Day 2
Day 2 of REAL World started with a nice breakfast (eggs, sausage and home fries). The first session I attended was Expanding REALbasic: Discovering Community Resources by REALBasic Developer Magazine publisher Marc Zeedar. RBDevZone got a nice little plug.
Next up for me was Bringing a Single-User Database to a Multi-User Database by REAL Software’s Mike Bailey. Mike did a good job with the presentation as we followed “Wally” and his process of converting a single user database application to be multi-user.
At lunch, had some good discussions with Bob Keeney and Mars Saxman (the RB compiler guy). After lunch I went to the REAL SQL Server session by Marco Bambini, the architect behind it. He showed us how it is designed and gave a great demo of a PHP calendar application that uses REAL SQL Server as the back-end.
Next I went to Report Printing I and II by Keith DeLong. This session was really good. Keith showed a class library he has designed to simplify printing with REALbasic (and he’s a great presenter). I can’t wait to give it a try. Printing with REALbasic has always been a bit of a mystery to me.
For the last session of the day, I went to Optimizing in REALbasic by Mike Woodworth, where he showed some techniques for improving your code speed. He also used the Shark profiling tool for Mac OS X.
For dinner I was at a table with Kevin Culley, Christian Miller, Bryan Lunduke and his wife, David Grogono (of REAL Software) and a few others whose names I didn’t get. As Kevin mentioned on his blog, we had some great discussions on life as a software consultant.
Day 3
Today I did my Unit Testing session, which I thought went really well. I estimate that there were about 20 or so people there including REALbasic luminaries such as Charles Yeomans, Brad Rhine, Brad Weber and Norman Palardy.
I then went to Design Patterns 2 by William Yu of REAL Software. He discussed the Command, Chain of Responsibility, Observer, Visitor patterns and the model-view-controller.
At lunch spent some time chatting with David Grogono and then headed off to the last two sessions of the day: Planning, Implementing and Supporting Cross-Platform Business Applications by John Callis and Building a Web Application in REALbasic by Joe Strout.
And that’s all! Overall I found this to be a great conference and look forward to next year, but now I can’t wait to get back home to my family.
3 Responses to “REAL World 2007 Days 2 and 3”
Heh, I didn’t realize Bryan was married to David.
It took my brain a few moments to properly parse that sentence, but it sure gave me a chuckle!
Paul, your session on unit testing was very good. As I mentioned in my blog, I always have trouble figuring out exactly what tests to run for my database apps. But if you nothing else, your session made me feel very guilty about not testing more thoroughly.
@ Aaron: I see how that sentence is a little weird. I’m glad it gave you a chuckle!
@Brad: I’m pleased to hear you liked the unit testing session. For testing database apps, one technique I’ve used to to create a separate “unit test database” that the tests run against.