Goldfish bowl: "A goldfish bowl on patterns" |
Ballroom C |
This goldfish bowl will allow some experienced pattern-masters and you the audience to discuss how patterns are working today in the OO community. Some questions to be answered include: How are patterns effective for you? How do you use them in your organisation? Who writes them? Who are they most useful for? Who finances them? Where do they come from? How are they stored and accessed? Are they at the architectural, design and/or programming level? Is their use enforced? Bring your own points of discussion and make your way to the stage in this highly interactive session. Moderator: Bruce Anderson, IBM OTP Invited Participants:
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Technical Papers: |
Exhibit Hall A |
| Chair: Eric Jul, University of Copenhagen "Visualizing Dynamic Software System Information through
High-level Models" |
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Practitioner Reports: |
Ballroom A |
| Prototyping &
Architecture Session Leader: Patrick Logan, GemStone Corp. "The Mount Sinai Human Resources Case Management System:
an Example of Rapid Application Development in a Java Environment" The Mount Sinai Human Resources Case Management system was developed using several new software development tools and techniques. The system was developed with 2 FTE developers in six months as a series of iterative prototypes, starting with paper-based mock-ups, proceeding to executable throw away prototypes developed in Java, and ending in a deployed three-tiered architecture with a Java client, an Oracle server, and Symantec's dbAnywhere middleware product. This article describes the tools and techniques used to develop the system and some lessons learned from the project. "A Look Behind Internet's First Digital
Trading Cards" This paper outlines our experience in developing a challenging and fun system; the first limited edition digital trading cards to be offered on the Internet. The challenges included implementing the required complex mechanism for a deceptively simple looking product in a very short amount of time, with a limited amount of resources. The product needed to be deliverable and maintainable over the Internet and the system needed to offer a high level of security, scalability, and reliability. We developed the first phase of the project by utilizing an object oriented architecture and a database system, RASE (Rapid Systems Engineering) tools, and design patterns as well as a variety of multimedia development tools. "An Improved Smalltalk Application Server
for a Web-based Business Solution" The project team started with a corporate human resources application which was used to log, approve, and reimburse employee purchases. The application was fully distributed with the client functionality delivered across the corporate intranet. The server portion contained the domain model and was constructed using a combination of VisualWorks Smalltalk and Gemstone Smalltalk for persistence. The application scalability was adequate but limited. The report describes a revision to the application architecture which improved the response time of the application and gave it the potential to support a greater number of concurrent users. The revised architecture uses a series of new management objects, most notably the Session Broker and the Session Manager, to respond to variations in the demand pattern. In addition, another series of objects, representing the remaining components of the application architecture were separated from the domain model with the intention of producing a generalized framework applicable to other business problems. "Architecture for a Production-quality
Java Application" The Avalon project was aimed at providing an interactive entertainment experience for consumers used to television-like entertainment via a Java applet. To accommodate a typical consumer's low-bandwidth, no-storage, high security requirements, we prototyped and then rebuilt our applet environment. This report will cover the following technical areas: the designs used in order to deliver production-quality applications over the consumer internet, the use of Java in reality, and lessons learned in the process. |
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Practitioner Reports: |
Ballroom B |
| Transitioning to OO Session
Leader: TBD "Automated
Testing of an Object Application" The system used for administrating the pension benefits for teachers in the province of Ontario is an example of a feature-rich intelligent agent participating in a highly complex business process. In addition to the challenge of developing the application itself, of major concern was the system testing for validation of the initial deployment and for regression testing of subsequent releases for maintenance, upgrades, and extensions. To that end, an automated testing system was also developed with the requirement that it be accessible to business experts: not just software developers. It also had to be usable at all stages of the business application's development: not just with a complete product but also at an object class and instance level. This paper illustrates how object design enabled software developers, testers, and business analysts to work together throughout the development and deployment process to improve quality and productivity. "Lessons Learned: Transitioning COBOL
Programmers to OO" Typical object technology (OT) courses provided by professional trainers are one week long and most managers expect developers to be productive after attending one or more of these courses. Yet, it is broadly acknowledged within the object-oriented (OO) community that the OT learning curve is anywhere from 6-18 months. Conventional wisdom concludes a longer-than-normal training program transitioning to object technology is better which we refute based on a recent experience. We attempt to provide a few primary reasons for the contradiction to conventional wisdom and offer suggestions to improve your experience. "An Integration Architecture for
Implementation of the DoD Computerized Patient Record" U.S. Military health systems include a very large set of heterogeneous systems involving multiple organizations, care environments, computing environments, and health care elements. Systems integration and interoperability in such an environment presents a series of challenges, particularly with respect to architectural and semantic mismatch. This report focuses on a particular logical architecture that facilitates meeting these challenges incrementally, on a requirements-based, mission increment by mission increment basis. Initial team experience in following the architecture and future implementation plans is also discussed.
