Launch & Conference Day Link Slides
Chaired by John A Thomson of Roundtrip Solutions Limited

The linking slides for the highly successful launch day of Scottish Developers in Edinburgh on the 12th June 2003.

Praise for the launch day:

"...let me say how much I enjoyed yesterday’s conference and express my thanks to the organisers and presenters for putting on such an informative and enjoyable session."

"I really enjoyed it."

"...the level of interaction was much better than other similar developer days I've been involved in previously".

"These events are stimulated by responses and even debate from attendees, so thanks to everyone who came and especially to those who contributed with questions and discussion. I hope we can keep up this informal interactive style."

Application Architecture - the PAC Agent Design Pattern
Presented by Mike Scott of Mike Scott Software

This session examined the high-level partitioning of an application into clean, robust & maintainable software entities known as Agents using the Presentation-Abstraction-Control (PAC) design pattern.

PAC Agents are a development of the popular Model-View-Controller (MVC) model initially developed for Smalltalk. PAC Agents refine the MVC pattern by creating very fine-grained nodes, each of which can contain presentation, data abstraction and controller parts. The application becomes a hierarchy of interacting PAC Agents.

One general principle of the pattern is that any Agent may only interact with its direct parent Agent, and any child Agent that it creates. Thus all communication between Agents is strictly controlled and decoupled, making development, modification and testing much simpler. Because each PAC Agent is an independent entity in its own right, it is possible to run each Agent in its own thread or even on separate machines, making the PAC Agent pattern extremely scaleable. Dynamic configuration of the Agent hierarchy is also possible.

The session drew upon applications of the PAC Agent pattern in real-world applications that have proved to be very successful. It was mainly code-orientated with little or no use of presentation slides.

The zip file contains the code segments to demonstrate a simple PAC agent.

Designing Web-based User Interfaces - ASP.NET versus IntraWeb
Presented by Craig Murphy of CraigMurphy.com

The WYSIWYG paradigm that we use to design our desktop user interfaces has long been the envy of those developers building web-based user interfaces.

The advent of Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) promoted the continued development of web applications, however ASP did little to help tackle the entanglement of the code required to handle the user interface. Microsoft's key design goal for ASP's successor was to make designing and building web applications as easy as it is to design and build traditional desktop applications. ASP.NET is that successor - it offers a near WYSIWYG user interface design environment, making it possible to "see" a web-based user-interface without the need for a web browser.

Third parties, such as AtoZSoftware, stepped in and managed to produce viable mechanisms that give developers a means of designing web user interfaces using traditional tried and tested form designers. AtoZSoftware built IntraWeb for use with Borland Delphi - IntraWeb boasts a drag'n'drop user interface design environment for web-based user interfaces. IntraWeb has proven so successful, Borland bought the technology and it is now an integral part of the Delphi IDE.

Fundamentally, both ASP.NET and IntraWeb make designing web-based user interfaces significantly easier, thus letting developers concentrate on the task of "solving the real problem" rather than dealing with user interface spaghetti.

In this 60 minute session, Craig compared and contrasted Microsoft's ASP.NET and Borland's IntraWeb as a means of creating web applications.

Demonstrations were provided using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Borland Delphi.

The download zip file contains presentation slides, code samples and supplementary files required to replicate the code demos.

Language and Virtual Machine Changes in Java 1.5
Presented by Andrew Swan of Panasonic

The next release of Java (1.5) will make significant changes to the language specification and virtual machine which should make development easier and more robust. The changes are covered by the following change requests, all going through the Java Community Process at the moment.

JSR-014 Add Generic Types to the Java Programming Language
Support for "parametric polymorphism" (like C++ templates). Mainly for the benefit of type safe collections.

JSR-65 Concise Object-Array Literals
Support for a short hand syntax for declaring arrays in Java. Primarilay used as a mechanism for passing variable arguments to methods.

JSR-121 Application Isolation API Specification
Support for running more than one application using the same VM, thus reducing startup time, class loading and memory footprint.

JSR-201 Extending the Java Programming Language with Enumerations, Autoboxing, Enhanced for loops and Static Import enhancements to the language to avoid the current verbose syntax for declaring enumerations, using static methods and constants, and creating for loops. Also support for "autoboxing", the process of converting primitive types to objects and vice versa.

During his presentation, Andy provided information on these changes and demonstrated code segments using these proposed mechanisms for the language.

The zip file contains Andy's presentation.

Web Services in .net
Presented by Barry Carr of Ixian Software

Barry showed how easy .NET makes the creation of Web-Services especially using the latest incarnation of Visual Studio.

A web-service was constructed to show how quickly and easily one can be coded and it's use demonstrated when he moved on to discuss ASP.NET.

In his discussion about ASP.NET, Barry showed how Visual Studio has made the creation of web-applications as simple as creating traditional Windows applications in tools like Delphi and how easy it is to utilise a web-service from a web-application.

The zip file contains both the session presentation and source code for the demos.