Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Today's spotlight - David Smith's Croquet presentation:

Keynote: Croquet - A Collaboration Architecture David Smith: OpenCroquet Tuesday 10:30:00 am to 12:00:00 pm

Abstract: Croquet is a computer software architecture built from the ground up with a focus on deep collaboration between teams of users. It is a totally open, totally free, highly portable extension to the Squeak programming system, a modern variant of Smalltalk. Croquet is a complete development and delivery platform for doing real collaborative work. There is no distinction between the user environment and the development environment.

Croquet is also a totally ad hoc multi-user network. It mirrors the current incarnation of the World Wide Web in many ways, in that any user has the ability to create and modify a "home world" and create links to any other such world. But in addition, any user, or group of users (assuming appropriate sharing privileges), can visit and work inside any other world on the net. Just as the World Wide Web has links between the web pages, Croquet allows fully dynamic connections between worlds via spatial portals. The key differences are that Croquet is a fully dynamic environment, everything is a collaborative object, and Croquet is fully modifiable at all times.

Croquet is a joint project being developed by David A. Smith, Alan Kay, David P. Reed, and Andreas Raab. More information is available at: http://www.opencroquet.org

Bio: David has been focused on interactive 3D and using 3D as a basis for new user environments and entertainment for almost twenty years. He created "The Colony", the very first 3D interactive game and precursor to today's "first person shooters" like Quake... except Colony ran on a Macintosh in 1987. "The Colony" won the "Best Adventure Game of the Year" award from MacWorld Magazine.

In 1989, David used the technologies developed for the game to create a virtual set and virtual camera system that was used by Jim Cameron for the movie "The Abyss". Based upon this experience, David founded Virtus Corporation in 1990 and developed Virtus Walkthrough, the first real-time 3D design application for personal computers.

In 2000 David joined forces with Alan Kay, David Reed, and Andreas Raab to develop a totally new kind of software. Croquet is intended to completely change the way you use a computer, transforming it from a closed box with very low bandwidth communication channels to a high-bandwidth collaboration and multi-user idea processing engine.

Overheard on the Smalltalk IRC:

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you will have to ram them down their throat"

From the NYC STUG:

NYC Smalltalk July Events - PostgresSql and OpenSkills

NYC Smalltalk will hold its next meeting on Wednesday July 9th, 2003. We will also be hosting OpenSkills.org DevCon 2003 on Thursday July 10th.

Date:	July 9th, 2003 - PostgresSql and VisualWorks, Bruce Badger
Date:	July 10th, 2003 - OpenSkills.org DevCon 2003, Bruce Badger

Location:	Suite LLC offices
Address:	440 9th Avenue, 8th Floor
Time:	6:30pm to 7:00pm -- Open house
Time:	7:00to 8:30 pm -- Presentation

Directions:

Take E or C train to 34th (Penn Station) walk to corner of 34th and 8th. Walk up one block to 9th.

RSVP is requested. Please send mail to: charles@ocit.com with subject line of: NYC Smalltalk July 9th, 2003. Our meetings are opened to the general public. Invite a friend ! To join our mailing list simply send mail to:

nycsmalltalk-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

Joining our list will give members access to all of the presentations and articles maintained on our site. Any questions send mail to: charles@ocit.com

Charles, Chair NYC Smalltalk

Google has added 'blog this' to their toolbar, and rival blogging companies are not pleased. Well heck, what did they expect? Google didn't pick up Blogger for the fun of it. This is a business, not a big kindergarten sandbox where everyone shares. Yeesh.

Cem Kaner has a full review and here of the SWEBOK. It's a detailed, almost page by page takedown - go read it, and better yet - follow his advice:

Please get involved in this review process, which will close on June 30. Go to www.swebok.org to sign up and download swebok, and submit comments

I'm not the only one thinking why bother with regards to Echo:

I did not realize what was coming with Echo when I reacted positively to Steve Gillmor's take on Microsoft and RSS a couple weeks ago. Of course when I was suggesting RSS might be supplanted over time, I did not think it would be for apparently political reasons. I certainly did not think the effort would begin any time soon.

