OOPSLA 2006

Having just finished my first ever OOPSLA Workshop, I must say it was very good. I met a lot of good people with both implementation experience and research projects.

The workshop consisted of a dozen 15 minute presentation of different projects both commercial and academic, and then two demos and discussions on two topics.

Most interresting of the demos was the one of SunSPOTs. It is still not commercially available, but it will be as soon as Sun can create a business unit for it :)

The discussions were interresting, but did not produce anything tangible enought for practical use, yet.

It is clear that there are several different categories of sensor networks, and that the different categories do not share the same solution space. One of the discussions were about wether applications will use specialized or general purpose devices, and it was very clear that it depend very much on the economics of the project. Large quantities suggess that cheaper devices are more important than development price, but if the capabilities change over time or the device needs to process more on its own, ie. in offline situations, a general purpose device may be better. Also, a general purpose device may give better time to market since production time for new specialized hardware is considerable.