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technical program |
thursday |
| "Growing a Language" | Exhibit Hall A |
Guy L. Steele Jr., Sun Microsystems Laboratories Over the last quarter-century I have become convinced that trying to design a complete and perfect programming language is now the worst thing you can do. A programming language (including its associated libraries) must grow over time as its user community and its development community grows. This is a different situation from 25 years ago, when all such communities were relatively small. The difference is a problem of scale. As a result, programming language design now and in the future is necessarily as much a matter of social engineering as technical engineering and must rely more on a set of general principles than on a set of specific technical decisions. Guy L. Steele Jr. is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, Inc. He received his A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard College (1975), and his S.M. and Ph.D. in computer science and artificial intelligence from M.I.T. (1977 and 1980). He has also been an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie-Mellon University; a member of technical staff at Tartan Laboratories in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and a senior scientist at Thinking Machines Corporation. He joined Sun Microsystems in 1994. He is author or co-author of five books: Common Lisp: The Language (Digital Press); C: A Reference Manual (Prentice-Hall); The Hacker's Dictionary (Harper&Row), which has been revised as The New Hacker's Dictionary by Eric Raymond (MIT Press); The High Performance Fortran Handbook (MIT Press); and The Java Language Specification (Addison-Wesley). The Association for Computing Machinery awarded him the 1988 Grace Murray Hopper Award and named him an ACM Fellow in 1994. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 1990. He led the team that received a 1990 Gordon Bell Prize honorable mention for achieving the fastest speed to that date for a production application: 14.182 Gigaflops. He was also awarded the 1996 ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award. He has served on accredited standards committees X3J11 (C language), X3J3 (Fortran), and X3J13 (Common Lisp). He designed the original EMACS command set and was the first person to port TeX. At Sun Microsystems he is responsible for research in language design and implementation strategies, and architectural and software support, and for the specification of the Java programming language. |
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| Panel: "The Project Manager Game" | Ballroom B |
An OOPSLA '98 exclusive! Watch contestants vie for fabulous prizes as you the audience choose the project manager of your dreams from this illustrious set of project manager wannabes. Master of ceremonies Kent Beck will put them through their paces for your edification and amusement. Emcee: Kent Beck, First Class Software Contestants: |
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| Technical Papers: | Exhibit Hall A |
| Chair: Kathleen Fisher,
AT&T Labs - Research "A Type System for Object
Initialization in the Java Bytecode Language" |
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| Practitioner Reports: | Ballroom A |
| Components & Reflection
Session Leader: Peter Sommerlad, IFA Informatik "Incremental development of a repository-based framework
supporting organizational inquiry and learning" In this paper we report on our experience with the development of a framework for administration and a supporting method for incremental development and learning. The framework helps us develop applications iterative, interactive and incrementally, with strong emphasis upon the process of problem appreciation. Thus we build increasingly complete specifications of applications that can be executed at once. The resulting system is easy to adapt to changes in the business. Argo can develop new applications through modeling and configuration, rather than through coding. The framework is based on a repository in two ways. First, it consists of a set of tools for managing a repository of documents, data and processes, including their history and status. These tools let users select applications, enter and view data, query the repository, access the thesaurus and manage electronic documents, workflow processes, and task assignments. More importantly, the repository drives the framework behavior. In the repository we capture knowledge of the business model, none of which is hard coded. The tools consult the repository at runtime. End-users can change the behavior of the system by using high-level tools to change the business model. Thus we separate descriptions of an organization's business logic from the application functionality. Since we can afford users to change their mind, inspired by learning experience with the technology at hand and the broader range of possibilities it offers, we use methods and techniques from soft system thinking to encourage our users to reflect on their applications and to envision better ways of working, even after initial delivery. To incorporate the feedback, we adapt both framework and the applications. "Use of Dynamic, Reflective, and