My reaction to Echo is along the lines of many others: RSS (regardless of its many forms and politics, I mean the collective sense of "RSS") has just in the last months taken a spot in the zeitgeist. My god, it takes ages for these concepts to make their way into large corporations. And now we have to explain Echo? I'm not going to rush that one.

Can we also get 6 versions, 5 of which are similar and a sixth which is out on a plank by itself? What's the point?

If you speak German and could not make any of the Cincom Smalltalk events there this month, then have a look at the presentations from those shows

So says Charles Cooper of CNet. His contention - OS developers don't really pay any heed to potential IP issues. So even if SCO gets no traction with their claims, this issue will come back to bite open source projects eventually:

The unauthorized incorporation of intellectual property (IP) is an obvious no-no in the real world, where laws and rules of behavior govern the limits of fair use. In contrast, the open-source world is a veritable swap mart where source code remains freely distributed and available to the general public. With the General Public License (GPL), anyone can see, change and distribute an application's source code, so long as they publish any changes they make before distributing it.

So far, that's worked out nicely and helped create the conditions for Linux's explosive growth. But it also leaves the door wide open for a code jockey version of Jayson Blair to rip off somebody's IP and disseminate it without permission.

Open-source defenders say that this is all a pig in a poke and that there are stringent review processes in place to prevent mischief. What's more, they say the code is open for anyone to examine.

Yeah, sooner or later I expect to see a suit claiming that some code was inappropriately placed under the GPL by someone with no right to do so.

I've added http-auth support to BottomFeeder. At the moment, I have no feeds that require authorization to test against - so if anyone is using the 3.0 dev stream, and has such a feed to test, I'd appreciate hearing about it. I added one other thing which was a silly omission - if the feed url is https, we now properly use https to fetch it.

Via CNet:

A federal appeals court dealt a legal blow to Sun Microsystems on Thursday, tossing out most of a preliminary injunction requiring Microsoft to carry its rival's version of an interpreter for the Java programming language.

Personally, I think Sun outsmarted itself in this deal.

I see that BitWorking has a post on the whole thread about a new syndication/web log entry subject. I just love this proposal:

post-id

An identifier that uniquely identifies the post on the web. Again, that needs some clarification. If you write a weblog entry about a story in the NYTimes, and post it to your weblog under two categories, the post-id will be the same regardless of which category it is published in. Also, the post-id is unique among all the Echo entries ever published, by anyone on the web, for all time. Once an item is published, it's post-id never changes. If you edit your entry, the post-id does not change. If you re-categorize your post, it does not change. Unique across space and time. What if you want to include some link to the source material? That is another Echo tag, possibly in another Echo optional module, that allows for citing multiple sources

Unique across the entire web, for all time? How, pray tell, is that going to happen? Is there going to be a central repository of serial numbers used for these, so that we can guarantee global uniqueness? Because if not, I fail to see how we can absolutely guarantee across source global uniqueness. A site level URI pointing to a given item might work - but it will end up being mostly useless if the site owner has to relocate the posts into a new CMS or to a new site entirely. Heck, say you publish - as I do - a blog from a Product Management perspective. Now say that BigCo, Inc. buys the product from SmallerCo., Inc. Do you think BigCo. will be happy with all those references to the old company lying around? Probably not, and they will probably want them changed. So much for the permanence of the ID.

It's a nice theory, but I don't think it's entirely workable. The RSS GUID set out to be the same thing, and it hasn't worked out that way either.

Today's spotlight is on David Shaffer's Web MVC talk:

An Application Framework for Developing MVC web applications with the VisualWorks WebToolkit tutorial (extra cost applies) David C. Shaffer: Westminster College Tuesday 2:00:00 pm to 5:30:00 pm

Abstract: Keep your code off of my page. Developing server-side web applications using technologies like Smalltalk Server Pages and Java Server Pages can lead to applications which are difficult to extend or maintain. This is especially true when such pages need to be maintained by both web page designers and programmers. This tutorial will present a framework for developing MVC-style applications using Smalltalk Server Pages, Custom Tag Libraries and Servlets. Use of this framework can result in well-factored applications having clear boundaries between the presentation layer and the underlying business/persistence/transaction layers.

