Cincom Speakers Gear Up for ESUG 2015
Leading up to the conference, Camp Smalltalk will take place on July 12. In addition to being a platinum sponsor of ESUG 2015, the Cincom Smalltalk Program Director, Engineering Manager and EMEA Sales Director will be attending, as well as several distinguished speakers. Below is the list of speakers along with their abstracts and bios:
Title: Cincom Smalltalk Roadmap 2015
Speaker: Arden Thomas
Abstract: In this presentation, Arden Thomas, the Product Manager for Cincom Smalltalk™, will discuss recent, current and future product changes and direction.
Bio: Arden Thomas started using Smalltalk in 1986, when he was researching and exploring better ways to do software development. He found it! Smalltalk and object-oriented were such a profoundly improved approach to software development that he made a full commitment to using Smalltalk. Arden used Smalltalk in his post-graduate work thesis and projects. Arden has worked with Smalltalk for IBM, Parcplace Systems, ParcPlace-Digitalk, ObjectShare and a hedge fund in a number of capacities including lead developer, trainer, architect, consultant and sales SE. When not working with Smalltalk, Arden can be found cycling, doing crossfit, coaching soccer, officiating at swim meets or attending events with his children. Arden believes in trying out new things in Smalltalk and his personal life, and recently performed in a local theater rendition of the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
Title: From Legacy Database to Domain Layer in the Cincom® VisualWorks® Mapping Tool
Speaker: Niall Ross
Abstract: The new Cincom VisualWorks Mapping Tool sits on Glorp, which sits on VisualWorks’ external database drivers, including the new Postgres protocol 3.0 drivers. After presenting these new items, Niall Ross of Cincom Systems, Inc. will demonstrate using the tool to kick-start fresh application development from a legacy database application. The talk will end at the starting point for Jerry Kott’s talk “Single Page Web Application Development with SiouX and AppeX.”
Bio: Niall ended his undergraduate career with two intellectual interests: computing and the theory of relativity. A quick check of how much commercial work was available to relativity and gravitation theorists made him decide to do academic research in that field and then seek a commercial job in computing, rather than the other way round. Niall started working commercially in IT in 1985. At first, he was assigned to designing and implementing software engineering process improvements, and after only three years, he began significant writing and delivery of commercial software. This experience taught him that intelligent people can nevertheless form foolish ideas about software engineering if they have not worked at the coding coalface of real, large commercial projects.
Learning from this, Niall spent the nineties working on software to manage complex, rapidly changing telecoms networks. A side effect of this work was that it taught him much about how scale and rate of change affects software. Early in the nineties, he discovered Smalltalk. The more he used it the more he came to recognize its power in this area. This perception was strengthened when he spent a year delivering a telecoms management system in Java.
At the end of the decade, Niall formed his own software company to offer consultancy in meta-data system design, Smalltalk and agile methods. Over the next decade, he worked on a variety of meta-data-driven systems, mostly in the financial domain.
Niall joined the Cincom Smalltalk Engineering Team nearly seven years ago. His first task was to lead the team that does the weekly VisualWorks builds—an experience he likened to doing brain surgery on yourself every Friday (e.g., “Prepare new memory for insertion, remove old memory … uh, I can’t remember what I was going to do next!”).
Currently, he leads the Glorp and Database team. He also leads the Custom Refactoring open-source project, which he co-founded, and the SUnit open-source project.
Title: Cincom Smalltalk Security Update
Speaker: Jerry Kott
Abstract: Jerry Kott, a senior software engineer with Cincom Systems, Inc., will provide an update of the security components of the Cincom Smalltalk Foundation. The security frameworks received some significant upgrades in recent years, enabling the products to support all of the current versions of SSL/TLS. Jerry will show some aspects of proper TLS configuration and discuss the ongoing focus on TLS cipher suite support, including work on Elliptic Curve Cryptography with Cincom Smalltalk.
