Cincom Smalltalk™ Digest: February Edition
Cincom Smalltalk Digest is a monthly publication that shares news, updates and resources with our customers, partners and users. This month’s newsletter includes the following:
CUSTOMERS and PARTNERS
- How Can Cincom Smalltalk Assist with Growing Your Business?
- Customer and Partner Guide to Reaching Cincom Smalltalk Support
BEGINNERS, FREELANCERS and DEVELOPERS
- Why Companies Should Reskill or Upskill Talent
- How Cincom Smalltalk Could Boost Your Career in 2022
- Two Ways to Handle Date, Time and Timestamp Data Types with SQLite in Cincom® VisualWorks®
- Using Store with SQLite
- Feature of the Month: Relational Databases
CUSTOMERS and PARTNERS
This section of the Cincom Smalltalk Digest is dedicated to our valued customers and partners.
How Can Cincom Smalltalk Assist with Growing Your Business?
As the need for process agility and digital transformation increases for companies, Cincom Smalltalk is helping business users through various services and programs we offer our customers and partners.
Through Cincom Consulting Services, we can help with:
- Product upgrades
- Mentoring
- Troubleshooting
- Performance enhancement
- Proof of concept
- … and much more!
If you’d like to read how Cincom Consulting Services can help with managing upgrades, troubleshooting, performance enhancements and more, check out the Cincom Discovery Zone for Customer and Partner Services here.
Listen to Suzanne Fortman, the Program Director and Engineering Manager of Cincom Smalltalk, describe how Cincom Consulting Services helped one of our customers here.
Customer and Partner Guide to Reaching Cincom Smalltalk Support
For quick access to Cincom Smalltalk Support, please take note of this list:
- Visit Cincom SupportWeb®for immediate support.
- Visit Cincom Smalltalk Resolutions Portal to access the Resolutions Portal.
- Email SmalltalkSupportTSC@cincom.comto reach Global Smalltalk Support, (USA and Europe). This email address allows for both English and German language Cincom Smalltalk Support.
- Email HelpNA@cincom.comand EuroTSC@cincom.com to file new support cases.
BEGINNERS, FREELANCERS and DEVELOPERS
This section of the Cincom Smalltalk Digest is devoted to new Smalltalkers, freelancers, and seasoned developers, providing informative articles and specific Smalltalk examples for learning new skills or honing existing ones using Cincom Smalltalk.
Why Companies Should Reskill or Upskill Talent
Before the pandemic, changing technologies and new ways of working were job disruptors for many employees. Now with the coronavirus pandemic, this issue has become increasingly more urgent and is about more than just working remotely. The biggest challenge lies in companies reskilling and upskilling their workers to deliver a new, post-pandemic business model.
Harvard Business Review said, “Under normal conditions, workers constantly shift between different industries, albeit at a slow pace. However, the COVID-19 pandemic created an urgent need to make labor shifts happen much more quickly.”
To meet this challenge, companies need to create talent strategies that develop their employees’ skills, knowledge, adaptability, resiliency and capabilities, as well as their social and emotional skills. This is called “reskilling” or “upskilling.”
- Reskilling is the development of new or additional skills that can assist workers as they move to a new role.
- Upskilling is the training that enables workers to become better at a job in which they are already performing.
AG5, one of Cincom Smalltalk’s many valued customers, has been developing skills-management, competence-management and skills-matrix software for over 15 years:
- AG5 has developed the only plug-n-play skills-management software in the industry.
- AG5 gives valuable insights for reskilling employees, showing their customers an overview of their workers’ current and missing skills.
- AG5 provides a better overview of employees with similar skills who can replace colleagues who are sick.
Cincom Smalltalk helps AG5’s development team to be very productive in an ever-changing environment. AG5 is constantly gaining a clear, competitive advantage over other vendors as they can instantly adopt any new training methodology, increased legislation requirements or changed organizational structures and thus be able to quickly respond to new demands.
According to Anthia Moehamadidris, Growth Marketeer at AG5,
“AG5 is built using Cincom VisualWorks, which has proven to be extremely robust for years. This programming environment plays well with all kinds of new technological developments, whether on the front or back end. In our industry and with our current growth, that is a real relief.”
- To read more details on how Cincom Smalltalk helped AG5 build its Skills Management Software, click here. (link to full article)
- To read more about AG5 and watch a demo that visualizes their application, click here.
- To learn how you can become a Cincom Smalltalk customer and partner and build success like AG5, click here.
