Roberto and myself just got back from OOP in Munich. We had a fair show, and managed to find really good German cooking :-)

While exposing as usual we did a lot of new developments and bug fixing, and got some nice ideas from the visitors; we had competent opinions, met a really nice guy from IBM (yes, really :-D), several bright developers (also girls!), and a bizarre but stimulating fellow from Siemens; a total of about 50 demos. A 3.1.3 version will be out soon!

It was an occasion for Roberto and me to reflect and discuss where to find our point of balance, between "groupware" (i.e. shared to-do's, boards, agenda, forum, portal features), project management, issue/bug track, document management and customer support; all who came to us reported the need, and we pointed out how limiting management to a specialised bug track leads to general unhappiness in the wider team, to which all agreed. Teamwork collects the different needs in one application, I believe quite maturely for what concerns the object model, and a little still to go for the interface, but we are almost there (I hope!).

All Germans we met spoke English very well, fortunately, as my scholastic German is by now almost useless for explaining (while I understand quite a bit). The size of the Messe expo area is amazing (you see only a bit in the picture); we went round it with our van, and it seemed never ending.

There were a lot of expositors, many selling really bizarre stuff, from Smalltalk development (never heard the news?) to "fast" UML (so what?), to miraculous testing tools (ever tried with a web application?). Anyway, I guess that diversity is a good thing in itself, as my father (a geneticist) always tells me.

Pietro Polsinelli