Bio: Jerry Kott has been a senior software engineer with Cincom Smalltalk since 2008. He is a member of the Cincom VisualWorks team responsible for network protocols, security and web application development components of the Cincom Smalltalk Foundation.
Prior to joining Cincom, Jerry worked as a Smalltalk consultant in a variety of industries including finance, insurance, telecommunications, manufacturing and entertainment. Throughout his career, Jerry has used most of the Smalltalk dialects. He first met Smalltalk/V in his native Czechoslovakia in 1988 while writing his masters theses at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University of Prague. The political upheaval of 1988/1989 led Jerry to leave Czechoslovakia, and after a year in Austria, his family settled in Canada. While working as a programmer analyst at the TD Bank in Toronto, he was reintroduced to Smalltalk in 1993—this time with the intent of staying with it for good. Jerry’s recollection of his falling in love with Smalltalk can be summed up like this:
Day one: This is weird, no source code file?
Day two: This is interesting; I can inspect live objects and send messages to them!
Day three: This is great! I never want to use any other language!
When not programming in Smalltalk, Jerry uses his passion for photography and film by helping independent filmmakers as a cinematographer. He occasionally dabbles as an associate producer and assistant director. Jerry is also a member of Juan de Fuca Search and Rescue, a volunteer emergency response team that services the rugged western coastline of Vancouver Island off the West Coast of Canada. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia with his wife, five chickens and approximately 120,000 bees.
Title: Single Page Web Application Development with SiouX and AppeX
Speaker: Jerry Kott
Abstract: Jerry Kott, a senior software engineer with Cincom Systems, Inc., will revisit key aspects of AppeX, Cincom’s new web development framework. AppeX provides a tight integration of Cincom VisualWorks IDE with object-oriented Javascript running in the web browser, as well as automatic support for client/server session management, authentication, server-to-client event notification and mobile applications. Jerry will highlight new features of AppeX, with emphasis on the upcoming Scaffolding framework. With AppeX Scaffolding, developers can build a single-page web application from an existing database, with minimal coding, using AppeX REST-ful services, Glorp and ActiveRecord.
Title: Cincom Smalltalk on a Tablet
Speaker: Andreas Hiltner
Abstract: In this teaching pearl, Andreas Hiltner, Lead Software Engineer from Cincom Systems, Inc., will use Cincom Smalltalk on a Windows tablet, demonstrating the use of gestures to zoom and rotate as well as show how to subscribe to certain gesture-events.
Bio: Andreas Hiltner is currently a Lead Software Engineer for Cincom® ObjectStudio®, and has a hand in many aspects of VM, base image and database development. He works from home near Nuremberg, Germany, where he just recently returned after spending five years with his family in the US at Cincom’s headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Along with many contributions to ObjectStudio over the years, he was the project lead in Cincom’s development of the current 8.x versions of ObjectStudio, based on Cincom VisualWorks. Andreas is a seasoned architect who has specialized in ObjectStudio for more than 15 years. In his years of working with Cincom, he has had the opportunity to assist key Cincom Smalltalk users worldwide including one of the world’s Top Five financial institutions, and several government agencies. Andreas accepted the responsibility of being the technical lead for ObjectStudio’s Next Generation GUI Project.
Title: Windows Systems Tools in Smalltalk
Speaker: Andreas Hiltner
Abstract: In this session, Andreas Hiltner, Lead Software Engineer from Cincom Systems, Inc., will access Windows internal information using Cincom Smalltalk as well as build system-level tools that help with testing and debugging.
Title: Smalltalk-driven GUI Testing
Speaker: Andreas Hiltner
Abstract: In this session, Andreas Hiltner, Lead Software Engineer from Cincom Systems, Inc., will be testing graphical user interface applications using Cincom Smalltalk. Some areas included in this demonstration include: recording and replaying events, showing Smalltalk code to perform mouse/keyboard input and taking screenshots to compare with previously recorded templates.