Meta-level Language Facilities in the Application Domain" Proponents of dynamic object-oriented languages with reflective or meta-level facilities assert that these facilities provide more flexibility and adaptability for reacting to changing business requirements. However, typically such language features are only applied in development tools. This paper argues that dynamic, reflective, and meta-level facilities can provide an advantage in implementing application domain solutions, and draws on a significant commercial object-oriented application framework for supporting examples. "An Evolutionary Path to Component-Based
Solution Development" This paper presents the evolutionary path to Component Based Solution Development by a medium sized organization of approximately 100 people. Three stages of the organization's maturation are presented. For each stage, the goals, organizational structure, development process, and conclusions are discussed. A brief summary of the projects executed during each stage are presented only for the purpose of setting the context within which the organization evolved. This organization's experience can be thought of as a single instance of the class of organizations attempting to implement the "Reuse Business" presented in "Software Reuse: Architecture, Process and Organization for Business Success," Jacobson, Griss, Jonsson, Addison-Wesley, 1997. No attempts are made to justify the path taken or any individual decision made by this team. Rather, the experiences, successes, and failures and an ideal end state are presented. Component-Based Development represents the maturation of the Object-Oriented paradigm. While objects themselves inherently provide a better mechanism for reuse they do not guarantee reuse success. By developing components comprised of objects, taking advantage of their clear and simple interface mechanisms, it becomes possible to develop groups of industry-specific components which may be "plugged" together to create complex business systems. This provides the value ascribed to but seldom realized by the "buy versus build" strategy or COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) solution, while allowing organizations to retain the flexibility to customize the solutions to match their business processes. It is through components that real and predictable reuse becomes possible.
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| Panel: "Experiences in Distributed Systems" | Ballroom B |
Everyone is building a distributed systems these days, but the "how" has become a matter for religious debate and the "why" is often neglected completely. This panel brings together practitioners from every aspect of industry including middleware customers, vendors, consultants and academics. Each has built at least one distributed system, and will explain:
Moderator: Laura Hill, Sun Microsystems Panelists:
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| Panel: "Software Reuse: Nemesis or Nirvana?" | Ballroom A |
As we reach the end of the millennium, the concept of software reuse and the discipline of software engineering have matured for almost thirty years. Has the reuse community evolved beyond visionaries devoted to an intellectual fad - the early adopters of a new technology? Has this evolution established a state of advancement in civilization with distinctive beliefs and traditions? How has this evolution been successful and how will success be sustained? This panel will share its experience and perspectives with the audience in a dialogue initiated by the following questions and positions:
Moderator: Steven Fraser, Nortel Panelists: |
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| Panel: "DesignFest Wrap-up" | Exhibit Hall C |
| Panel: "Educators' Symposium Review" | Ballroom C |
| Technical Papers: | Exhibit Hall A |
| Chair: John
Lamping, Xerox Palo Alto Research
Center "Compound Types for
Java" |
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Last updated 16 October 1998 10:30:40/Teresa Warwaruk