On the 5th and 6th of June German software architects and some ALT.NET buddies met at the Architecture.NET Open Space conference. It was the first event in a series and indeed a great time.
The event started at Friday at 9 o´clock. We had booked some rooms in the World Wide Business Center on the famous “Kö” in Düsseldorf, Germany. In total we were 22 participants.
My main take-away is that I got to know even more great people. I also have tons of new ideas and a somewhat better picture on what good software architecture is.
Find more reactions here: Architecture.NET Reactions, or have a look at the twitter stream.
I also made some pictures and videos I’d like to share:
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Sessions I attended
- Cloud Computing The conclusion was, that there is more fear than necessary. It’s a matter of good contracts. One thing to remember when putting software into the cloud is legal concerns. In Germany, for example, some company’s data is not allowed to be stored physically in other countries.
- Asynchronous, Decoupling Messaging Human communication is totally asynchronous. Why not apply that to software architectures? What are the pitfalls? Are business processes really synchronous? In most cases they are not. But what are the trade-offs for synchronous processes in an async world? Great discussion!
- Where to put status? Is there a live without session beans? Where does the session status belong? Database? Client? Middle tier? Distributed cache? Well, the answer is: it depends. But still a good discussion. I got some new ideas and even some product hints as Coherence, Terracotta and MSFT Codename "Velocity".
- How dangerous is "cool"? What are the motivations behind introducing new technologies? Do we decide intuitively or rationally? Is there a benefit to it, or do we just want to try something new? Whom do we trust? Microsoft? The ALT.NET-Community? Gartner? Maybe the main problem in our industry is, that new technologies keep coming without leaving a chance to really learn how to apply them efficiently.
- What is the next OOP? Discussion about possible future programming paradigms. Maybe it is component-oriented programming – just another static view on the world? Or could it be something flow-based as the actor-model? Are we just locked into Van Neumann architectures?
- Plus many great discussions about architecture evolution, REST and much more.
Things I would have liked to talk about, but didn’t find time for are:
- Deployment/Setup/Dependency-Management
- Domain-specific languages for defining sw-architectures
- Security aspects
- How to make my customers trust in Open Source
Lars Corneliussen 