Brian Barry, Bedarra Research Labs

Brian Barry is currently CEO of Bedarra Research Labs. From 1991-2002 he served variously as Chief Scientist, CEO, President and CTO at Object Technology International, Inc. Under his leadership OTI developed the Eclipse IDE Platform, IBM VisualAge for Java, and IBM VisualAge MicroEdition for embedded systems. He has over 15 years of experience in the design and implementation of object-oriented systems, including distributed, client/server, embedded and real-time applications.

Dr. Barry has published a number of research papers and articles in the areas of simulation, OO applications, systems integration, embedded systems and software engineering, and is a frequent speaker on object technology. He has served on the Program Committees for OOT conferences such as OOPSLA and ECOOP, was an original member of the ANSI Smalltalk committee, and actively participates in a research review boards and committees. He holds a Ph.D. from Queen's University.

Presentation: "Future trends in open source"

Track: Sixth Generation Languages

Time: Tuesday 16:00 - 16:45

Location: Conference Hall

Abstract: Open source software is changing the face of Information Technology. Some would say it is wreaking havoc, others that it brings new energy and vitality to a moribund discipline. We will explore the disruptive influence of open source, and discuss the impact that it is having on developers, researchers, businesses, and end users. Throughout the talk we will illustrate with examples from the Eclipse Project, drawing on the history of Eclipse to show how modern open source projects are launched in practice, and how communities evolve and grow around open source technology. Finally we will offer our speculations and predictions as to how this phenomenon will play out and the impact that it can be expected to have over the next 5 - 10 years.

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Presentation: "Introduction: Smart Client Development"

Track: Smart Client Development

Time: Wednesday 10:15 - 10:45

Location: SAS Nortvegia

Presentation: "The Smart Client Evolution"

Track: Smart Client Development

Time: Wednesday 11:00 - 12:00

Location: SAS Nortvegia

Abstract:

In the early days of client/server computing, as Dumb Terminals were replaced by workstations, applications grew more powerful, resulting by the 1990s in the much vilified "Fat Client". Soon enough the limitations of Fat Clients were apparent - allowing a lot of companies to make a lot of money selling desktop management solutions that didn't really work. Along came HTML and the web browser to save the day, resulting in browser-based Thin Clients. Thin was clearly superior to Fat: we couldn't mix business and presentation logic on the Thin Client, it offered a degree of platform and location independence, desktops were easier to manage - and if a few input events were lost along the way, well, that was a small price to pay for progress.

Of course, a little later we discovered that some of those lost events were important, that platform independence was only as deep as incompatible JavaScripts allowed it to be, and that Internet Explorer wasn't all that thin after all. The solution was "Rich Clients" - which as it turns out are still pretty Fat but like the 1900s era business tycoons, now those extra pounds just make them more distinguished. But wait: sadly, as we shall see, Rich Clients have their problems as well.

Against this context of the evolution from Dumb to Fat, to Thin, and then to Rich, we will offer our thoughts and speculations concerning the next evolutionary stage, "Smart Clients". Smart Clients should provide all the benefits of a Rich Client model but with Thin Client manageability. At the same time they should offer more flexibility and adaptability to the increasingly connected infospace of the 21st century, where typical applications are highly mobile, and where data is often more interesting than the processes that generated it.

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