Separation of the presentation layer when developing server-side web applications is achieved by combining Servlets, Smalltalk Server Pages, form models, and Command objects, in a manner similar to that used in the Java-based Jakarta Struts project[1]. This model is similar in purpose to the framework discussed by Knight and Dai in "Objects and the Web"[2] and consists of three related components:

1. An extensive custom tag library for more self-describing page markup, to simplify input validation, to provide scripting capabilities to web page designers (without resorting to Smalltalk), to help communicate between the presentation and control layers.
2. A centralized Servlet which controls flow, provides final validation of data and invokes "Command" objects.
3. Command objects typically implementing use-cases in your application.

In this tutorial each of these components will be presented and utilized in the context of developing a web application. The resulting application demonstrates most of the common forms of web interaction. The full source of the supporting framework and sample application will be provided to attendees for their extension and/or incorporation in their own applications.

Attendee Background: This tutorial is geared toward Smalltalk developers with little or no web development experience. Some VisualWorks experience will be helpful but not required.

Bio: David Shaffer has worked designing Object-Oriented web applications for the Electro-Plating industry since 1997. He is also an assistant professor of Computer Science at Westminster College where he uses Smalltalk extensively in his courses.

I'll likely sign up to attend this one - lots of good ideas are likely to come out of this.

Via manageability come these thoughts on how talk often substitutes for action:

"The Knowing-Doing Gap" is a very insightful book that I encourage everyone to read. There's one particular chapter, entitled "When Talk Substitutes for Action" that is particular relevant.

The chapter talks about the tendency to treat "talking" about something as equivalent to actually "doing" something about it. The author writes about different variations on the theme:

• Making Decisions as a Substitute for Action
• Making Presentations as a Substitute for Action
• Preparing Documents as a Substitute for Action
• Using Mission Statements as a Substitute for Action
• Planning as a Substitute for Action

Manageability discusses this in regard to development, but it's a more widespread problem. Change licensing policy? See the above. Change prices? See the above. Change just about any long term policy? See the above. Inertia is a powerful force in business - especially in larger companies. Getting past the stalling actions (which are, consciously or otherwise, a call to keep the status quo) is hard. This is why once of the marketing guys I work with, after reading Kent Beck's XP book stated that it wasn't a development process so much as it was a general business process. I think he was onto something there.

A few days ago, someone asked in cls whether or not the Method Finder tool in Squeak existed in VW. Not long afterwards, Bob Westergaard went ahead and ported it. Go ahead and load SqueakMethodFinder into VW from the Public Store and try it out. It's quite useful!

From Jason Jones:

Hello Everyone,

Just a quick reminder about tutorials at Smalltalk Solutions 2003 this year. Tutorials are a separate charge from the conference registration and each tutorial costs $100 USD.

A schedule of the tutorials can be found here.

You can sign up for 1, 2, or 3 tutorials here. After you have paid, a Smalltalk Solutions committee member will contact you by email concerning which tutorial(s) you wish to sign up for. Sorry for the extra steps :-)

Sign up soon!!

Jason Jones

At least, it got easier on Windows. I picked up a copy of Nullsoft's installer for Windows, and it was a breeze to use. If you are install a new version, this makes the whole process very easy. Thanks to Bob Westergaard for recommending this to me. The dev build for Windows is now using the NullSoft Installer.

I went to see The Italian Job last night. Ebert liked it, and I did as well. There aren't any big surprises, and it's certainly no message movie - but it's an entertaining caper movie. The pacing was good - there's never time where you feel like you're waiting for something to happen. The characters are all enjoyable - it's a nice, mindless romp of a movie, perfect for a summer night with a big bucket of popcorn. There are some amusing riffs with Seth Green - playing a computer whiz - claiming to be the "real Napster", and yes, Shawn Fanning gets an uncredited cameo. Nice to see he doesn't take himself too seriously. Don't go into this trying to make sense of the chase scenes, or trying to view all the ways they move the loot logically. Just sit back and enjoy the spectacle.

