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Exchange 2007 Retrospective

"As is my long-standing custom, each year I write about the Progress Exchange conference for the benefit of those who could not be there (and perhaps to entertain those who were). This was an exceptionally good conference. One of the best we've had in the past few years. Here is the Exchange 2007 edition of my retrospective."

The conference took place at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, NV, from June 4 through June 7. The turnout was excellent, with a little less than a thousand people there. There was a lot going on and for me it was one of the most exhilarating conferences we've had. Great fun!"

This year the conference took place at the JW Marriot Desert Ridge resort just outside Phoenix, Arizona on June 10 through June 14. It was fairly hot, not quite 100 degrees F. most days. I thought it was pleasant even though we were indoors most of the time. It was quite cool in the mornings and a great place to go walking.

Highlights:

We make great software. It was good to talk with so many enthusiastic folks who use what we make, sometimes in strange and wonderful ways. You should all feel proud of what we have accomplished.

The general session demos were awesome. More on that later.

The top technical sessions: Mary Szekely's and Dave Olson's talk on 4GL Data Objects, Shelley Chase's on the outstanding new OpenEdge user interface and Andi Abes talk on the new Sonic BPEL (business process execution language). My talk on agile development methodologies got a much bigger audience than I expected and I got a lot of good feedback.

I was pleased to see a good number of Sonic customers there.

The hotel was a great place for a conference like this—good facilities, very pretty location, great staff (they fixed me a "take out" lunch one day so I could prepare for my talk after lunch instead of eating in the dining room) and many places and opportunities to talk with people. It was both exhilarating and tiring.

Getting Started - Saturday

I left for the airport in the morning. Flying has become an unpleasant ordeal. The line through security was long and slow and we were constantly being shouted at about a variety of topics. My backpack was selected for special treatment because of the car key. Once we were aboard the aircraft and on our way, we were told we could buy food but that they didn't have enough for everyone—that was good because I didn't have to eat "gunge."

I was amazed at how beautiful the hotel and grounds are. After I checked in, I walked around for awhile checking the place out and taking pictures in the gardens. Then I spent the rest of the day going over the slide decks for my talks, practicing and making improvements.

Welcoming Day - Sunday

This was mostly a day for workshops and general session practice, followed by the Welcome Reception. I got up early so I could get a few pictures at sunrise. Much to my surprise, when I asked, the concierge knew when sunrise was scheduled (5:17 am).

There were 3 workshops in the morning and 3 in the afternoon. Most of them were full or close to full. These 4-hour workshops are a good way to get some in-depth knowledge on a specific area. Most of the comments I heard were quite positive even though there were some flaws in one or two.

I stopped by the general session rehearsal to see how things were going. Not so well—the old saying that you shouldn't watch sausage being made is true. There were various equipment problems and last-minute tweaks being worked out. But in the end it all came together very well.

The Welcome Reception and Poster Fair began at 5:00pm. A good opportunity to get together and reconnect with people I haven't seen in a while. Unfortunately, the beer selection was a bit limited.

After the reception, Rick Kuzyk and I hosted a meeting for the North American PUG (Progress User Group) members at the conference. We entertained them by arguing over which breakout sessions would be the ones to go to. Rick did a great job, especially since he was a last-minute replacement who had about 30 minutes to prepare.

Day 1 - Monday

The day began with the opening general session, which I must say was extremely good, based on the comments I heard afterward. David Olson was master of ceremonies. There was a small jazz ensemble playing on stage as people came into the auditorium. It turns out that music was the theme for the morning. Joe Alsop was the first speaker and he talked about the state of the company, briefly described our product lines (OpenEdge, Apama, Sonic, Actional, Shadow, DataDirect, DataXtend, EasyAsk, and ObjectStore) and then discussed the past, present, and future of computing as he set the stage for the rest of the program. The three things that will be important for the next few years are SOA, Software as a Service (SaaS), and Event Stream Processing.

Jaime Meritt and Dave Olson demonstrated how to use Sonic to orchestrate a business process using music played on four synthesizers set up in the four corners of the room as an analogy. Dave killed the primary broker (an explosion could have been used here) and the secondary took over the orchestration without a hitch.

We saw a video about Manuvis' Factory MRI product, which uses OpenEdge, Sonic, and Apama to analyze data from shop-floor sensors in factories. It was a good example of how Apama can and is being used in applications beyond just stock trading systems.

We also learned that Sonic is part of the Large Hadron Collider being built on the border of France and Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider is a big (17 miles in circumference) machine that physicists use to smash hadrons together at a very high speed so they can see what happens. Hadrons are elementary particles, like neutrons and protons, that are building blocks of atoms. The collider works sort of like this: you drive groups of black suburbans in opposite directions around a race track as fast as you can until they collide head-on. If you do this enough times, a white Honda Civic hybird will emerge.

Mark Palmer explained how Apama is used for event stream processing and "picking out the notes" you want to hear, using several Beatles tunes to illustrate.

Michael Fabrico, Vice President of IT at Broder Bros. Co., talked about how Broder Bros. is using OpenEdge and EasyAsk to run their growing business and that his OpenEdge databases just work. Dmitri Levin takes care of them all by himself.

Anthony Swindells then joined Dave onstage to show how the new OpenEdge user interface can be used to control the music synthesizers using the same Sonic ESB services Jaime had set up earlier. He used a third-party piano keyboard plug-in to augment the application he built as we watched. Very, very slick and easy to do. Anthony's demo was a great finale for the opening session.

