ESUG Innovation Technology Awards – Time is running out!
29 June, 2009
The Innovation Technology Awards session is one of the real highlights of the annual International Smalltalk Conference organised by ESUG each year.
Noury Bouraqadi has just posted to remind everyone that you only have until 1st July to nominate your work for an award. Put together a brief description of your work, which can be in any Smalltalk dialect, make it available for inspection online, and be prepared to demonstrate it to a constant stream of inquisitive Smalltalkers during the conference, and you could win up to €500 in addition to the recognition and respect of your peers.
Have a look at Noury’s site for an introduction to the ideas that have proved popular in the past, or our own details of last year’s winners.
All the administrative details can be found on the ESUG 2009 website – so get those application forms in now!
And in case you’ve forgotten, this year’s conference is in Brest, France from 31 August—4 September, 2009. It will be preceded by Camp Smalltalk running on the weekend of 29—30 August 2009, and incorporates the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies on 31 August.
Back to the Future: Programming in Smalltalk
17 June, 2009
More exciting conference news for Smalltalk aficionados: James Foster has announced on his blog that this year’s OOPSLA conference will include several tutorials with a Smalltalk theme including his “Back to the Future: Programming in Smalltalk” in which he will look at the “new” ideas from Smalltalk that are still influencing newer programming languages. He will examine some of these ideas and present a number of tutorial exercises that explore some of Smalltalk’s fundamentally different approach to language design and object orientation, including the following aspects:
- All values are objects, even integers, booleans, and characters (no boxing/unboxing);
- Classes and methods are objects (supporting reflection);
- The language has only five reserved words;
- All control flow (looping and conditional branching) is done through message sends;
- Programming is done by sending messages to existing objects; and
- The base class library can be modified.
James works on Gemstone’s high performance product family based on Smalltalk, but intends the exercises to be relevant across different versions.
This year’s OOPSLA will be held in Orlando, Florida from 25 to 29 October, and will also be co-located with the Dynamic Languages Symposium, which will doubtless have lots to interest Smalltalkers.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for a European break this year, don’t forget that the 2009 International Smalltalk Conference, organised by ESUG, will be held in Brest, France, from 31 August to 4 September, and also has a great set of sessions lined up.
ESUG ‘08 – Seaside Sprint
30 August, 2008
Following the conclusion of ESUG’s 16th Joint International Smalltalk Conference in Amsterdam, the Seaside developers held a Seaside Sprint. The aim of the sprint was to address a number of outstanding issues in order to move Seaside 2.9 towards release.
The sprint was a great success with 14 developers working on a number of issues. Eighteen key bugs were resolved, and progress was made in a number of other areas. The attendees had a range of levels of knowledge and experience, from the core developers, to those seeing Seaside code for the first time
The Sprint attendees would like to thank Café Kobalt and the Amsterdam Bibliotheek who provided essential facilities including free internet access, and great food and drink.
ESUG Innovation Awards 2008
28 August, 2008
This year’s winners of the ESUG Innovation Technology Awards were announced at the 16th Joint International Smalltalk Conference in Amsterdam last night. There were a record-breaking 21 entrants, with a great selection of innovative ideas and products. Voting was by all attendees of the conference, and the winners were:
1st prize – DrGeoII, Hilaire Fernandes’ development in Squeak Smalltalk of an application that allows students at primary or secondary level to create and interactively manipulate geometric figures within definable constraints, as featured on the Weekly Squeak recently (pdf description available here).
2nd prize – seaBreeze, an application from Georg Heeg eK which allows Seaside developers to work in an interactive environment to develop web content (pdf description available here).
3rd prize – iSqueak, a project from John M McIntosh, Grit Schuster and Michael Rueger, which allows Squeak to interact with multi-touch input devices such as the iPhone (pdf description available here).
The competition was sponsored by ABN Amro Bank, and the winners get prizes of €500, €300 and €200.
Following the ceremony, Georg Heeg announced that seaBreeze will be dual-licensed, with a free versions available under the MIT licence. The code will be made available once some finishing touches have been applied.