Mark Bernstein comments on the IEEE SWEBOK:

How, incidentally, can IEEE even think about promulgating a "Book of Knowledge" about software engineering that doesn't include Design Patterns among its recommended books?

This is something others have been commenting on as well - the GOF book has been around for quite awhile now, and is obviously valued by the developer community. Why is the IEEE ignoring it?

Go read Sam's post for some good links for promoting XP practices:

By now, virtually everyone on the planet groks the whole Unit Test thing and even writing the unit test first, but Pair Programming has always been the toughest sell to management. Many times I have gotten all of XP adopted at a company except Pair Programming. Management's fear is that they instantly lose 50% productivity. It's a shame because exactly the opposite happens. This study, among many others actually show a big increase in productivity that comes from the synergy of ideas, instant code review, and refactoring on the spot.

The hardest part of getting any new idea in place is overcoming the built in biases - both of management and of developers. I've had some success using the "two heads are better than one" analogy - but I've not actually tried to promote XP into an organization, either.

Today's spotlight is on Sam Shuster's Pollock talk:

Advanced Pollock: Under The Hood, Getting Your Hands Dirty Sam Shuster: Cincom Tuesday 4:00:00 pm to 5:30:00 pm

Abstract: Often the best way to really understand a framework is to try to use or extend it in some way. With that in mind, in this presentation we will extend the Pollock Framework by adding a new widget. Using Unit Tests and "Gang" programming, we will take a ride on the Pollock bus.

By building this new widget, we will see how and where and when a Pane interacts with its Agent and its Artist. We will also see the new reduced role of the Controller, and its new abstract API. With this information, people who have extended or added widgets in the current VisualWorks GUI framework, will be able take that knowledge and apply it to Pollock.

Ample time will be given to discuss the existing Pollock framework, and its future, as well as how to improve the framework.

Bio: Samuel S. Shuster is the GUI project lead for VisualWorks Smalltalk. An early Windows programmer, he has been, sometimes reluctantly, exposed to many GUI development frameworks and tools in multiple programming languages, including experience with all commercial Smalltalk GUI frameworks. Taking these as a guide, along with many GUI framework research projects, he has taken the best from each and synthesized them into a new GUI framework for VisualWorks: Pollock. Unfortunately, he had no idea what he was really getting into.

Pollock is the VW GUI's future, so it's a talk well worth checking out.

Cybersource doesn't think much of SCO's suit. In fact, they figure that the oucome in all circumstances is "Linux is unaffected".

The IEEE has put together what they call the Software Engineering Book of Knowledge. It's what they think of as a set of "best practices" for software development. I'm more or less of the opinion that we don't yet have best practices, but Martin Fowler states it better than I do:

Usually I'd ignore something like this. There are hoards of IEEE standards out there that are routinely ignored by anyone doing commercial software development. Mostly they were written by academics and those engaged in large government projects. Business people don't consider government as a synonym for efficiency.

But Cem Kaner, whose judgment I've learned to respect, does take it seriously. In his blog he says "If the SWEBOK is the basis for the licensing exam, the practices in the SWEBOK will be treated as the basis for malpractice lawsuits. People who do what is called good practice in SWEBOK will be able to defend their practices in court if they are ever sued for malpractice. People who adopt what might be much better practices, but practices that conflict with the SWEBOK, will risk harsh criticism in court. As the basis for a licensing exam, SWEBOK becomes as close to an Official Statement of the approved practices of the field as a licensed profession is going to get."

So how flawed is the Swebok? This is a busy month for me, so I haven't had time to dig into it in any detail. Just reading a few sections is enough to raise a few red flags, and certainly to confirm the view that Swebok puts undue emphasis on plan-driven development, to a degree that rules out agile approaches.

The legal aspect of that could get scary - watch out of this goes anywhere

Via Dave Buck comes news of this Java roundtable discussion:

Borland's Ted Shelton said Java's use is declining in the world because of a perception that vendors compete against one another too much. Java grew up without any serious alternatives, but now Microsoft .NET is maturing and will be a "ferocious competitor" to Java. He even heard about companies putting Java projects on hold pending their evaluation of their .NET projects.

