OOP 2010: Day 1
Michael Stal: Von den Anforderungen zur Softwarearchitektur
This week the OOP conference is taking place in Munich. The first day is tutorials only and I attended Michael Stal’s full day tutorial on “Von den Anforderungen zur Softwarearchitektur”. When I got the handouts I was quite intimidated: around 240 slides is a lot of ground to cover even in 6 hours. Overall, the tutorial was quite good. He not only focused on basic software architecture principles but also, among others, how requirements and software architecture get together, how to deal with architecture in the software lifecycle or how to perform an architecture review. In addition, the slides contain a number of checklists and templates which deemed me quite helpful. On the other hand, I sometimes was not sure what kind of audience the presenter had in mind. Occasionally, he went at great lengths in explainings basics such as the observer pattern. Even junior architects should be familiar with design patterns (at least the usual suspects from the gang of four book).
Ralph de Wargny: Die Multicore Zukunft – Ein Eldorado für Software-Entwickler?
At the end of the first day Ralph de Wargny who is an Intel business development manager gave a keynote speech. Unfortunately, this was an almost 100% Intel sales presentation and not very convincing. Intel ended the Gigahertz race a few years ago and since then they have been preaching the virtues of multicore. They now intend to prove Moore’s law by doubling the number of cores every 18 months. However, software developers are hardly capable to make use of this processing power. Parallel programming has been and still is hard. Multicores make a lot of sense in a server environment especially when virtualizing operating systems and applications. Optimizing common desktop applications for multicores is hardly worth the effort unless you can achieve this with tools rather than doing it manually. Ironically, he showcased Crysis, a very violent game, as the first of its kind which makes full use of the four cores in the new i7 to achieve more realism. At least, multicore enables you to kill more virtual opponents in less time. I understand the need of the conference organizers to provide advertisment slots to the conference sponsors. But it should not be a pure sales show.
