duchesses, Diane Etman from VXCompany and two men (since we now allow each woman to bring one male guest) headed off towards ‘de 3 Vrienden’ in the city center. There we met up with the third man, since he had misrembered the time and was already there enjoying the sunshine. VXCompany was very gracious to sponsor the food, so we only had to pay for our drinks. After our first dish we all scooted over three seats so we could talk to more people than just those who were sitting close in the first place. All in all a very successful ending to a great day.