Architecture World 2006 - Day One

The day started off early in the morning (08:45) with the lighting of the lamp. It was followed by the Welcome speech by Sachin Khanna, Director Sales, Compuware and then a Sunil Dutt Jha went over the agenda.

Agenda:
- Covers EAF, MDA, SOA
- 2 keynotes - Dr. Thomas Mowbray (Day One) and Jon Kern (Day Two)
- 9 Presentations
- Panel discussion - Career paths for Software Architects

The first two speakers didn't seem to have the required presentation skills or the skills needed to talk to a large audience (about 450).

[1] Keynote: Enterprise System Planning Methodology - Beginning Large IT Systems Properly - Thomas Mowbray (2 hours)

Even Thomas didn't seem to have good presentation skills (wasn't live enough or I would go down to the level of saying - wasn't live at all).

- Lack of documentation is a Universal problem

His slides were damn crowded with data/information. Even the front row folks had trouble viewing it.

- Normally a project contains 1 Enterprise Architect and 1 or more Solution Architects

EA Principles:
- Result driven
- Visual
- Self contained
- Best Practices
- Actionable
- Long term view with short term benefits

By this time he was boring us to death. I suddenly heard closures and started to think about closures in Ruby and the article I read last week about it by Martin Fowler on his Bliki.

I have attended other seminars & conferences, but none was so boring as this. The case study Thomas used isn't enlighting enough.

Guess what's EAEF?
It's Enterprise Architecture Evaluation Framework - a framework to evaluate an architecture. Where is this going?

Thomas is really making me re-think about my becoming an Architect plan (I believe a lot would have thought the same way). Looks like all they (EAs) do is document, discuss, make powerpoints and posters. If you like that kind of thing, then that's the way to make *good* money.

He is boring us to death.

Posters

Posters

More Posters...

He spoke about Steven H. Spewak method (Enterprise Architecture Planning) and Infrastructure views.

[Re-engineering = Engineering the same thing over and over again.] :)

All his case studies were based on the District of Columbia project he is working on and talked mostly about how the Fedral government worked (which of course none was interested in knowing). This was visible as quite a number of people left the hall to take a break.

He talked about how to procure paper clips ;)

Center of Excellence - reminded me of my last job where I was a member of Software Engineering Center of Excellence division.

CBA - Cost Benefit Analysis

It finally came to an end. I could see a lot of releaved faces!


[2] Defining and realizing migration & modernization blueprints using EA - Sunil Jha

I am still editing this entry...(will post again shortly)

Architecture World 2006 at Bangalore

Architecture World 2006 is being held at IISc, Bangalore on May 09th & 10th. This is my first Architecture World conference and I will be posting about what happened at the end of each day.

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colleagues
co leagues
co-leagues
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StaX

StaX is a pull parsing Java XML API designed around the iterator design pattern. Read the Introduction to StAX for more information.

The other famous pull parsing API is XMLPULL. StaX is considered to be the next generation API which also addresses some of the issues in XMLPULL.

More information on StaX can also be found at Sun's JCP site

End of Days for the DOS Command Prompt

The new Microsoft Command Line shell called MSH or Monad which will finally replace the dumb, boring DOS Command prompt. The MSH syntax facilitates development with both functional and procedural idioms.

You can read a detailed report about MSH at ars technica

All the Java world needs is a Fancy name

All the Java world needs is a fancy name. This short blog by Martin Fowler explains how the name POJO (Plain Old Java Object) came into existence.

"The term was coined while Rebbecca Parsons, Josh MacKenzie and I were preparing for a talk at a conference in September 2000. In the talk we were pointing out the many benefits of encoding business logic into regular java objects rather than using Entity Beans. We wondered why people were so against using regular objects in their systems and concluded that it was because simple objects lacked a fancy name. So we gave them one, and it's caught on very nicely."

Give them (Java world) anything with a fancy name and they will start to use it and probably even write a couple of books on it :)

Start thinking about some fancy names, will you!

Just Released - Pattern Languages of Program Design 5

Just released. Till date I haven't read any of the books in this series. It been there in my 'Must Read' list for a long time (AFAIK, none of these is available in India. Might have to order thro' Amazon and get it shipped here).


More details later.