Squeak projects at Camp Smalltalk
25 August, 2008
Over fifty Smalltalk developers have spent the last two days working on a variety of Camp Smalltalk projects before this year’s ESUG Conference. A number of projects were based on Squeak:
The SqueakNOS team are working to get rid of the need to have an OS underlying the Squeak image. They have now got to the point where any image can run on their VM with minor changes. They can boot from USB memory, and are making progress on accessing SD memory cards.
The Amelia Project aims to use OpenCroquet to develop a three-dimensional multiuser collaborative virtual environment to help teachers organizing computer-mediated activities where children can collaborate, negotiate and make decisions regarding the spatial configuration of school spaces. Filipe Santos was able to work with other Squeak developers to move his work forward.
The MOOSE team worked on their collaborative research platform for Software Analysis and Information Visualisation, and were able to make significant progress with migrating their FAMIX2 meta-model to Squeak using Fame.
Hilaire Fernandes and Michael Reuger began exploring how to integrate DrGeoII, a tool for interacting with geometric figures, into the Sophie multimedia authoring environment.
Giovanni Corriga worked on the code for the KomHttpServer, and delivered a number of bug-fixes.
Lukas Renggli and Philippe Marschall were able to fix a number of bugs in Magritte, and add new functionality to Pier, as well as releasing a new maintenance version of Seaside.
Conference news: ESUG 2008 – more information
4 July, 2008
A set of posts to the squeak mailing lists has given more details about the 16th International Smalltalk Joint Conference organised by the European Smalltalk Users’ Group, to be held 25-29 August 2008 at CWI in Amsterdam.
Programme Details
Mathieu van Echtelt writes that the programme features more than 40 presentations on, among others, the following subjects:
Programming Language Platforms
- Newspeak (New open source dynamic language focusing on modularity, security and interoperability)
- Cog (New highly optimized open source Squeak VM)
- Maglev (Highly scalable Ruby VM)
- OpenCroquet (Deeply collaborative, multi-user online Smalltalk development environment)
Web Frameworks
- Seaside (The continuation & component-based web framework)
- WebVelocity
- AidaWeb (Smalltalk Web Application Server)
- WebTerminal
Model Driven Engineering:
- The Meta Environment Language Workbench
- ObjectStudio ModelingTool
- Fame; Meta-modeling Framework
- MBA Smalltalk; to manage your objects
Additionally, the winners of the ABN Amro sponsored Innovation Awards will be presented.
Booking Accommodation
Noury Bouraqadi notes that discount hotel rates for conference attendees are available until 11 July.
Seaside Sprint
Lukas Renggli has announced that the core Seaside dev team will be holding the first official Seaside Sprint, starting after the conference closes at 14:00 on 29 August, and finishing when the last participant collapses over their smoking keyboard. He invites anyone interested in working on Seaside or related code to participate. The venue details will be announced once agreed.
Camp Smalltalk
As usual, the weekend preceding the conference will be used to host Camp Smalltalk, an opportunity to work with colleagues on a number of exciting projects. See the Camp Smalltalk page for more information.
ESUG Awards for innovative software
18 June, 2008
Noury Bouraqadi wants to remind all Smalltalkers that the deadline for entries in the ESUG Innovation Technology Awards is in two weeks time. The Innovation Technology Awards, to be awarded at the 16th International Smalltalk Joint Conference in Amsterdam, are intended to make public part of the innovative software built using Smalltalk. The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, €500, €300 and €200 during an awards ceremony at the conference.
The winners will be selected based on criteria of creativity, stability, performance, successful use, and impact for the community. No constraints are put on the software except that it should be Smalltalk-based or Smalltalk-related; all flavours of Smalltalk are accepted.
The awards were founded by Nouri in 2004, and details of past winners can be found on his web-site.
ESUG, the organisers of the 16th International Smalltalk Joint Conference, to be held 25-29 August 2008 in Amsterdam, have issued a call for contributions. Submissions are to be made by 1st June 2008, with notification of acceptance on 15th June 2008.
