When we went from procedural programming to object-oriented programming, by realizing that we could remove the “object pointer” as the first argument to a procedure, and instead went to a model where methods are invoked on objects with identity, it fundamentally transformed our ability to structure and reason about software. Now, with the introduction of the DCI paradigm, I think that a similar change is possible, by realizing that DCI contexts are to stateless services what objects were to procedures.

The second presentation from JavaZone 2009 that I want to comment on is “På tide å kaste ut relasjonsdataben?” (Is it time to throw out the relational database?) by Trond Arve Wasskog, which continues the current trend of looking at alternatives to relational databases for persistence.

For myself, I have for some time argued that most people seem to be using relational databases for four separate things: storing objects, querying them, reports, and backups. In my view it is only really good at the reporting part and literally suck at the rest. The object-relational impedance mismatch is a well-known issue, that DDD values are hard to implement using OR mappers also seems to be common knowledge, and that backups are not exactly efficient or easy to make is also an issue.

The JavaZone 2009 conference is over, and although I couldn’t make it this year due to our project, StreamFlow, going into production soon, the Qi was definitely flowing there. I’ve been watching the videos from the conference (available here, and many kudos for making them available so soon), and there’s a number of presentations which either explicitly or implicitly relates to Qi4j. It seems that so many of the issues that Qi4j has been designed to deal with are things that are becoming known and annoying to a majority of developers. So, I’ll try to outline below just how the topics covered at JavaZone relate to Qi4j, and how Qi4j can help you deal with those problems.

Swedish readers of IDG.se might have noticed today that there was an article about how the Swedish municipalities are working on a new workflow product, as the current vendors simply doesn’t cut it. Jayway was mentioned as a partner in this development, and since this involves me I thought I would take this opportunity to [...]

For decades, we have viewed software applications as layers and modules, but no-one has yet tried to capture these simple concepts and enforce good practices in the development. Qi4j does, and in this article we will try to explore how this is done and what benefits are achieved. The Age Old Diagram Very early software [...]

The goal of modeling domain concepts through objects set by OOP has for a long time been handled in insufficient ways. What is the fundamental problem with how we have tried to do this so far? Is there a better way to deal with it? In this article we introduce the concept of Composite Oriented [...]