Lol. Java got big because Sun gave it away and the whole early net buzz was around it. Maybe companies are finally noticing this - something I commented on quite awhile ago. Maybe the absurd complexity of things like EJB is strating to sink in. Perhaps people are noticing that Cobol and VB developers are interested in solving problems, not arcane syntax and curly braces :)

Since August of last year, I've had a Kyocera 2135a. It's an ok phone, except for one horrible problem - I've had to replace it 5 times. Why? Becase every 6-10 weeks, the headset port just stops working. Today I replaced it with a newer Kyocera. Right off, something irked me about the phone. When I'm on conference calls, I often mute the phone when no one needs me - that way extraneous office noise doesn't bother the rest of the call. Well, with this phone, there seems to me no way to get to the mute option if you have typed in anything (like, say, a passcode) after the phone call started. Well that's just great. You know what? I don't care about mobile internet access. I don't care about text messaging. I don't care about email on my phone. But it would be nice to have access to core phone functionality.

I expect very little of telecom providers, and they never disappoint or surprise me.....

The usual suspects are off creating a new format for posting to a web log and for syndicating web log content. I look at this, and the first thought that comes to mind is why? RSS 2.0 explicitly allows for extensions via namespace; it also seems to cover the basic ground that is being gone over yet again by this group. The thing of it is, RSS is just starting to be widely adopted - by news organizations and bloggers. Adding yet another format will add some interesting chaos into this mix. what need is this filling? What does RSS 2.0 not do that needs doing so badly that we need a new format? A reasonable blog API, yes - that needs to be done. The blogger API is hideous, and the MetaWebLog API isn't any better. That's a limited goal though, and I suppose it isn't nearly as much fun as re-inventing things that already work.

I posted yesterday on this aspect of the case - now CNet has a story from an IP lawyer that reinforces the point:

Some open-source software projects require contributors to provide legal documentation of ownership in the code they submit and use digital signatures to authenticate those submissions. These types of measures should continue to be improved and be implemented more broadly within the open-source community.

Another confidence-building step would be for the distributors or developers of open-source software to move away from offering their products "as is" and find ways to indemnify customers from any liability for intellectual property infringement. Some in the community might suggest that this step is too radical and that it runs counter to their ideals. However, by not offering at least some degree of comfort to their customers through indemnification, they risk ceding an important market advantage to those proprietary software companies that do

Read that carefully - what it implies is that safe open source efforts require a legal department to verify that everything is ok. That may not be bad advice, but it certainly throws a wrench into the efforts put into projects by small guys - not to mention being a call for full emplyment of IP lawyers. If this advice gets taken, the costs to the larger OS efforts (Apache, Linux, etc.) go up. Who wins in that scenario? MS, of course. And SCO provides a convenient fall guy, so that they don't get blamed.

Today's spotlight is on Anthony Lander's talk on adding encryption to an MSN IM client:

Adding Strong Encryption to the MSN Instant Messenger Network presentation Anthony Lander: independent consultant Tuesday 9:15:00 am to 10:00:00 am

Abstract: This talk looks at the design and implementation of Pongo, an open source MSN Instant Messenger client written in VisualWorks Smalltalk. Pongo adds a strong encryption layer to MSN IM enabling users to have encrypted conversations over chat. This talk looks briefly at the MSN protocol, and the implementation of the Pongo client, but focuses primarily on understanding the design of the encryption layer. Participants should have an intermediate understanding of Smalltalk. No knowledge of encryption is required.

Bio: Anthony Lander has been programming in Smalltalk for over ten years. He has worked on a variety of projects developing database connectivity frameworks, communications switching software, law enforcement applications and real-time 3d video games.

I've watched the Pongo Project progress on the IRC Channel. I've also been inlcuding it as a plugin to BottomFeeder for quite awhile now. Anthony has worked hard to get the encryption working properly with the MS services; come here how he did it!

