SPA2008 - some final thoughts

It is now 2 weeks since the end of the SPA 2008 Conference and I have finally finished writing my notes. (Yippee!) So what are my final thoughts and what I am going to take away for exploring in the next few weeks and months?

I thought the conference was excellently run with a good mix of software practitioners attending. I was spoilt for choice in selecting the sessions to attend but there are some good notes appearing which summarise the sessions I didn't attend. There are also a number of articles appearing on various blogs. The dialogue during and between sessions was also stimulating and I hope to continue this when time permits.

Technically, I am particularly interested in following up the following topics:

• Python, Django and other frameworks


• Erlang, particularly as part of a multi-language development probably with C, C++ or Java


• Further development of metric dashboards (which is work in progress ) now that I have got some further input to consider


• Look more at DSM, DSL's and domain specific code generation


• Decaying architecture and legacy code bases, and attempting to detect when to intervene

I also learnt a lot about me. The conference confirmed that generally, the work I do is pretty well in line with what the rest of the software world in the UK is currently doing (or tyring to do!). There are differences but these appeared to be related to the domains, size of developments and team dynamics.

Learning another language beginning with P

I arrived early at the SPA2008 conference so that I could attend a fast-paced (not my words!) workshop given by Nick Efford on Python and how it could be used to develop web applications. Having experience in using the other two P languages for the web (Perl and PHP), I was keen to see what made Python a better choice than the other two.

Nick started by covering the fundamentals of the language, explaining some of specific features of the language that were different to other languages including dynamic typing and the importance of layout as a way of implying structure (e.g. no } brackets for if statements, just ensure that the if body is indented). Clearly one of the strengths of Python is the ability to efficiently handle and operate on sets of data as tuples or lists.

After a explanation of OO-Python, a demonstration of the neat way that documentation can be created for classes and methods (embedding a method/class description in """) and a quick overview of the Standard Python libraries provided; Nick moved on to the various implementations of Python that are available including Jython (a Java version which currently lags behind the 'native' Python), IronPython (for .NET), CherryPy and Django.

Nick is obviously a fan of Django and demonstrated very quickly how a web-based application could be created quickly using the Django toolkit although I couldn't get it working on my Vista Laptop. One neat feature of Django that particularly impressed me, was the Admin interface which is automatically generated when you create a project. I also like the approach to documenting Django through the publication of both a paper and web-based book. Clearly I need a project to try and experience the power and efficiency of developing web-based applications using Django for real.

In summary, I felt that Nick had done a very good job at highlighting the advantages of Python and left me keen to try and experiment further, particularly with Django. At the end of the session, I left knowing a lot more about Python than before and I feel I will soon be able to add another language beginning with P to my kitbag knowing that there will be some applications where Python will make an excellent implementation language. It is also clear that within the SPA community, Python is a must-know language as there where many sessions in the conference were Python was cited as the language of choice to implement certain tasks.