Dan Moore!

Software archeology

I presented this evening on J2ME for the kickstart meeting at BJUG, where Grady Booch was the featured speaker. After unknowingly knocking UML in his presence, I enjoyed a fine talk on software archeology. This discipline involves looking at larger, historical patterns of software development. Essentially, when we build software, we are building artifacts. And, just as the plans and meetings of the the slave foremen who built the pyramids used are not recorded, so there are aspects of present day software development that are simply lost when the project ends or the programmers die. One of Booch's projects is to capture as much of that data as possible, because these architectures are full of valuable knowledge that many folks have sweated for. It needs to happen soon, because, in his words, "time is not on our side" when it comes to collecting this kind of data. Man, I could handle that kind of job.

Speaking of architecture, I stumbled on "Effective Enterprise Java" which looks to be a set of rules for enterprise java development. I really enjoy "Effective Java", by Joshua Bloch, so I hope that Ted Neward's book lives up to its name. And I certainly hope this project doesn't get stranded like "Interface Design" apparently did.