ESUG Innovation Technology Awards – sneak preview
26 August, 2010
This year’s ESUG conference will host the 6th annual Innovation Technology Awards. The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, €500, €300 and €200 during an awards ceremony at the conference. Developers of any Smalltalk-based software are welcome to compete, and, for the first time, this year entrants are asked to provide a 3-5min video explaining each entry.
There are lots of interesting projects up for the competition, based on Squeak, Pharo, VisualWorks, and Smalltalk/X. You can find out more about the competition at http://www.esug.org/Conferences/2010/Innovation+Technology+Awards, and of course, you’ll be able to see them for yourself at the conference. See you there!
Squeak 4.1 in production use
19 August, 2010
Andreas Raab noted on the Squeak-dev mailing list and on his blog that Teleplace have decided that Squeak 4.1 is sufficiently stable to use as the basis for their commercial software. They made the massive leap from 3.8 all the way to Squeak 4.1 in this release of their Teleplace Enterprise Server 3.5, which is used to host online collaboration environments.
It appears to have been a painless and successful activity, and is a massive vote of confidence in the ongoing changes to Squeak. If you want to see the new product in action, there’s a free trial version available at http://www.teleplace.com/trial/signup.php.
Google buys (part of) Instantiations
6 August, 2010
Instantiations, the company who took over IBM’s Visual Age for Smalltalk business, have now had the Java part of their operation snapped up by Google, who were reportedly interested in Instantiation’s Java and Ajax team, especially their GWT Designer product, which is slated to become part of the Google Web Toolkit infrastructure.
In many cases in the past, innovative companies using Smalltalk have attracted the attentions of the big players, who have then bought them and dropped all Smalltalk development in favour of Java or other enterprise environments. In this case however, Instantiations’ Smalltalk business is being spun off, and will remain in business as a separate entity focusing on development and support of Smalltalk products including VA Smalltalk, as their new homepage makes clear.
