The first presentation was by Bruce Tate, the author of Bitter Java and the forthcoming Bitter EJB , as a preview for the Pacific NorthWest Software Symposium. I think that the No Fluff Just Stuff guys are going the right direction (I've never been to one, just talked to people who went, and Jay Zimmerman who's organizing the symposia). Bruce's talk on Database Persistence Frameworks was pretty good -- he got started late and got bogged down with a question so he had to hurry to finish his presentation. I've been meaning to take a look at the various open source persistence frameworks, so I was curious to see what his opinion was. He mentioned Castor, OJB, and Hibernate (that I remember) and he felt that Hibernate was the one with the most momentum behind it. Unfortunately, this was right around where he had to start whipping through slides in order to make the time slot. He referred to something he calls "Strategic POJO", which appears to be a use of AOP to do persistence. He wasn't able to spend much time there -- like I just saw the slide fly by. I'm really curious to hear more about this.

The second presentation was on Model-Driven Development using Rational XDE. This just didn't do much for me, because I'm not a fan of RUP or ROSE, etc. I've used some tools to produce RUP diagrams from code, but I've never found tools like this to be helpful in the forward direction. Mostly they make it easier to deal with the structure of classes and objects, but specifying control flow via sequence diagrams is less efficient than banging out the code. Unfortunately for Rational, the speaker agreed -- he said he frequently writes code that he usese to generate the sequence diagrams. The presentation was short, and not that much of a product pitch. One item of note is that the XDE product is a set of plugins for Eclipse/WebSphere Studio.