Amongst a bunch of stuff on copyright law that I don't know enough to comment intelligently on, Cringely points out who the real winner is:

Microsoft is smart and quick. They are no doubt angling to take advantage of this new chaos in the software industry. If history repeats, Microsoft will make very good business decisions. Everyone else will make very poor, if not stupid business decisions. The result will be that Windows will be stronger, and Microsoft's own CRM products, acquired when it bought Navision (the Danish CRM company), will gain a foothold in the market against PeopleSoft and Oracle. A year from now, Microsoft will be a vastly more powerful business even than it is today, which is saying something.

It's been a bad idea to vote against MS winning for years now; this could easily be the next winning round for them....

Interested in getting started with a Smalltalk application server? You can try out VisualWorks and Gemstone in their NC forms free. VW on a single CPU starts at $6000, and Gemstone has just introduced a starter package at $7000. So you can build fully network and web enabled server applications - including a nice persistent store on the back end - for a combined $13k. That's very competitive with the Java app servers. Have a look!

Software vendors - both formal shops and open source, spare time projects - have some preferred method of bug collection. Some use a web form, some use an 800 number - many OS projects use the SourceForge bug tracker. Scott Johnson points out the limitations in reference to a complaint he had about Evolution, and the response that came back on it:

Now Jason argues that I Should have gone to the Ximian site and found the right place to put the comment and then submitted it properly all nice and tidy. Well that's just not going to happen in the real world. Its difficult to find here to put stuff on a web site, figure it out, etc. Until that's a standard thing, users are going to put comments everywhere, even in blogs*. And as someone who has been a product manager most of their professional life, I can honestly tell you this:

• Commentary on your product even in the wrong place is better than no commentary
• Commentary even negative is better than no commentary

One thing that I do think that Jason has missed is that public rants -- IF THEY ARE CREDIBLE** -- serve a real purpose. They make a company very aware that there's an issue and perhaps some incentive to get it fixed. That's huge. And someone else posted in the comments here "how would I like it if someone did that to me for one of my products (Inbox Buddy)?". Well sure I see the issues but you know something -- if I screw up badly enough for someone to write this kind of rant then I should have my feet held to the flame. Yup. That's right -- I may be difficult*** but at least I'm consistently difficult.

I have to say that I agree with him. Yes, I'd rather see bug reports go through our support system or through one of the mailing lists we monitor. The reality is, they crop up in comp.lang.smalltalk, on people's blogs and websites, and in the Smalltalk IRC Channel. They also arrive in email sent to me and to other well known Cincomers. Is this the most efficient way to get them? Maybe not, but it's how it works, and as a software vendor, we just have to deal with the reality. Raging against the nature of reality really isn't going to do us a lot of good. We try to encourage people (gently) to use the preferred channels, but that's about as far as you can go that way.

There was a short outage of the application server this afternoon. I had a complaint that the Public Store access was broken. I took a look at that, and realized that I had done something very silly when I migrated the server from VW 7 to VW 7.1 I had neglected to load in the PostgreSQL access libraries - and that, of course, made it rather difficult to access the database in order to grant new rights. That's addressed now, and the application works. So it's all back to normal, finally. Next time, I'll have to pay a lot more attention to the upgrade....

Today's highlight: The Mysteries of the RB Rewrite Tool

The Mysteries of the RB Rewrite Tool (aka roll-your-own ""refactorings"") tutorial (extra cost applies) Don Roberts, John Brant: Refactory Monday 2:00:00 pm to 5:30:00 pm

Abstract: At the heart of the Refactoring Browser is a general transformation tool known as the "Rewrite Tool" all of the refactorings use this tool to transform the actual smalltalk code. It is possible to use this tool to create your own custom transformations. These transformation might be refactorings but can also be used for any task requiring changing a lot of code. It has been used for migrating between dialects of Smalltalk, replacing a data-access layer with a different one, and converting an application to use ANSI standard exceptions.

Participants will learn the syntax of the rewrite tool along with the concepts necessary to create their own rules. This tutorial will consist of many examples of the various types of rules.

Bio: John Brant and Don Roberts are the co-creators of the Refactoring Browser, the first commercially viable refactoring tool for any language. They are consultants and have spent the past several years working on various projects in addition to developing the RB. Don has recently gone legit and is an assistant professor at the University of Evansville.

