Winging it

Last night, at the Portland Smalltalk Users Group meeting, James Foster and Dale Henrichs gave a good presentation on how Seaside is being put into GemStone. For those that missed it, they'll be presenting again at Smalltalk Solutions in Toronto at the end of this month.

This is an exciting development for the GemStone/S product line and for Seaside applications that need robust persistence and scalability.

What: Portland Smalltalk Users' Group

When: Tuesday, April 10, 7:00 - 9:00PM

Where: GemStone Systems

Travel details: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/eric/blogView?showComments=true&entry=3337289535

Topic: James Foster and Dale Henrichs of GemStone will present a beta version of the talk on running Seaside in GemStone that they'll be giving at IT360 / Smalltalk Solutions in three weeks:

GLASS: GemStone, Linux, Apache, Seaside, and Smalltalk

James Foster GemStone Systems, Inc. The Seaside framework provides a layered set of abstractions over HTTP and HTML that can be used for developing sophisticated web applications in Smalltalk. Seaside was developed in Squeak and ports are available for VisualWorks and for Dolphin. While the Seaside framework elegantly addresses HTML generation and application flow-of-control issues, it still leaves a few challenges for the developer-including persistence and multi-user coordination. In this seminar we will demonstrate a port of Seaside to a new dialect: GemStone/S. As a multi-user, persistent Smalltalk implementation that has no native user interface, GemStone/S provides an excellent environment for serving HTML and keeping domain objects persistent.

James Foster has been working with computers since Fortran programs were submitted on punch cards and "core" was a fine mesh of wires with tiny magnetic rings (1971). He has been programming in Smalltalk since 1993 and has developed applications with VisualSmalltalk, VisualAge, VisualWorks, Dolphin, and GemStone/S. James is currently QA Lead on the GemStone/S development team.

I just plain forgot to post a note that tomorrow is the next pdx smalltalk users' group meeting. It will be at GemStone again. Details are here. Martin McClure is going to give a talk about Ian Plumarta's work on extensible dynamic programming systems. This will cover a lot of the information that Ian gave at OOPSLA this year.

Very paraphrased, because this is from memory.

"So when you're writing software, after the first billion or so bugs, things tend to settle down. But you never seem to get rid of that last bug." -- Brian Foote, while moderating the Young Guns panel discussion.

"Isn't it an amazing natural phenomenon how, for unknown reasons, every year Smalltalkers from all over the world fly to some destination, hover over their computers for five days, then fly back to their homes. " -- Don Roberts, referring to the informal smalltalk tables at every OOPSLA.

I'm back from OOPSLA. Even though the conference was held here in Portland, it was really a kind of check-out from reality for 5 days. I had a lot of fun, although going home at night was rather weird and distracting. I think I prefer the travel conferences because the distractions of home are not present. But, the flip side of that is, I might not have been able to go otherwise.

So, glad to see everyone again. Had a great time!

This is pretty cool. Weekly squeak is reporting that seaside downloads for squeak have surpassed 200,000.

We had a good turnout for the pdx st meeting last night. About 11 people, I believe, enjoyed several hours of good smalltalk and related discussions here at GemStone and at dinner after.

Since the meeting was in a secured building, we needed to post a notice for attendees on how to enter the building. I thought the notice was worth showing here. And yes, for the real version, we had passed Integers to call: !

Marc Abramowitz relates his experiences with Cincom. As he says, bravo.