David Buck - Blog

It looks like an old friend of mine John Hylands is doing some interesting robotics work in Smalltalk. There's a YouTube video there showing a RoboRealm robot tracking a ball with its head.

I was recently contracted to write a report to help a company determine what to do with their Smalltalk project. Here are a few facts I gathered and included in the report:

1. Last year was the best year yet for Cincom Smalltalk. Their revenues are growing and they have been consistently growing ever since they acquired VisualWorks. They are also seeing some new projects starting up in Smalltalk.
2. Last year was GemStone's best year in their last 26 years in business. They are landing big projects and are seeing lots of interest in Smalltalk.
3. Instantiations says "Last year the software industry grew at about an 8% rate while Instantiations grew at substantially more than that rate and our VA Smalltalk at an even better rate than that!"

This all points to the fact that Smalltalk is experiencing a resurgence. I see it as a reaction against complex software development environments and the realization that software development doesn't have to be that hard. Smalltalk has the simplicity, the tools support, the dynamic environment and the flexibility to solve a large number of today's software development problems. I'd say that the future is now looking good for Smalltalk.

There was a pretty good response to my first video, so I released another. This one shows how you can dynamically change the structure of a class while the application is still running.

You can find the video on the Simberon Videos page as Smalltalk Demo 2. There's also an AVI available for those who can't play Flash.

Adriaan van Os has pictures from StS 2008 posted on his blog. Unfortunately, I can't make it to the conference this year, but it's amazing how many people I recognize from the pictures. Thanks Adriaan.

Simberon will be running the course Experiencing Design Patterns using Smalltalk in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada from November 3rd to November 7th 2008. This course is one that we don't deliver frequently as an open enrollment course so this may be your only chance to take this course for at least the next 6 months to a year. We'll be using Smalltalk for both the lecture parts and the hands-on exercises.

The course covers all 23 design patterns from the famous Gang of Four Design Patterns book but looks at each pattern objectively with its advantages, disadvantages and plenty of experience reports from using the patterns in practice. We show where the pattens work well and where they fall down.

If you'd like to register for the course, visit the Simberon registration page.

It seems like John McIntosh has gotten Squeak to run on the iPhone. Currently it runs slowly and pushes Apple's imposed safety limits to the max, but he's working on reducing the image size and is asking for support from other Squeak developers.

This was pointed out on the Seaside mailing list. The cover of the latest Rails book from the Pragmatic Bookshelf has an interesting cover:

Randal Schwartz says he'll submit an errata "doesn't include enough info on Seaside despite the cover"

I've been tossing around the idea of developing advanced Smalltalk courses and was wondering what interest there may be in them. They could be delivered as open enrollment courses or on-site courses. Topics could include:

• XML reading and writing
• Namespaces and bindings
• Exceptions and error handling
• Detailed debugging techniques
• Regular expressions
• Performance profiling and improvement
• Processes and process synchronization
• Metaprogramming
• Sockets
• Garbage Collection and weak references
• Memory policy tuning
• C interfacing
• Developing proxy classes
• Net clients (HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, etc)
• Building Domain Specific Languages in Smalltalk (Parser Generator and other compiler technologies)
• Creating your own pragmas
• GLORP
• Seaside

If you're interested in courses on these topics, drop me an e-mail at david@simberon.com.