COOTS last year was, admittedly, spotty. There were some talks that
were of very high calibre. Others were clearly given by people
who had done something or other on a project, thought it was brilliant,
and managed to present what turned out to be very weak papers.
The organizers involved in COOTS however, last year as well as this, are
about as good as they come: Steve Vinoski (formerly HP Orb Plus, now
Iona), Doug Schmidt (WashU. St Louis, he of ACE fame and big patterns
VIP- edited PLOP1 with Coplien), Jim Coplien, Jim Waldo (Javasoft-
brains behind RMI), Doug Lea (SUNY Oswego - dist. objects, patterns ,..)
and others. Really, in my experience, these are serious folks who
have been around the orb merrygoround a few times, are taking a spin
on the Java one, but are seriously into building large, scaling , high
performance DO solutions.
As a reviewer, I read a couple of papers submitted to this year's coots
(2 papers on building reliable orbs and group based DOs). I think
the calibre is up from last year.
As to the one day workshop referred to by Rohit - hard to tell how that
one will turn out. The papers aren't reviewed in the formal sense the
rest of the conference papers are. Last year, on the topic of "Distributed
Objects and the Internet", I found myself disappointed at the level of
the discussion - I had expected better. This year, the topic is more
along the lines of building componentware, and experience with component
tools like ActiveX and Beans. Again, the results will be better if people
with real development experience in relevant stuff show up. I think
an Infospheres representation would be great!
Ron.
"In other words: there's an Orb-like thingie in just about everything,
supporting a queryable BO that can do meaningful things ?"
--Sandor Spruit