Introducing OO Database Technology for Mission-Critical Applications in IS.

Theme

The purpose of the workshop is to bring together the leading practitioners of OODb application development to discuss the issues of; reliability & quality development, integrating OODb technology into an organization, maintaining OODb applications, and the project management challenges unique to OODb systems. Particular attention will be given to the technology adoption issues of bringing OODbs into an organization for the first time.

Intent is to provide a forum to exchange ideas on introducing OODb technology into the enterprise, and successfully manage development and deployment of specialized, mission-critical OODb applications.

Issues Addressed

Several of the issues to be addressed in this workshop are:

1. Introducing OODb technology into the organization
• Strategies
• Cultural impacts of new technology introduction.

1. Managing OODb development
• Staff training and development
• Unique aspects of project development
2. Maintenance of OODb systems
• DBA role
• Application Impacts
3. Reconciling OODbs with the existing corporate dataspace

Agenda

• Individual review of submitted position papers.
• Roundtable discussion (moderated) of each paper (15 minutes per position paper).
• Critique of each paper, listing 3 - 5 salient points of each paper.
• Experience report on surviving technology introduction of Object Databases (Cole).
• Strategic forecast of Object Database development in the next two years (Vitulo).

Organizers

Mr. Cole is the founder and President of JumpStart Systems, a services organization specializing in Smalltalk and OODb application development consulting. He has over eight years of commercial OO experience using Smalltalk to implement client-server applications. For the last five years he has been consulting with numerous clients in multiple areas of object-oriented technology including; OO project management, OO analysis and design, OODb application development, and OO software quality assurance. For the last three years he has been consulting with Fortune-100 clients, assisting them in moving into implementation of complex Object Database applications.

Mr. Vitulo is a project manager within the Finance Systems of Ford Motor Co. He has been implemening mission-critical financial analysis systems using Smalltalk and Object Databases for the last four years. He presently manages a development group of over 20 developers actively engaged in Object Database application development.