The BCS had
an excellent talk last night by Dr
Ben Fairfax of Webcab Components.
He walked us through a number of interested topics regarding the how and why of CBD,
gave us a look at the major platforms on the market and shared some insight into how
his company works in this ecosystem. Basically he has a very interesting
setup where he can generate components and documentation for a variety of different
platforms and technologies. I was particularly impressed by the fact that unit tests
and “business” documentation are also generated through automated means, which greatly
increases the productivity of their efforts. From what I understand it’s a very small
team who work on these products, yet they are the only company I know of who produce
software artifacts for both Microsoft and Java platforms. Their main focus is primarily
on financial components, but you can read more about them on their website.
In the meantime, Ben has kindly supplied all the code samples, presentation material
and links to the relevant technologies he used yesterday. They can be found
on his website here.
On a personal note, this was the first event I organised for the the local section
of the BCS, since I joined the committee a few
months ago. It has been extremely rewarding and I’m looking forward to working on
the rest of the events we’re having this year.