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Eiffel Summit

Program

Tuesday 30 July 2002

8:00 AM - 8:15 AM Welcome to the Eiffel Summit!
Rex Fowler
8:15 AM - 8:45 AM Eiffel and .NET: Two Worlds Separated by a Common Paradigm
Hal Webre

It is easily said that Eiffel and Microsoft .NET are both based on the object-oriented model of software development. Although this is true, it is also easy to infer too much from such a statement. The object model used by Eiffel is different in many ways from that used by .NET. Each of these differences must be addressed and resolved in order for Eiffel to be effective in the .NET environment. A few of the issues discussed are type and feature naming and organization, overloading, creation procedures versus constructors, similar types from both worlds, and the impact of query/command mixing.

Hal is a software engineer with over thirty years of broad-based experience. He holds a B.S. Computer Science from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and an M.S. Software Engineering from the University of West Florida. Hal has served as an officer in the U.S. Air Force, worked with Department of Defense contractors, and spent 21 years with a large U.S. chemical company.

A partial list of his diverse application software experience includes natural language processing, realtime communication, manufacturing support, and object-oriented client/server database applications.

Since the early 1970's, Hal's professional interest has been the construction of high quality software. As a result, in every job Hal has served as educator, mentor, and toolsmith in addition to his more conventional duties. He has both operating system and database management system support experience.

Although Hal has developed production software in many languages, his interest in object-oriented technology has led him in recent years to develop in Smalltalk and Eiffel. For two years, Hal taught the Object-Oriented Programming courses in Eiffel and C++ at the University of West Florida. In 2001 Hal chaired Eiffel Summit. He is a long-time member of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society, and in an ICCP Certified System Professional.
8:45 AM Break
9:00 AM - 9:30 AM The Recoverable Storable Facility: A Mismatch Correction Mechanism for Handling Schema Evolution in an Eiffel System
Darren Hiebert

In "Object-Oriented Software Construction", Bertrand Meyer proposes a general approach for handling schema evolution in an object-oriented system in order to handle changes to the attributes of objects stored in persistent storage. This talk presents the first publicly-known implementation of Meyer's proposed approach. The Recoverable Storable Facility stores a meta-representation of an object tree that permits recovery of objects whose representation has changed and allows per-object correction of representation mismatches detected.

Darren Hiebert, Principal Software Engineer of XonTech, Inc., located in Huntsville, Alabama, serves as Object-Oriented Subject Matter Expert and chief architect for the Sensor Simulation Test Bed (SSTB). The SSTB is a physics-based simulation of the Ground-Based Missile Defense project (a.k.a. National Missile Defense System) and is used to evaluate performance of sensor elements of that system.

Darren possesses a masters degree in Physics from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has 16 years of experience in the software development field.

Darren is active in the free software community with offerings including Exuberant Ctags, EiffelFox, and the Recoverable Storable Facility.
9:45 AM Break
10: AM - 10:30 AM Eiffel Multi-Tier Application Development Framework
Rex Fowler

Fowler Software Design has developed and is currently developing custom software applications for clients using FSD's "Multi-Tier Framework" (MTF). We will demonstrate an application developed using MTF and will show some class diagrams to reveal the software structure. We will also preview FSD's "Automated Software Generator" and our plan for how application classes can be generated from application meta data entered by the software analyst and the client.

Rex Fowler is CEO (and CTO) of Fowler Software Design LLC located in Denver, Colorado. FSD has been producing custom software for clients since 1984. Before that Rex was VP of Software Development for MCBA, a company that produced DIBOL and COBOL accounting and manufacturing software for the mini-computer market. Rex's formal education was in mathematics and economics: Harvey Mudd College, 1971 and University of Southern California, 1981.
10:30 AM Break
11:00 AM - Noon Keynote: Cristophe Job
Noon - 1:30 PM Lunch and Exhibition
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM Keynote: Ali Arsanjani
2:30 PM Break
3:00 PM - 3:15 PM Introduction to the Afternoon Session of the Eiffel Summit
Rex Fowler
3:15 PM - 3:45 PM Eiffel Then and Now
Roger Osmond

A retrospective, introspective and interactive discussion about the state of computing in general, but more specifically the issues facing the Eiffel community over the past dozen years. Roger will give his own impressions, but would also like to lead a discussion with the group focusing on "what has changed" and "what is still the same", with an eye to the future, and how we, the Eiffel community can influence the future.

Mr. Osmond is a software engineering consultant with Amalasoft, specializing in object-oriented systems and software development processes. He is currently on contract at EMC Corporation. Roger has been an Eiffel convert and evangelist for over a decade and is a frequent presenter at TOOLS conferences and elsewhere. Roger is also giving the Keynote presentation at 1:30 PM on Wednesday: Productivity in Software.
3:45 PM Break
4:00 PM - 4:30 PM Eiffel and the Neocore XML Database Manager
Owen Walcher

Show an Eiffel application accessing XMS and writing to, the Neocore XML Management System.

Owen Walcher is a Solutions Architect with over 20 years experience developing large, mission critical applications for government and business. While a consultant with AMS, Owen developed Best Practices and co-authored the Object-Oriented Corporate Methodology and the Client/Server Methodologies. Mr. Walcher was a keynote speaker at OOPSLA '93, where he talked about Wrapping Legacy Systems using Object Technology for Business Function Reuse, and is currently working towards his Doctor of Computer Science in Bio Informatics. Mr. Walcher is a Senior Systems Engineer at NeoCore Inc., a Colorado-based company offering a high performance, native XML database product.
4:30 PM Break
4:45 PM - 5:30 PM Archetypes: Constraint-based Domain Models for Future-proof Information Systems
Rex Fowler for Thomas Beale

Rex will be presenting material authored by Thomas. Thomas has used Eiffel and Eiffel examples in papers which outline the use of Archetypes in separating work done by domain experts from work done by programmers. The Electronic Heath Record (EHR) is the example domain used to illustrate the power of archetypes and how this can be implemented using Eiffel.

Thomas's academic background is in Electrical Engineering (communications) and Computer Science. He worked for six years in software engineering in the SCADA (control system) industry, in an environment based on IEEE standards, strict software configuration management, and disciplined project management. Other work experience includes configuration manager and systems architect at British Telecom (Martlesham, UK 1992-1993), technical advisor for the Good European Health Record project (1994 - 1995), and consultancy in various financial enterprises in Sydney, Australia (1994 - 1997). In 1997, he led the development of a mandate compliance system for one of Australia's leading investment houses, a system which is still in use in 2002. This system was one of the success stories of fully object-oriented technology, being based on Eiffel and the Matisse object database, and resulted in the creation of a publicly available open-source Eiffel persistence library (Ostore). Since 1998, he worked with the other partners of Ocean Informatics, particularly Dr Sam Heard, on evolving EHR architectures, participating in international standards work (OMG HDTF, HL7, CEN TC 251). During this period, the concept of archetypes was developed and published and prototype systems based on the work were funded by the Australian Government, including the 2002 HealthConnect contract for a GEHR-based prototype for a national EHR system. Current work includes the development of the latest proposals and implementations for standardised EHRs, under the aegis of the openEHR Foundation, as well as continued convergence work in the international standards arena.
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