This talk will show the true power of the refactoring engine - well worth the time for the serious Smalltalker.

CIO Magazine is talking about Open Source as a solution:

In a November 2002 CIO survey of 375 information executives, 54 percent said that within five years open source would be their dominant server platform. Today, major enterprises are running mission-critical functions on open source, big vendors have lined up to support it, and reliable applications have emerged.

And CIOs who have implemented it report huge total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) reductions.

It's now clear that within five years, open source will transform how software is developed, sold and supported.

When CIOs need help with their systems and software, they don't have to depend on vendors with their own agendas because when an open-source app doesn't work, administrators can look at the source code, figure out why and write a fix themselves. If they're having trouble, help is just a newsgroup away.

Read that again, and note that this is CIOs talking, not a bunch of wild eyed evangelists. The ground is shifting, and IT shops that don't notice are going to be saddling their firms with higher costs than their competitors. That won't be noticed immediately - but at some point, it will be.

Now that I've finished the 5th Harry Potter book, I can get to bed earlier. Yawn.....

Today's highlight: Maurice Rabb's micro-smalltalk talk:

Microlingua, a Tiny Real-Time Smalltalk Maurice Rabb: Stono Technologies LLC Monday 4:00:00 pm to 5:30:00 pm

Abstract: Dynamic object-oriented programming languages are rarely used in small or real-time embedded systems. This presentation will discuss implementation techniques originally developed to enable Smalltalk to run efficiently on tiny consumer electronic products such as animated watches. The work has application in other domains including wireless, medical, industrial, and military equipment.

Topics will include developments since Smalltalk Solutions 2002, as well as issues around real-time garbage collection, scaleable object models, fast ROMable message dispatch and resolution, fast and consistent numerics, handling immutability, and consistent and easy concurrency. One of the speaker's goals is to enable Smalltalk to run on new cellphones. Wireless handsets represent a new frontier in computing, and possibly an enormous new marketplace for Smalltalk.

Bio: Maurice Rabb is the Director of Special Projects at Blackwell Consulting Services in Chicago. He specializes in new product development, design patterns, object mentoring, and conceptual blockbusting. Mr. Rabb is co-founder of Stono Technologies LLC, a firm dedicated to the development of new technologies for the consumer electronics industry. Mr. Rabb is a Squeaker, and earned his BS and MS in engineering from Stanford University.

This sounds like a great talk, showing that Smalltalk's range is wide.

Two Harry Potter books, that is. I stayed up way, way too late reading last night, and was able to slip in a few more pages this morning while my daughter was cleaning her room - but now she's got the book back, and it'll likely be her bedtime before I get another crack at it. Of course, I couldn't buy a second book; the stores were all sold out except for reserved copies very quickly. And by the time they get new copies in, I'll have read the whole thing anyway.

This book is darker than the first four - I suspect that when they get around to making it into a movie, it will be difficult to keep the mood up. It's a page turner - and written to a higher level than the earlier books (the author is obviously trying to stay with the first generation of readers). I'm sure people will be reading the book for a long time, so I'm not going to let slip any spoilers - and I'm only half way in at this point anyway. Thus far, I'm very pleased with the book - Rowling's done a great job.

Via Ted Leung comes a fascinating snapshot of XML development.

Via Sean McGrath:

At Applied XML, there's a talk entitled SOAP, it wasn't Simple, we didn't Access Objects and its not really a Protocol. That sounds like an interesting experience report...

Today's highlight: Dave Buck's VWUnit talk:

VWUnit - An Open Source Framework for Unit Testing VisualWorks GUIs David Buck: Simberon Tuesday 8:30:00 am to 9:15:00 am

Abstract: VWUnit is a testing framework for VisualWorks Smalltalk - it is built on top of the standard SUnit framework, and handles fully automated testing of VisualWorks GUIs. VWUnit is open source.

David Buck started using Smalltalk in 1984 and has been doing Smalltalk consulting work since 1994 under Simberon Incorporated. Known for his ray-tracing program DKBTrace and its derivative POV-Ray, David is also known as the key developer of the ElastoLab physics simulator for kids.