How Cincom Smalltalk Could Boost Your Career in 2022
For those who are looking to develop new or additional skills or become better at a job in which they are already performing, Cincom Smalltalk may provide a boost to your career. In late 2022, Forbes posted a story on 4 Booming Career Paths to Secure Your Future In 2022. In this article, Ashley Stahl considers the following four types of career paths that could assist the reader in developing a 2022 career plan: knowledge-based, skills-based, entrepreneur-based and freelance.
- Knowledge-based career paths – Rely on experience-based knowledge. A career path based on this type will rely heavily on moving up the corporate ladder, with each position serving as a stepping stone to the next.
- Skills-based career paths – Physical, hands-on or service-oriented careers that necessitate a thorough understanding of how a specific job role functions.
- Entrepreneur-based career paths – Centered on solving a problem or meeting a need with a self-developed product or service and are built on the premise of solving a consumer problem.
- Freelancers or independent contractors – A non-employee individual or business that completes a specific task or project for a company.
NOTE: Following the pandemic, freelancing has grown significantly due to people preferring a work-life balance over company perks.
Whichever category you may currently fall into or may be considering, Cincom Smalltalk has a solution for you. The bridge between the CST PUL Program (trial version) and full licensing is the REV 9.1 Program. The REV 9.1 Program is only available for purchase on our website and gives developers an affordable entry into a connection with the Cincom platform. For $1,000, program members get:
- Development access to the current version of Cincom Smalltalk for one full year
- A 12-month preview of the customer experience with Cincom
- Full support for one year
- An opportunity to create a success story to market your application or business
- Helpful tutorials and screencasts
- Video archives covering many topics
- … and much more!
NOTE: If you experience an issue with the REV 9.1 Program purchase link, contact CSSTARTeam@cincom.com.
Two Ways to Handle Date, Time and Timestamp Data Types with SQLite in Cincom VisualWorks
What is SQLite? According to the SQLite website:
- SQLite is one of the world’s most popular database engines.
- SQLite is built into all mobile phones and most computers.
- SQLite is bundled with a plethora of other applications that people use on a daily basis.
- SQLite is a C-language library that implements a small, but fast, self-contained and highly reliable, full-featured SQL database engine.
- SQLite file format is stable, cross-platform, and backwards compatible (it’s promised to be kept that way until 2050 by its creators).
- SQLite database files are frequently used as containers to transfer rich content between systems and as a long-term data archival format.
- SQLite databases are in use in excess of one trillion (1e12).
- SQLite source code is in the public domain and can be used by anyone for any purpose.
SQLite does not support built-in date, time and timestamp storage classes. Users normally make use of its built-in date and time functions to handle these data types. To show how to do this, we’ll demonstrate two ways to process date, time and timestamp data:
- Take advantage of Glorp’s conversion methods.
- Use SQLite’s built-in functions to achieve the same goal.
To read more and see the live, working code for both demos, click here (link to full article)
Using Store with SQLite
The Hidden Gems screencast series was created for developers who are passionate about their use of Cincom Smalltalk. These screencasts give the viewer live coding examples while sharing valuable insight into the product and informing them about things they may not know about.
SQLite is a small, fast and reliable relational database that is easy to use. Using Store with SQLite is a convenient format for sharing or moving Smalltalk code or creating a backup file of your code.
Often on Hidden Gems screencasts, we say “it is easy, once you know how,” and Hidden Gems – Using Store with SQLite is a great example of this. The minimal installation we need is simple, but not obvious. Enjoy this useful technique!
- This screencast is part of the Techniques Seriesthat shows various techniques for accomplishing or solving different tasks using Cincom Smalltalk.
- If you have questions, comments or ideas for other Smalltalk examples or suggestions for future Hidden Gems, please email the Cincom Smalltalk Product Team at CSSTARTeam@cincom.com.
Feature of the Month: Relational Databases
Last month we highlighted StoreForGlorpReplication. This component allows replication of bundles and packages between Store databases. Store is an integrated source code management and version control system for team development in Cincom VisualWorks. Store can use a variety of popular, commercially available database systems (e.g., Oracle, SQLServer, PostgreSQL, SQLite3 and DB2). The public repository uses a PostgreSQL database.
NOTE: You can use these relational databases for Store and/or as the database for your applications.
If you would like more information on the Store Repository, click here.
This month, we are sharing a feature of the Cincom Smalltalk Foundation. Cincom Smalltalk supports connectivity to all major relational databases including Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server®, PostgreSQL, MySQL, DB/2 and SQLite. VisualWorks also connects easily with OODBMS systems.