Martin Fowler speech in Melbourne

2 days ago, I have attended a seminar about "Software Design in the 21th Century". The speaker, Martin Fowler, who is currently very famous celebrity in Software Engineering world, made the speech in the seminar. This seminar was held in Melbourne by Enterprise Java which is a Java community in Australia. His attendence attraced lots of people to come, especially in Java field. In his speech, I jot down several points which I was aware. I am going to share what are these points in here.

- The importance on Open Source. He said nowaday lots of proprietary software, like application servers, technology concepts are not as good as many open source projects. One eaxmple, as we can see, EJB3 by SunMicro System, the persistence storage concept is learned from Hibernate, which is a ORM data storage pioneer. And the IDE tools, he said he quite like IntelliJ since it was out. But Eclipse, he said a copy version of IntelliJ, is now almost dominant the market as it becomes free. He kept repeating on how important position will be Open Source in the future.

- Ruby on Rails or JRuby would probably be the next generation of programming language. As he knows, some of the professional who worked on Java for many yaers have already switched to Ruby. But still, as he mentioned, Java and .NET will still dominant the market in the next 5 years.

- As he is the pioneer of Agile methodology, of course in his speech, he talked about how important on Test-Driven programming, it would be a tragedy if a software without a good test.

- The position on AOP. He was making a joke that AOP is best tool for Logging only.

- A Framework should not do too many things. A framework should be as simple as possible, not tightly couple to each others.

I do get a lot of things from his speech. At least I know how are those people focusing on and the technology trend in the next few years, especially on Open Source. What I used in Hong Kong was proprietary application servers, tools. But it looks like the outside world are very focusing on Open Source projects. I do agree with Martin at this point. If more people starts to focus on Open Source, lots and lots of Corporation, Governments who needs a large amount of support may tend to give up these propriertary software and use Open Source tools. But it may be only a dream of mine...