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After the seven hour drive to Nashville, we settled in to our hotel and hit the bar. Getting the brain ready for todays activities. I’ll be updating at the end of each Tutorial or Keynote through out the day, but will only publish the entries at the end of day, so bare with me if the entrys seem like many posts in one.

Green Bar for C++
This was the first turotial I atteneded. The one I had picked was canceled and this was my runner up. The tutorial was handled by the author CUTE Peter Sommerlad. The presentation was good and packed full of content. I have been out of the C++ game for a while now, but his presentation of CUTE integrated in to the new Eclipse has sparked my interest once again and really made me want to take on another C++ project. Maybe an optimized parser this extends Python bindings .. just have to find something to parse.

They were very well setup for the course. Course was very interactive and hands on. I spent the second half of the course implementing the classic Numeric to Roman converted using Eclipse and CUTE with TDD practices. The practices themselves were all refresher for me, but getting a chance to put my hands on some C++ felt good. It had been over a year since I really got dirty in C++. They also had multi-platform installs of Eclipse and a CUTE package archive on a flash drive. Everyone in the tutorial was up and running in no time. I made not of this for sure, in case my any of my recent proposals to speak get accepted.

I was also able to see other peoples approach to the same problem which is always insigntful and thought provoking, no matter the language. I spoke with Peter breifly after the tutorial. The functionality of the CUTE framework itself only took about 2 days of development. The integration in to Eclipse is a different monster. Thanks for the free pen and the swiss chocolate.

Building SOAs with Web Services
Olaf from IBM gives us a great tutorial on using SOAs to build web services. The introduction was an abstract overview of SOA (Service Oriented Archiecture) with some touches on concepts and motivation behind SOAP and WSDLs.

He then spoke about some real world implementations and showed some examples and diagrams of those implementations. After which we began the interactive part of walking through a very simple implementation that tied a PHP script to a Java SOA via Tomcat/Axis.

Coverage was also given to user experiences and best practices and identifying when a given problem lends itself to the SOA (WSDL/SOAP) solution. Overall it was a good tutorial and getting a chance to see the Web Tools plugin for Eclipse in action generating bottom-up from existing POJO and making the WSDL contract was neat.

Afterwards
After the day at OOPSLA my wife and I at some St. Louis style BBQ down on Broadway. It was very good. I have a personal goal to eat nothing but BBQ for dinner during my time in Nashville.