Smalltalk Solutions 2008

This is a great show for Smalltalkers, and those wanting to learn about the technology and what's new.

I always enjoyed attending.

There are some very interesting talks this year, including Gilad Bracha, whom I mentioned in my previous post, giving one of the keynotes. See the links for the listed talks below.

You can go here to register.  Highly recommended.
 
The show is held in Reno this year, in order to have a very nice facility at a very reasonable hotel rate.  Check it out.

See you there!    - Arden

These are the preliminary schedules:
Calendar schedule

Talks List

 

Gilad Bracha has a very interesting talk on his new language "Newspeak".

Gilad Bracha on Newspeak

 
When Gilad chose to invent a new language of the best ideas he could find, what languages did he chose to borrow the most from?  Smalltalk, and languages derivative of Smalltalk, like Self.
 

From a Product Manager perspective, the following comment from Gilad, highlights why VMasDLL, and DLLCC tools & improvements, are on our list of work in progress, for future product improvements.

"I think that the reason the world lives in ignorance and uses the kind of languages it does instead of using something beautiful like Smalltalk, is because of all the pragmatics of interacting with the rest of the world." 

Index 1:35:30 (approx)

   - Arden

Product News! 

Our latest set of Cincom Smalltalk products:
 
VisualWorks 7.6
ObjectStudio 8.1
ObjectStudio Classic 7.1.3

... are officially released!

Congratulations to all those involved in producing these products.

Customers should begin receiving these very soon.

   Arden Thomas

   Cincom Smalltalk Product manager

Product News! 

Our latest set of Cincom Smalltalk products:
 
VisualWorks 7.6
ObjectStudio 8.1
ObjectStudio Classic 7.1.3

... are shipping soon!  

There are some logistical and distribution work items to complete, then the media will be shipped.

In the meantime, you can find VW7.6 and  OS7.1.3 Non-commercial here.

Really useful (and even pretty amazing) developer tools in the pipeline

Travis and Michael never fail to show interesting and useful things that can enhance development capabilities for Cincom Smalltalk. 

Please check out this video of a way to add dynamic updates to an inspector, and this video walkthrough of SearchLight II (called SearchLightTools in the repository).  Great stuff!

You can also see these from James blog (if you haven't already :-) )

Arden

You may remember an earlier post I did that showed some scripts to auto-build images.

I use these scripts for easily upgrading to new versions of VisualWorks and automatically building my base set of images, without having to do it manually.

In the latest beta build of VisualWorks 7.6 (Feb08.1), a change is necessary. 

If you import your repositories with:

stream := 'repositories.xml' asFilename readStream.

Store.RepositoryManager importRepositoriesFromXmlOn: stream.

You will need to change this to: 

stream := 'repositories.xml' asFilename readStream.

Store.RepositoryManager importRepositoriesFromStream: stream.

.Happy scripting!

Smalltalk Night at OOP - Materials 

We have had a lot of requests for the slides from the OOP Smalltalk night presentation, so we are making (thank to James efforts) them available, along with audio, and audio-visual.  See James blog for lots of pictures and other coverage of the OOP show too.

"If you like Ruby on Rails, You'll Love Seaside on Smalltalk" by Arden Thomas 

I would recommend you download the slides, then listen to the audio while going through the slides.  The slides are not meant to be self explanatory.

Here are the links to the presentation :
 

Slides

Audio

Video

 

"Web Development as you Like it" by Lukas Renggli
 

Lukas gives an excellent demonstration and description of Seaside. 

The audio is in German however.

Lukas audio (in German)

Lukas Video

Lukas Slides

I gave a presentation at the Smalltalk evening at OOP 2008.

James preserved the presentation both in video and podcast form (great job,Thanks Jim!).

The presentation was aimed at educating non-Smalltalkers of the power and advantages of the Seaside framework, and the Smalltalk language. 

The presentation basically covered two things:

- What is Seaside, How is it different, and Why should I be interested?

- What is Smaltalk, How is it different, and Why should I be interested? 

I found this a useful and interesting exercise.  Instead of focusing on specific details, I wanted to back up, and think about what the attractive and salient points of these products are.

Seaside was easier in a way, since it is a newer technology.   But I really hope the perspective on Smalltalk had an impact, both to those learning about it for the first time, but especially to Smalltalkers who occasionally have to justify their use of the technology to their management.

The talk lays out three capabilities of Smalltalk that were overlooked by the languages that borrowed from it, and are meaningful today, perhaps more than ever - the features I posit are helping drive the resurgence & renaissance of Smalltalk.

I welcome any comments or feedback, having refinement or perspective on this message.

Thanks!

OOP 2008!

The Cincom Smalltalk Star team just got back from the OOP 2008 conference held near Munich Germany. It was interesting and enjoyable and Smalltalk got some great exposure and interest.

The Dynamic Language Shootout, sponsored by Java Spektrum

This was a competition where developers could use a dynamic language to solve a programming problem. I've listed the languages that were used below.

