TOOLS Europe '99 Keynote Presentations

TOOLS Europe '99 will welcome the following invited speakers for keynote presentations:

Monday, June 7, 1999 • 18:00 – 18:45

The Unity of Software and the Power of Roundtrip Engineering
Bertrand Meyer, Interactive Software Engineering, USA

Part of the initial progress in developing an engineering basis for software development was to identify the specific tasks at hand and highlight their differences. Although that step was probably inevitable, it has led to a somewhat skewed view of software engineering, which ignores the fundamental unity of software construction, and leads to unnecessary gaps, detrimental to quality and productivity. It is more fruitful to take advantage of the fundamental invariants of software development and view system engineering as a continuous, seamless and reversible process. The talk will show how that full roundtrip engineering is possible in practice, leading to far higher quality of both process and product.

Tuesday, June 8, 1999 • 8:30 – 9:15

The Death of Patterns and the Last Pattern Language
Jim Coplien, Bell Laboratories, USA

Alexander has been nurturing a vision of beauty and support for human comfort as his understanding of design has evolved over the past 40 years. In a talk to the software community in 1996, he challenged us to look beyond our short-term business focus, to rise above the exercise of our technical prowess, and to embrace the moral imperative to build systems that are whole, systems that live. The software pattern community is often viewed -- even by itself -- as the group carrying this torch. However, that community has fallen far short of that vision. What does Alexander's vision really mean to us? Where have we fallen short? What will be the death of the current pattern discipline, and what does that mean to the industry?

Wednesday, June 9, 1999 • 8:30 – 9:15

Design Patterns at Work
Erich Gamma, Technical Director, Object Technology International, Switzerland

The idea of capturing design experience with patterns has progressed rapidly from cult to mainstream status. Now that it is well understand what design patterns are it is important to understand how they are best applied. This talks reports experience in how patterns can be applied to generate, explain, and improve a system's architecture.

Wednesday, June 9, 1999 • 18:00 – 18:45

Trends in Technology - Getting Ready For the 21st Century
Jean-Paul Figer, Chief Technology Officer, CAP Gemini, France

A Vision of the Future of Information Technology. Impact on IT Architectures and development tools. Consequences on Corporate IT.

Thursday, June 10, 1999 • 8:30 – 9:15

Component Based Development - the True Object Orientation
Trygve Reenskaug, Numerica Taskon AS, Norway

The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate by sending messages to each other. Mainstream object technology has repressed this simple picture, focusing on programming languages, classes and inheritance. With the "new" components coupled with distribution, we finally capture the true power of objects: Simple solutions, unlimited scaling, distributed ownership, separation of concern, and independence of language, platform and location.

The advantages of the component technology are shorter development time, simpler and more reliable systems, and extensive reuse. It is surprisingly different and difficult, even though it starts from objects. The difficulties partly stem from a confusing and immature technology with a hodgepodge of solutions such as CORBA, RMI, EJB, and transaction monitors. But the main challenge is on a higher level. Component technology requires changing one's mindset from the self-contained application to a world of interconnected objects. Few developers write code, they mainly compose components and set their properties. Projects no longer develop systems from scratch, but merely add features to the existing web. End users interact directly with information, the programs are invisible. In time, users will even compose their own systems without help from experts.

Thursday, June 10, 1999 • 14:30 – 15:15

Two or Three Things I Have Learnt About Repositories
Olivier Roubine, Regional Manager, Rational Software, France

Since the appearance of the term "repository" in the software development community in the late seventies, it has been used in a variety of contexts, and especially in relation with software tools and software engineering environments. This term has become so overloaded so as to mean different things to different people. As a consequence, professionals have become embattled in quasi-religious feuds on whether such or such tool should be "repository-based", losing track of the very purpose of the tools. We will review some of the connotations that are often associated with the notion of repository, and we will describe some of the desirable features and functionalities that should be provided in order to see repositories used as unifying frameworks in software development.