After the opening session, we had the first round of breakout sessions with a pause for lunch.

Before lunch I did a pretty well received session on tips for database administrators. I would have liked to go to the session called "Enterprise SOA Implementation, What Your Mother Failed to Tell You" but I can't yet be in two places at the same time.

The Mashup session with Sheldon Borkin was pretty interesting. He showed how existing services and data can be easily combined to create new things. For example, Google Maps can be combined with a listing of apartments for rent from Craigslist so you can see where they are. Here's a video mashup Sheldon showed.

I did a session on database design at the same time as Adam Backman's database performance tuning session. Adam is always interesting and I heard he did a great job. I used a music theme but had no idea the opening session would too.

The rest of the day was devoted to the Expo, which worked out quite well. It was set up right in the middle of everything and the exhibitors said they got a lot more traffic than in previous years. Unfortunately, I didn't find very many good tchotchkes so the kids will have to do without. The beer selection was a bit limited again. I just don't understand why some people like simulated beer. Or is it virtual beer?

Day 2 - Tuesday

More breakouts and the Expo was open all day.

John Harlow talked about virtualization and how virtual machines like VMware and Parallels can be used to make life easier. Among other things, John had benchmark results for various configurations. Check out the slide deck under the session abstract page or on PSDN (along with all the others).

Pete Sliwkowski and Jaime Meritt hosted the Enterprise Infrastructure Roadmap and Info Exchange. They got some great questions and suggestions from a good sized audience.

Shelley Chase's talk on the new user interface capabilities was packed, and for good reason. Shelley did not disappoint—she had good stuff to demo and put on a great performance.

For the last slot of the day, I went to Andi Abes excellent session about the new BPEL capabilities in Sonic. With it, you can compose new applications built out of existing web services. Andi quite unjustifiably accused me of heckling him. I did no such thing.

La Puesta del Sol Evening Entertainment

After a longish bus ride, we arrived at a ranch in the hills near Fort McDowell where we were treated to food, drink, entertainment by a pretty decent band and various games. I watched Paul Petersen try his hand at quick draw shooting. I think he could use a bit more practice. Well quite a lot, actually. Line dancing, photos in western costumes, bucking barrel riding, roping and hay rides were also on offer. There was a temporary shortage of beer but it was quickly remedied. I meant to go have a look at the sky through the large telescope but completely forgot. There was an odd sort of tourist rodeo to finish up the festivities. It was a nice party and it sure looked like a great time was had by all.

I stayed up until 2 am arguing about all sorts of things with Andi Abes. We did solve many problems but I can't remember the solutions.

Day 3 - Wednesday

More breakouts.

Mary Szekely and Dave Olson's session on 4GL Database Objects was a big hit—the place was jammed and rightly so. Mary only comes to the conference every five years or so. She says she got lots of great ideas from the people at the conference. In fact, she has already implemented a few of them.

While Mary and Dave were talking, Colleen Smith, Salvador Vinals, Sheldon Borkin, and I hosted a Birds of a Feather discussion about Software as a Service. We had a small audience but an interesting discussion nevertheless.

Marv Stone did a session entitled "It's Monday Morning, Do You Know Where Your Service has Been?" Marv is a great speaker and deserved a much bigger audience but it's hard to compete with Mary and Dave.

At lunch, Greg Higgins presented Libor Laubacher with this year's "PEG'er of the Year" award. Congratulations Libor.

After lunch I talked about optimizing your 4GL code to make it run faster. This was a 60 minute session in a 90 minute time slot, but I completely forgot that. So when I got to 59 minutes, I said I was out of time but could answer a couple of questions. Someone in the audience said "no, you still have half an hour left". Boy was I surprised. We spent the half hour on questions. Afterward, one of the people in the audience came up to me and said with a smile that I owe him $20. On Monday I had said I have to give people $72 worth because you can go to 14 sessions and the conference fee was about $1000, which works out to about $72 per session.

In the last slot of the conference I went to Ken Wilner's "Getting Started with AJAX." Ken showed three different ways to use browsers and various toolkits to build very nice user interfaces that allow OpenEdge and other applications to be accessed with a web browser.

Other Items

A lot of people said that they had difficulty deciding what to go to because there were so many good talks to choose among. That's exactly how it should be. Let's make it even harder next time.

The Dean and the Chairman of the computer science department of Georgia Southern University were both there. GSU teaches Progress courses. BravePoint has hired some of the graduates.

I was disappointed that we didn't have PSDN Radio this year. I guess we can't have everything.

I heard a lot of good comments about the sessions in the Architecture track. People said "For years you have been telling us to modernize our application architectures, separate business logic from user interface, and so on, but now you're actually telling us how to do it.".

Did I mention the beer? Would have been nice to have more actual beer and less simulated beer.

Conclusion

The flight home was uneventful and again we were told there is food to purchase but there isn't any (it's another example of the difference between theory and practice). Fortunately, I brought a sandwich I got at the Starbuck's in the waiting area.

This was an exceptionally good conference. One of the best we've had in the past few years. Thank you to all the people who worked hard to make it a success.

I hope to see you next year when Exchange takes place at Disneyland outside Paris, France. Maybe I'll bring my Elvis costume.

Regards,

Gus
Wizard and Vice President, Technology
Progress Software, Bedford, MA