Object Expo: Small show focuses on Java, components

Ever wonder what goes on at software development conferences? There are the big conferences, like Miller Freeman’s Software Development East & West and Sun’s JavaOne, where you’ll find thousands of attendees, scores of sessions, and huge lines to get into various events. These conferences have it all, but their sheer size makes them difficult to navigate. At the other end of the spectrum are conferences like SIGS’s Conference for Java Development and Object Expo. These conferences are small and focused, and they let you get a lot closer to the speakers and industry exhibitors.

The recent Object Expo, held March 28 to April 1 in New York, NY, was a typical East Coast SIGS show. The overall attendance was small — a few hundred registered attendees — but the show was well-situated for developers in the Manhattan area who wanted to come in and see the exhibitors or catch a few technical sessions without having to travel. SIGS has recently also begun running “night school” sessions so that developers who want to brush up on new technology can attend without having to disrupt their daily work schedules.

For a contrast to the New York show, see Bill Day’s description of last year’s SIGS Java conference in San Jose, CA: “Useful gems from SIGS Conference for Java Development.” While you’d consider the San Jose conference small in comparison to something like JavaOne, the primary difference between it and the recent Object Expo in New York is that Object Expo is not exclusively a Java show — there were a number of technical sessions on object technology, distributed objects, C++, and UML.

Components captivate developers

There was no explicit theme to this year’s Object Expo, but a quick glance at the keynote speeches and the technical sessions says it all. With keynotes like “Components for Java,” “Building Enterprise-Scale Solutions with Components,” and “Effective Rapid Component-Based Development,” there’s clearly a huge interest in components. With emerging new standards, like Enterprise JavaBeans and the recent submission to the OMG of a draft for the CORBA Component Model, components are quickly being recognized as crucial to the delivery of new software applications and systems. This heightened interest is also reflected in the appearance of new publications, one example being Component Strategies magazine, as well as SIGS’s latest addition to its family of conferences, Component Development, which is devoted entirely to topics relating to component-based software development.

It’s not surprising that many of the sessions at Object Expo touched on some aspects of component-based development (CBD), but it was surprising to see how many were focused solely on this topic. Some of these sessions were:

• “Developing a Component Framework with CORBA,” by Alan Ewald
• “Agents — The Next Components,” by John Williams
• “A Comparison of EJB Application Servers,” by Joshua Duhl
• “Distributed Component-Based Event Monitoring and Debugging,” by S. Tucker Taft
• “Practical Strategies for Migrating to CBD,” by Paul Allen
• “Building Transactional Components with EJB,” by Ken Wei
• “Building Business Component Architectures with Enterprise JavaBeans and CORBA,” by Chris Tarr

In some ways, these sessions provided a huge amount of new information, including how to accelerate software development through the use of off-the-shelf software components and through component architectures as a support framework for in-house software development. In some other ways, there is nothing new under the sun here — many aspects of CDM practices today are the same as those software reuse advocates have been implementing for years. In fact, anyone who wants to learn more about how to use component frameworks and, more importantly, to understand why component frameworks exist can read books like Will Tracz’s 1995 Confessions of a Used Program Salesman: Institutionalizing Software Reuse. This book contains articles and essays written by Tracz — over the 10 years preceding publication — on how to bring software reuse into an organization and how it can reduce the overall cost of software projects. Component frameworks are new, exciting, and have a lot of potential, but it’s important to remember that they’re just a further evolution of ideas that have been around for a decade.

Some sessions at Object Expo

But back to the show. While I wasn’t able to attend as many sessions as I would have liked (being busy giving some technical presentations myself, as well as working the expo), I managed to get to a few of the sessions and talk to the authors of a few more. Here are some of the sessions I managed to check out:

• “An Introduction to Process Patterns,” by Scott Ambler

  Scott takes the patterns concept that has become so popular in the last few years and extends it from software itself to the process of software development. He also included some examples of antipatterns — patterns that have proven to be counterproductive and therefore should be avoided. Everyone working in software development has had the experience of working on a project that was technologically sound but caused trouble because there was no formal software construction process. This session contained lots of useful information and was a nice change from most of the other sessions that were primarily focused on explaining tools, libraries, and frameworks.

• “Dynamic Page Compilation with Java Server Pages (JSP),” by Chad Darby

  Java Server Pages (JSP) is Sun’s answer to Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP), and represents a way of dynamically generating HTML pages from Java code combined with static HTML. Web developers who need dynamic content, want to work in Java, but don’t need (or want) to use applets should definitely check out JSP. This technology allows developers to embed JavaBeans or even straight Java code directly into HTML pages. The JSP-enabled Web server then processes the Java code when the page is requested, doing away with having to maintain separate sets of HTML pages and CGI scripts. JSP also helps Web developers create and maintain Web cookies to track state and session information for more advanced applications.

• “Jini and Java Spaces: Spontaneous Networking,” by Gerry Seidman

  Jini has generated a lot of buzz and lots of people are curious about it, but few seem people to have a clear idea about what it is and how it works. Jini is a way to establish a “federation” of devices and resources; it provides a mechanism so networked devices can automatically discover one another, find out what each device’s capabilities are, and use those resources. At a high level, this is pretty straightforward and quite exciting. At the low level, Jini is a set of services and protocols built on top of Java’s existing RMI mechanism, for things like acquiring a resource, generating and monitoring events, and handling transactions.

  Java Spaces, in some ways a precursor of Jini, is a platform for designing distributed object systems in Java, with support for distributed persistence and distributed algorithms. While Java Spaces was initially a research project inside Sun and is still considered primarily an academic/research-oriented piece of technology, it has a lot of potential for building the types of multitier, distributed applications that have become the standard in enterprise development.

• “Bean Soup: Using Components with Java,” by Alex Chaffee

  While it’s easy to think that “components in Java = JavaBeans,” there actually are a variety of component frameworks available to Java developers. Chaffee discussed what a component is and how JavaBeans fits Java’s need for a basic component specification. He also addressed other component technologies, like Microsoft’s COM, servlets, JSP, RMI, CORBA, and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs).

As I said before, Object Expo wasn’t a totally Java-oriented show. There were a number of non-Java sessions that I didn’t attend, but to give you an idea of some of the other topics that were covered, here are some of the non-Java sessions:

• “Writing Exception-Safe C++,” by Herb Sutter
• “Choosing DCOM or CORBA: Salient Decision Factors,” by Owen Tallman
• “Requirements Engineering,” by Christopher M. Enright
• “Effective Use of UML and a Unified Development Process,” by Don Kavanagh

Conclusions

Overall, Object Expo was a useful and informative technical conference. Java was a major part of the show, but not its sole focus. The exposition wasn’t as impressive as the large West Coast software development shows, but it did let you get up close and personal with the vendors who had booths in the modest expo area. With its small, highly technical focus, Object Expo is the kind of show that will help you get right into the latest trends and technologies in software development.