OOPSLA 2006

Well, it’s the last day here in Portland, and I’ve spent the day shopping and adding RMagick (Ruby fron end for ImageMagick) to this Blog application to make the small versions of the images go faster over the net.

Total time shopping 1 hour.

Total time adding RMagick thumbnails 20 minutes.

We thought about going to Mount St. Helens, but the weather this morning was very cloudy, so the trip was cancelled. The vulcano had a small erruption on sunday, though, so we were at least around then :)

This demo was of a plugin for Eclipse for using the Molhadu source code repository. Instead of treating all files a s either text or binary, the MolhadoRef system knows about the structure of source code and can detect APIs and distinguish them from other source code. The system can then distinguish refactorings of the API from general code edits, and be much more efficient in automatically merging concurrent changes.

The demo included a couple of editing round trips with automatic merging of changes that would have been conflicts in CVS or SVN.

Very nice, but it does still have some way to go before it is usable in regular projects, most important the lack of tagging and branching in the Eclipse plugin.

Sun SPOTs are devices designed by Sun to be a general purpose small field device for tracking, sensing, controlling and communicationg with the world.

Sun SPOTs run Java on the metal, a JME CDLC 1.1 comatible JVM. They get their code in a special bytecode format packed in Suites.

Sun SPOTs have built in ZigBee radio, and can be fitted with customized sensor boards and customized communication boards.

GPS: not yet, but done as an experiment. Works only outside, and consumes a lot of power.

The Sun SPOTs do proximity sensing.

Run on car battery or other external power source. Both USB and direct connection to the battery are possible.

SpotWorld, a NetBeans environment allows you to administer and directly deploy, debug and control actual devices or virtual devices.

It will take a while before the SunSPOTs are for sale. Check out Sun SPOT World for updates on this.

…an Eclipse plugin for inserting actual AOP code into the source code realtime by using linked editing i Eclipse.

Interresting.

The Sun guys misunderstood and thought the demo was at 15:00, so they will try again in the coffee break.

This was a demo of an annotation system for managing encapsulation of data.

The classical example is that a private field can hold a reference to what is intended to be private data, but that any accessor can return an alias to the private data.

AliasJava allows you to annotate fields and methods to indicate who is allowed to alias the data, and this will be enforced by tooling/compiler.

Annotations can only be inserted at declaration points! That’s why we cannot put “unchecked” annotations before certain statements, only declarations…that was a useful lesson.

AliasJava does look to me like it is to much clutter in the code in comparison to the usefulness it provides.

Sad…

Here are the pictures. Report coming soon.

First there was a presentation of OOPSLA 2007 will be held in Montreal.

Dr. Philip Wadler then held an interresting speech on Science and Faith.

It was OK.

He then went on to explain his views around types, and how it relates to java Generics.

That was better.

We had a great BoF on Groovy and Grails wednesday evening. First we got a presentation of the Groovy language, and then a short coding session using Grails.

Groovy looks VERY interresting. Compared to Ruby/Rails the most compelling feature is the tight integration with Java.

Most definately something to look at.