Last night, I decided to stop at Barnes and Noble on my way home from a gaming session. I got there are 12:30 - only half an hour after they started selling the new Harry Potter book. It was completely packed - a huge line at the registers, a huge line at the cafe - and the employees calling people up to pay by ticket number. They had sold out of un-reserved copies, and were calling people up who had pre-reserved - and all this, only 30 minutes in! I asked some staff about it, and they said that they wouldn't have more copies for about a week. Someone in ordering didn't do their homework :)

So I headed to the mall this morning - my daughter had entered a contest awhile back, and entry pre-reserved a copy of the book. They were opening at 7, and I'm never up that early. I rolled in about 11:30 - the lines were long gone, but so were unreserved copies - thank goodness we had one reserved! It's massive too - 870 pages. I hope Rowling isn't startting to develop Heinlein disease... Not only the bookstores either - I had to stop at Giant for a few things, and they had been selling the book - it was sold out in 90 minutes, according the checkers. Looks to me like no one ordered enough copies of this book.

The public store access application has been broken for a few days, and it was a matter of sloppy testing on my part when I upgraded the app server from VW 7 to VW 7.1. In VW 7, the VisualWave namespace was imported into the Smalltalk namespace; in 7.1, that's no longer the case. The Postgres app is an old wave application, and a couple of methods - in particular, a method that was needed just to open the web page - could no longer "see" a class that was referenced.

That's fixed now, and things are back in business. I apologize for the inconvenience.

The local Borders will be open until 1 AM to sell the new Harry Potter book. Since I'm off to play boardgames this evening, and my daughter is coming along, what do you think my chances are for coming home without the book?

Today's spotlight goes to Terry Raymond's talk on the Multi-Process uI in VW 7.1

The Multi-Process UI in VW 7.1 Terry Raymond, Crafted Smalltalk Monday 2:00:00 pm to 2:45:00 pm

Abstract: I will be discussing; the reasons for modifying VisualWorks to use multiple user interface processes instead of a single process, the design concepts embodied in the MPUI changes, and what the changes mean for various types of applications.

Bio: Terry Raymond is the author of the Smalltalk Professional Debug Package. He spent four years working on the development of a Manufacturing Execution System which encompases, managing a manufacturing plant model, scheduling tasks, executing the tasks in real time, and user interfaces that monitor the tasks. He has over 13 years experience with Smalltalk, going back to ObjectWorks Smalltalk 2.5 and several years experience in the development of real-time systems.

Terry created a lot of this support, for which the Cincom Smalltalk team is extremely grateful. Go register so you can hear what's new on this!

I posted on Dan Antion's talk yesterday - now today, I see that he's running a panel at StS:

I am moderating a panel discussion on remote development at Smalltalk Solutions in July. The discussion will focus on things that make remote development work, things that prevent it from working as well as it should and things that we need to make it work better.

For the purposes of this panel, remote development can be a team of distant programmers adding to a collective work, a single developer handling small portions (or large portions) of a company's development or two people in the same office who do not share an image. The goal is to learn from those doing it, how to work better when we work from a distance. The work can be commercial products, in-house development, tools or enhancements to development environments. I would like to focus on joint development, not simply development of a stand-alone end product for delivery to a remote client.

VAST and Dolphin have representation on the panel, but I would like to include the other dialects too. If you are planning to attend Smalltalk Solutions, fit the (fairly broad) profile described above and would like to share your experiences (good and/or bad), please send me an email.

Thanks, and see you in Toronto Dan

Someone from Cincom will be there!

There was a post the other day in cls looking for people interested in building a "next generation" development environment for Java. The post contrasted what Eclipse does vs. what they want to do. They point you here for a listing of points to consider. Seems to me that these guys were inspired by Smalltalk and/or Lisp tools in their desire to create a Java environment. It will be interesting to see whether they get anywhere - I rather suspect that any serious work down that path will result in re-building a significant portion of Smalltalk or Lisp along the way.

Tim Bray has some good thoughts - both on the potential uses of RSS, and on the roadblocks it faces in a business situation