Python

2 Smalltalk (VisualWorks, Squeak)

2 Groovy

Perl

2 Ruby

Lua

Scheme

Haskell

Scala

See Dynamic Languages Shootout if you read German, go here for a google English translation.

The application was the game of scrabble.

Bottom line? The winning entry was done in Seaside on VisualWorks!

Of course we were very happy to see this outcome. The winner, Thorsten Seitz, really earned the win, doing well thought out work on every aspect of the application. The part that grabbed my attention immediately was the interface. It was gorgeous! See below for a screenshot.

An interesting post from Jame's blog about music; buy only the bits, or is physical media needed? 

From a less is more philosophy, the bits only, would be the way to go. 

For folks wanting to simplify things, or even just reduce clutter, the bits only option seems the better alternative.  Note that if you have the desire to then burn all this to physical media, and if you marked it poorly or not at all, this would defeat the purpose.

Folks that like to create collections that they can enjoy, or even sell/trade in the future would still want the physical media.  I wonder how much of this is just nostalgia?

What did the holidays bring?

I guess the holidays are basically over now. I managed to fit in the movies I usually watch with the family at this time of year. ("Christmas Carol" (the one with Patrick Stewart), and "It's a Wonderful Life" - both classics. Recommended if you have not seen them) .

I got one gift that is very neat, and is proving to be very fun and useful. An iPod Touch. I have resisted Apple products in the past for two reasons:

First, I grew up in "IBM country" where IBM used to employ so many folks, that growing up here, four out of five of your neighbors worked for IBM. Local towns of Poughkeepsie and East Fishkill employed, at their peak, somewhere between ten and twelve thousand employees each. So most folks here had PC's, and not Macs, due to local influence, employee pricing, or loyalty to the local employer. (I worked for IBM for nine years, taught myself Smalltalk while there, and got a Smalltalk based project going at IBM. I left to join ParcPlace and continue with Smalltalk when funding was cut, and the ability to continue using Smalltalk with my employer went away).

Second, iPods would not play (or not easily) protected WMA based books that I frequently listened to during my commutes and travels. This is not so much an issue for me now.

So why the change? Based on the title of my blog and love of Smalltalk, you might guess that I can appreciate a simple, beautiful, and well designed interface. I also feel, in general, that we should try to support the products and companies that take the time to produce better designs, and interfaces, (lest we get stuck with no good choices), when it is possible or reasonable to do so.

What do I like about the iTouch?

• Flipping through pictures with a flick of the finger is intuitive and entertaining. Great interface.
• Video: My kids are competitive swimmers, and occasionally I take some footage of their races. It was simple to put these on the iTouch. This makes it easier for me to show my co-workers pictures AND video of my children (as they patiently indulge me, hmmm, I better stay with the shorter races :-) ).
• The Web! Safari and Wifi are built in. I can wake up in the morning and check web pages for weather, school cancellations, check my blog for feedback, read James blog, etc, all without firing up any computer!
• Multi-touch: Zooming in and out with a simple, intuitive two finger gesture is great. It is needed for reading web pages, but very easy to zoom in and slide through the pages.
• Auto aspect rotation: Simply rotating the iTouch from portrait to landscape orientation, automatically rotates the contents (pictures and web) for readability. Simple, useful and entertaining.
• Podcasts! I can get them in three ways: I can download them automatically through iTunes, I can manually download them to the iTouch, or I can download and listen to them from the safari browser on the iTouch. Very flexible!
• I almost forgot:  It plays mp3's too!  :-)
  

First, let me say, we like Rails, and we like the Rails and Ruby communities. We think much sharing and learning with the Smalltalk and Seaside communities is happening that benefit all the involved participants. We invite them to speak at our conferences, and vice versa.

Rails is a pretty neat framework, and can do some very nice, and practical work.

The Seaside framework is, in some ways very different, and in some ways similar.

Seaside inexorably gets compared with Rails, for two reasons; Rails is better known, and they both solve similar types of problems, but in very different ways.

Ultimately, both of these frameworks are tools, and which tool you choose may depend on the job you have in front of you. If you are not familiar with Seaside, I encourage you to check out how to get started using it.

Some parts of Seaside are easy to grasp, but I think the big picture of its power may take more time. But when it clicks: Watch out! :-)  I see people noting this theme.

Here are some quotes I really enjoyed:

"there's a scene in Atlas Shrugged where the heroine walks into a diner and finds the greatest composer on the face of the planet working there, flipping burgers. Sometimes Seaside feels like that. How dumb must the tech industry be, overlooking something like this? Is it run by monkeys? What the hell is going on?"

(From this blog)

"Seaside is certainly more advanced than Rails in terms of raw technology, to the point that it's hard to wrap your head around the concepts."

"Don't be surprised if Seaside just looks weird to you at first. Leave it for a little while and then come back. You'll be glad you did. And when it clicks for you, beware. You won't ever look back."

(from here)