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No More Need for Plumbers

Goldfish bowl 75 minutes

How dumb can software become? Do middle-tier componentenvironments spell the end for specialist distributed systems developers?

Andy Longshaw

The arrival of middle-tier component environments such as EJB, COM+ and the CORBA Component Model has provided an unprecedented level of support for developers of distributed systems. These environments provide functionality such as declarative attributes for transaction and security requirements, automatic persistence and pooling of many kinds. These are precisely the areas where experienced, low-level, distributed systems developers have proved their (not inconsiderable) worth to their companies and clients. If this functionality can now be automatically generated, what is left for these specialist developers? Must they all now learn VB?

Andy Longshaw (andyl@contentm.com)

Content Master

Andy is a founder member of and Principal Technologist at Content Master. In this role he is responsible for the creation of various types of technical content such as training courses and whitepapers. Andy's areas of expertise include Java, XML and component systems. Throughout the past three years, Andy has given a series of conference sessions on Java, XML, middle-tier component architectures and COM/COM+. In his previous 5 years at QA Training, Andy helped to build one of the UK's largest Java curricula outside of Sun including Enterprise topics such as CORBA, RMI, Enterprise JavaBeans, JDBC and COM interoperability. He was also involved in developing QA's COM and COM+ curriculum and recently helped to co-develop Microsoft's "Building Solutions for Microsoft Windows 2000 with Visual C++" and "Building XML-Based Web Applications" courses.

Topics

Benefits

The intention is to discover the various pitfalls in using the middle-tier component environments. Can you really use them in such a "dumb" way, ignoring what is going on under the covers? Can they really do all that they say they can? If they cannot, how does this change the application of the skills of the distributed developer (i.e. what holes do they have to plug)? If they can provide such an environment, then where are the next batch of problems arise in this area that will call for in-depth technical expertise?

Session: Goldfish bowl 75 minutes Level: basic
Audience: Almost anyone, from technical managers to grungy developers Max 60

Material

Basic discussion background material. Brief whitepaper on the proposed benefits of such environments.

Delivery

Discussion summary posted on the web at http://techland.qatraining.com

Format

Standard goldfish bowl.

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