Revenge of the waterfall
If you thought you'd escaped waterfall projects, have a look at this conference site. Great stuff! Long live the waterfall 
A vision of Eclipse
Here are some thoughts from Mike Milinkovich's keynote on Eclipse titled "A Vision of Eclipse":
- Primary goal of Eclipse is to build a general purpose tool platform.
- Writing software is hard - mostly because of all the people you have to talk to.
- One of the biggest problem in developing software is integrating all the tools you have to use. Eclipse is trying to provide a universal tooling platform to enable all of the tools to talk to each other.
- Eclipse is never done: there is always a new language to integrate, there is always a new platform to run on.
- There are around 415 committers on various projects around Eclipse
- The RCP platform was almost entirely community-driven.
JAX 2005 started!
Today, JAX 2005 started with an overwhelming number of 120 sessions. Detailed information can be found here, a live blogging site has been set up here. The topics most intersting for me are Eclipse, Modelling and the current discussion around heavyweight (EJB-centric) and lightweight (Spring, PicoContainer) containers.
Currently, I am attending Craig Russel's keynote on persistence. He started with a nice story about architects:
A manager, an engineer and an architect are traveling to a fereign country. They are stopped at the customs and are asked what they do. "We are selling object relational mapping", they answer. "Oh, intersting", the customs officer replies, "Which kind of object relational mapping?". The reply is "We are doing Java Data Objects". The customer says: "Oh, in this country we are using Toplink. I am sorry, but we'll have to kill you." The manager, the engineer and the architects have to stand in a row. When it comes to shooting the manager, the gun is jammed. "This must be divine revelation, you are free to go", says the customs officer and the manager leaves. Now the engineer is about to be shot, but the gun blocks again. He may go as well. The architect is the last man standing. "Is there anything you want to say before we shoot you?" - "Oh yes, " answers the architect, "I think I know what the problem is."
