Thoughts on Presenting Seaside
Sitting on my flight back home, I'm pondering how the presentation to the Dallas Ruby group was received. The first thing to come to mind is this: as I've visited various Ruby groups, it's clear that Smalltalk has some nascent mindshare. Everyone tells me that Smalltalk comes up in conversation a lot, but they just don't hear much about it (leading them to believe that there's not much going on with it). Clearly, this means that we (Cincom) need to do a better job of promoting what we do. Here are a few things that anyone interested in Smalltalk should know about:
- Industry Misinterpretations - our weekly podcast. You can subscribe with iTunes. We have fresh ideas about Smalltalk and interviews with notable people in the Smalltalk (and dynamic language) community regularly
- Smalltalk Daily - our daily screencast demonstrating "how to" do various things with ObjectStudio and VisualWorks. There are over 500 of these now, and a new one appears every weekday. You can subscribe in iTunes
- Smalltalk Videos - we post videos from trade shows, various presentations, and longer form screencasts. As with evreything else, you can subscribe in iTunes
With that out of the way, some more observations - the ability to debug web applications (especially in the browser with Web Velocity) really impresses people - jaws regularly drop when I demonstrate that. The entire environment impresses people, but the debugger (and even the workspace) especially. Want to impress a non-Smalltalker? Just do a demo that shows coding in the debugger!
Technorati Tags: web velocity, smalltalk
Comments
[Marlon Moyer] January 7, 2009 14:05:27.623
[Marlon Moyer] January 7, 2009 14:16:15.447
I've got to admit that the environment both impressed me and threw up red flags. It is nice to see all the integration going on in the environment and the seamless transition to debugging, etc. At the same time, the lack of the ability to use my favorite text editor to code signals that things may be more complicated than they need to be, just like trying to set up a server using java/jRuby seems.
Leaving behind my favorite text editor, source control app and terminal tools would require a large leap of faith.
That said, I'll probably subscribe to the podcasts and give smallTalk/Seaside a try.
Re: Thoughts on Presenting Seaside
[ Dennis Smith] January 7, 2009 21:31:21.335
Comment by Dennis Smith
Having programmed in numerous languages, most of which allowed me to use my "favourite" editor, I have to say that using Smalltalk with its IDE (including integrated Editor) is enormously more productive.
For example, if I create a method and want to rename one of its local variables (say I used "x" and now would like to make it "myCustomer", the IDE lets me do that in one action, no matter how many references there are to the variable. I can also auto-reformat my code one a method-by-method basis, based on formatting criteria.
Only a couple of the things one gets out of an IDE, there are many more.
I would not trade the IDE for a text editor for anything!
text-only smalltalk!
[Bernard Devlin] January 8, 2009 20:38:51.058
I suppose people who really want to use their favourite text editor/vcs could always try gnu-smalltalk. I'm no expert in it, but I believe it also provides seaside now.