OOPSLA 2006: Day 1, Tuesday, October 24

It was a full day. Here's the rundown:

After morning Mass, played a couple of games of chess at Starbucks.

Wandered through some of the book displays and posters.

Demo: Bringing Ownership Domains to Mainstream Java
Method to annotate object elements to ensure, among other things, consistency regarding encapsulations.

Demo: WebTest
Tool for testing web applications. This looks like a really impressive open-source web testing tool. You can check it out here.

Demo: Enhancements to refactoring tools in Eclipse
A project to make it easier to perform some refactorings in Eclipse. It did provide me with an immediately useful tip: In Eclipse, you can quickly build up a selection by hitting Shift-Alt-Up. If you start with the cursor on a word, it is selected. Hit Shift-Alt-Up, and the expression is selected. Hit it again, and the statement. Again, the block. Again, the enclosing block, working all the way up to the file itself. Very cool.

Took the train into Downtown for lunch.

I also went to presentations of three research papers:

• Research Paper: Pluggable Type Systems
• Research Paper: Design fragments Make using Frameworks Easier
• Research paper: JTL - Java Tools Language. Language used to help search Java code, even within Java.

The second one was extremely interesting and I think could be applied directly in a project at work.

It is amazing what a difference a presentation makes. I had glanced through some of these papers beforehand, but the presentation was really required in order to make sense of the context in which these techniques would be useful.

The final event I attended was an experimental art-thingy. It was good, because my brain was basically full. Each of us was given a large piece of paper and some pens. We were the told we would be listening to 43 minute of music by The Necks. As we listened, we were to draw a continuous line with our pens and basically let the music direct what appeared on the page. Our drawing was then filmed. The director of the project will make a time-lapse video of the drawings from several sessions like this and then show it Thursday evening. The music was interesting to a degree, but definitely from the "art should hurt" school.

Drove around, did a little shopping, came back to the hotel and watched the World Series game 3 while eating dinner.