The second day at Øredev started with a keynote by James Bach. The talk seemed to start a bit slow, but that might have been a lack of coffee on my part after a packed first day. Gradually the talk got more and more interesting when he started discussing stuff like “best practices”, which he thinks are a bad thing, and RUP, the Rational Unified Process, which even Rational is not using internally as James found out. Basically he was arguing that every good process absolutely must include a learning aspect. The waterfall model for example does not, so it’s bad.
Jon Bostrom did a talk on the state of OSGi on the mobile phone as used by Sprint in their Titan platform, for which an SDK will be released in the upcoming weeks. He envisioned a more open phone where people can actually add and update middleware services. A local webserver can even be used to share stuff with others directly. All of this builds on OSGi, the security model, and things like deployment packages. His main argument for all this openness is that a phone should be able to adapt to all kinds of new technologies as they become available, and that means making everything optional and updatable. That means the platform will be open to for example different UI technologies, like eRCP/eSWT, Flash, JavaFX, JavaME and basically anything else that will come out.
A big part before and after lunch was taken up with discussions with all kinds of people in the hallways. The sessions at Øredev also allow plenty of time to discuss things between sessions, which is a very smart move by the organizers. Later in the afternoon, BJ Hargrave presented a talk about OSGi now and in the future. Most of us know the now, so I’ll focus on the future. Release 4.2 is being finalized for a late Q2 2009 release. This is a release which focusses on OSGi in the enterprise. The enterprise expert group formed two years ago now and the new things in this release will be: a distributed service registry, including service registry hooks, a spec called “blueprint” which basically standardizes some of the Spring DM dependency injection stuff, a bundle tracker, a standard mechanism for launching multiple frameworks in a single JVM (which felix already supports) and a unified launcher.
The features for release 5.0 are a bit more vague. Nothing has really finalized, but there are a couple of interesting things ahead that basically evolve around a framework 2.0 version, that breaks backward compatibility and adds modern features like annotations, collections, etc. Still, this new framework will probably expose older versions of the framework packages too so it won’t totally break backward compatibility after all, something that’s only possible in an OSGi framework!
The closing keynote by a guy from Oracle about identity almost bored me to sleep, but the beer kept me awake for the dinner and subsequent Boom Chicago stand-up comedy, which gave us a lot of laughs in a very interactive program.
The final day started with an opening keynote with great food for thought from Robert C. Martin, who talked about the craftsmanship called software development. He had a couple of important points to make, that all evolved around being agile and doing test driven development. He believed that iterations should be short. One or two weeks. He also believed strongly in writing tests first, writing no more than necessary for the test to fail and then implement no more than necessary for the test to pass again. Doing that means that you always have code that at least “worked a couple of minutes ago”. As simple as that might sound, it is a very valuable concept. There were a lot of other topics in his talk, such as taking personal responsibility, always doing the best job you can, writing great code and always making sure the code you check in is at least a bit better than the code you checked out. He also stressed the need for constant improvements on the codebase, because you never get it right the first time, or the second, or the third. There is no such thing as perfect code. Finally, he commented on what he called “the grand rewrite”, completely redoing an existing project again from scratch, and told us it is a very sure, slow and painful way to complete failure.
After the keynote I attended sessions about customizing Silverlight 2 controls, developing an iPhone application from scratch in Objective C, and a second session by Jon Bostrom on OSGi. This time he got more technical and it was nice to see a general interest from the people in the room when he mentioned things like deployment admin and its role in provisioning software. I attended a second talk by Terence Barr, about LWUIT, but Terence gave the impression he was tired and showed mostly demos he’d shown in an earlier session already.
A session by Mike Jennings about Google Android, even though it was in the last time slot, was absolutely packed, which shows how much interest there is in this open platform. Mike explained how to do development for Android, showcasing both command line tools and Eclipse integration and talking us through an application that uses the tilt sensors and touch screen. He stressed that Google has no interest in controlling what applications you put on your phone, a strategy that is clearly pitched against Apple, who have a very tight and sometimes extremely silly form of control (or censorship) over what goes on the iPhone.
Summarizing Øredev 2008, it was a great conference. The level of the speakers is remarkably high and everything around it is organized well. It was a true joy to be there, to share knowledge and I sure hope to be back next year.