Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Andres Valloud sent me some photos from Smalltalk Solutions - here are a few of them. I'll get more posted on the main Cincom Smalltalk Site later today, as I get them processed. First, here are two from the coding contest:

In the top photo, that's Michael Lucas Smith on the left, and Mike Hales on the right - with Randy Coulman behind them. Below that, it's Niall Ross all the way to the right, and Travis Griggs getting up. Next, I have two Andres took of the "Industry Misinterpretations" podcast we did at the show:

From left to right, that's Michael Lucas-Smith, me (James Robertson), David Buck, and James Savidge. I'll have more later

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Arden Thomas has published the Widgetry version of the UI frameworks he discussed at StS 2007: ObservedUserInterface. You can grab it in the public repository.

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Arden has published the ValueInterface code that he talked about at Smalltalk Solutions.

Andres is making the contest code available for your perusal.

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David Buck took notes at Thomas Staltzer's Home Automation talk at StS 2007 - I was attending Niall's talk at the time.

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Sounds like the Squeak Booth at StS 2007 worked out well:

As most of you know, due to the fantastic work of Chris Cunnington, Squeak was able to acquire a booth at Smalltalk Solutions this year. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to volunteer to work the booth for the two days of the convention. We had a fabulous location and got a tremendous amount of traffic. The Smalltalk community, while small, is one of the most intelligent, kind, supportive, and fun communities I have ever been involved in. I would like to thank all Smalltalk Solution attendees for there kind words, Squeak cheerleading, and help with answering questions when the crowds got large.

Bert Freudenberg was kind enough to lend us a OLPC laptop. This was the major draw of non-Smalltalkers to our booth. Many of the people knew nothing of Smalltalk but had heard of the OPLC project. The etoys demo was beautiful and if gave us a real opportunity to explain a little about Squeak, Smalltalk, and etoys.

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I have another batch of pictures from StS 2007 - I only had my camera phone with me, and I couldn't send myself the pictures while we were in Canada. First, another shot of the OLPC, swiveled around - and then a picture of Dale Henrichs and James Foster, during their GLASS presentation:

Next, two from the Seaside BOF: Carl Gundel talking about the Run Basic site (implemented in Seaside on VW), and Boris Popov, speaking about their web app, also in Seaside on VW:

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I have a few pictures from Smalltalk Solutions; I'll happily post anything else that gets sent to me. The one on the left is Thomas Gagne, from his OLTP Talk, the one on the right is Aik Siong Koh, with his 3D CAD talk:

Next, Michael Lucas-Smith talking about C Connectivity, and a picture of the OLPC:

I'll have more posted soon.

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Last talk of the show: Arden Thomas is talking about Application Frameworks. He's been using a derivative of the old "Slam Dunk" stuff from way back in the day at PPS. Today, he's talking about that. He's also building a new rev of this for Widgetry (briefly discussed today).

Arden put the original framework to use at a Hedge Fund he worked for during the early 2000's. He adapted it over time, since his employer wanted regular, tangible results (i.e., no going "off into a cave" for months to create it). Arden sometimes discusses this stuff on his blog. The idea behind any good framework: make things simpler and easier to understand - and facilitate reuse.

Most importantly: A framework should not get in your way and put you in a box. Eventually, you'll need to go outside of the box, and that shouldn't be hard to do. The two frameworks that inspired Arden (for Wrapper):

• Tim Howard's DomainInterface (from his book)
• Steve Abell's ValueInterface (this was inspired by Roby's "SlamDunk")

The main idea: "one" domain, held in a value model. Both frameworks avoided littering ApplicationModel with instance variables (which are just copy of domain instance variables anyway). The main thing is this: it's a set of simple ideas, consistently applied. What ValueInterface did is to use the dependency mechanism to auto-hook a UI and a domain via ValueModels (typically, AspectAdaptors and/or BufferedValueHolders).

AspectAdaptors translate UI level messages into things the domain will understand (and you automate this via naming conventions). BufferedValueHolders are simply wrappers on an underlying ValueModel. All of this allows for a very simple set of messaging - sending #value and #value: gets everything done, and changes at the domain level are automatically signalled up.

Moving forward, Arden is building a Widgetry based version of this. The rest: a Demo. Both the Widgetry version and the older ValueInterface (for Wrapper) will be pushed to the public store repository by the end of next week - so check the RSS feed :)

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This afternoon, Niall Ross is doing a talk on Extreme UI Testing. Heh: from 1999:

One of the great things about the web is that it's trained our users to not be so picky. They're now accustomed to seeing UIs that look like garbage and change without notice"

Niall is probably right in saying that Ajax (and Apollo, and Silverlight) are undermining this assumption. For UI testing, there are options: SilverMark's Test Mentor, Dave Buck's VWUnit. James Foster has extended WinRunner as well. Niall says that these tools are good for retrofitting an existing system. They don't really support "Test First" (i.e., you can't click an unpainted widget).

An approach: Method Wrappers. Easily possible in VW and Squeak, since you can subclass CompiledMethod and muck with the method dictionary. In VA, you have to do some additional work. Why use MethodWrappers? Niall's earliest attempts at getting at widgets as UI operations returned things made code unpredictable. Using MethodWrappers, you can:

• Wrap the #open method
• Have it not actually open, but instead just report "yes, I was about to open"

You can extend that approach to other actions the UI takes and install before/after handling/reporting. Wrappers are a way to achieve what other languages do with "policy" code.

The ideal test is like a use case test at the "top" of the model layer. Niall uses a strategy pattern to automatically wrap threads that get forked off by looking up the stack to see if the code is under test (and if it is, make sure to install a wrapper). He wraps processes, deferred messages, completion helpers, etc. In VW, there's some additional cleanup necessary to ensure that WindowManagers (for example) get "kicked". In VA, you have to drain the event queues.

Summary:

• MethodWrappers are good for UI tests
• The same tests can drive the model layer and the UI layer
• You can still do this in multi-process UIs.

A lot of thanks to various people: John Brant, Don Roberts, Michael Lucas-Smith, and Reinout Heeck.

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