Keynote: Architects and Agilists

First up - keynote presentation on day 1. Martin Fowler and Rebecka Parsons.
The main topic was how Architects and Agilists don't but should live happily together.

• Architects should also code, agilists should also respect long-term goals Architects pursue.
• Architects should be thought of as stakeholders, just like business, representing the long-term needs of the enterprise information systems, such as maintainability, architectural unity of vision, etc.

Interesting idea: express architectural principles through unit tests (automated or not). This gives an agile development organization a way to measure whether these goals are being met. This also allows goals to be clarified and well defined by the executable specification. Rebecka mentioned expression architectural goals as a "fitness function".

An Aside:
There was actually a product being showcased at the show that goes along these lines - SonarJ. This is a pretty cool product. It's an Eclipse add-in (or a stand alone Eclipse-based executable) that allows an "architect" to define project architecture in terms of layers and allowed dependencies between them. If some piece of code violates the allowed dependencies, it is marked as an error by the Eclipse builder. The "architect" license is around $6000! Developer licenses are much cheaper ($250 or something). The only difference is that the architect can use a nice GUI to update the architecture definitions, while developer's can only check the code against them. Definitions are stored as XML files in the project source tree. With enough cleverness, they can be edited directly, but that's probably not worth the effort.

Martin took a slightly different angle, casting an architect as a "coach".
He also tried to pull in the financial crisis, comparing the architectural debt that we've accummulated out there with bad software designs with the financial debt that is currently unraveling.

QCon Materials Online (Updated)

I will update this post with links to materials from QCon that can be downloaded freely.

There are two resources that I know right now:

• QCon web site, which has slides from most presentations available for download on the schedule pages.
• InfoQ web site is supposed to have video presentations available. But I am not able to find them right now. This site has A LOT of information. Looks like a lot of interesting articles and presentations from prior years.

[Updated 11/30/2008]
InfoQ site is starting to post presentations and articles from the QCon SF conference. They are tagged under QCon San Francisco 2007.

Adobe Flex example sites

At QCon we got a nice booklet of showcase sites for Adobe Air / Flex platform.
I'm still quite a bit confused about exactly where do boundaries lie between Flash, Flex, and Air. But here's a list of links given in the booklet (those that work anyway):


Earthlive - interactive global warming explorer
Nice simple format. Works on Linux / Firefox. The only problem is that the flash window floats over any traditional popup menus, which makes them unusable.
The UI functions are limited to publishing articles with globe overlays. If you select an article, corresponding overlay is shown on the free-spinning globe.





Bay Desktop - can try it out because it only runs on Windows and Mac. Will have to wait then. But it looks promising as an example of a data-rich UI. Any lucky Mac owners out there to help out a poor Linux geek?








Finetune - online music playing site. Seems to play music on demand without time limit. I'm sure there is a catch but it hasn't hit yet. But more to the point - the Flash bit is the player and probably some scripting. Works great under Linux.

From description in the brochure it seems they also have a desktop player, and that's probably where the Air was used.



IntelliSea - Wow, this is really something! This is Startrek meets today's sea ships! This seems to be a client-side piece of software, mainly for local operation, not working over the internet (although it might connect out for weather and such). The main appeal - complex data visualization and interactive dashboard. Unified status display and control for a large number of sensors and equipment. Integrated radar, telemetry, cameras.

Nasdaq Market Replay - provides market activity replay and visualization across three exchanges. Users can also upload their own trade stream.

Most of the work is done on the client side, as the brochure specifies. Uses local data storage for offline processing.



StudioCloud - application for managing photographer's studio. Has online and offline operation. This one is part of Adobe Showcase: StudioCloud Adobe Showcase. Doesn't work on Linux but the installer didn't even detect that. It tried to "install Adobe AIR" and kept getting an "error".

A number of Adobe's own sites got included into the brochure as well:

• Photoshop Express - Picasa competition? Looks cool but doesn't work on Linux.
• kuler - Download color themes (swatches) from the web into Adobe Creative Suite. Wants "latest flash player".
• Acrobat.com - nothing too fancy. Just a flashy push-button UI for doing things on this site (document sharing, pdf conversion, conferencing).
  

That's all for now. I really like the IntelliSea interface. Definitely worth a look!

QCon 2008

QCon 2008 has just finished in San Francisco last week. There is a lot of interesting information that I wrote down during the conference and a lot of leads that I want to follow up on. This is a perfect time to start this blog then. As I follow up through my notes, I will keep record of my findings here.

Let's kick things off with this quick summary:
For me, there were two big topics at QCon:

• First - how do you scale your application to web sizes without running into relational database walls.

• Second - the Moor's law is still in effect but you have to use multiple cores efficiently in order to continue riding it.