About the Conference
For the past 16 years, the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG) has organised the International Smalltalk Conference, a lively forum on cutting edge software technologies that attract people from both academia and industry for a whole week. The attendees are both engineers using Smalltalk in business and students and teachers using Smalltalk both for research and didactic purposes.
As every year, this year’s edition of the largest European Smalltalk event will include the regular Smalltalk developers conference with renowned invited speakers, a Smalltalk camp that proves fruitful for interactions and discussions. This year’s conference will also see the 4th year of the Innovation Technology Awards, where prizes will be awarded to authors of best pieces of Smalltalk-related projects.
The conference features the following events:
- Camp Smalltalk – There will be a Smalltalk camp on 23-24 August
- Developers Forum
- Technology Forum
Developers Forum
This year we are looking for your experience with using Smalltalk. The list of topics includes, but is not limited to, the following:
- XP practices
- Development tools
- Experience reports
- Model driven development
- Web development
- Team management
- Meta-Modelling
- Security
- New libraries & frameworks
- Educational material
- Embedded systems and robotics
- SOA and Web services
- Interaction with other programming languages
Technology Forum
We are proud to announce the 4th 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.
Student Volunteer Program
If you are a student wanting to attend ESUG, have you considered being a student volunteer? Student volunteers help keep the conference running smoothly; in return, they have free accommodations, while still having most of the time to enjoy the conference.
We hope to see you there and have fun together.
Squeak at ESUG
12 September, 2007
The European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG) has organised the International Smalltalk Conference for the last 14 years, and this year, at Lugano in Switzerland, the program included a number of presentations interesting to Squeakers. These included:
- Noury Bouraqadi on Bridging the Gap Between Morphic Visual Programming and Smalltalk Code
- Damien Cassou on Redesigning with Traits: The Nile stream trait-based library
- Marcus Denker on TypePlug — Practical, Pluggable Types
- Bruce Kampjes on Exupery, a Next Generation Compiler Written in Smalltalk
- Stéphane Ducasse on How to promote Smalltalk
There’s lots more material, and links to photographs taken during the events, at the ESUG 2007 media page.
ESUG 2007 Call for Contributions
28 April, 2007
ESUG Conference 2007 Call for Contributions
15th International Smalltalk Joint Conference – Call for Contributions
August 25 – 31, 2007 – Lugano, Switzerland
http://www.esug.org/conferences/2007
For the past 14 years, the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG) has organised the International Smalltalk Conference, a lively forum on cutting edge software technologies that attract people from both academia and industry for a whole week. The attendees are both engineers using Smalltalk in business and students and teachers using Smalltalk both for research and didactic purposes.
As every year, this year’s edition of the largest European Smalltalk event will include the regular Smalltalk developers conference with renowned invited speakers, a Smalltalk camp that proves fruitful for interactions and discussions. Besides, this year will be held the 4th edition of the Innovation Technology Awards where prizes will be awarded to authors of best pieces of Smalltalk-related projects. Last, but not least the event includes as usual a research conference which was renamed this year into “International Conference on Dynamic Languages”. This reflects the widening of the scope of this conference to enable cross-fertilization with research conducted using other dynamic languages.
You can support the ESUG conference in many different ways:
* Sponsor the conference. New sponsoring packages are described at http://www.esug.org/supportesug/becomeasponsor/
* Submit a talk, a software or a paper to one of the events. See below.
* Attend the conference. We’d like to beat the previous record of attendance (116 people at Köthen, Germany in 2004)!
* Students can get free registration and hosting if they enroll into the the Student Volunteers program. See below.
The conference features the following events:
* Camp Smalltalk
* Developers Forum
* Research Forum
* Technology Forum
Camp Smalltalk
Camp Smalltalk is a free forum where smalltalk developers can join forces on projects.
Developers Forum : International Smalltalk Developers Conference
This year we are looking for YOUR experience on using Smalltalk. The list of topics includes, but is not limited to the following:
* XP practices
* Development tools
* Experience reports
* Model driven development
* Web development
* Team management
* Meta-Modeling
* Security
* New libraries & frameworks
* Educational material
* Embedded systems and robotics
* SOA and Web services
* Interaction with other programming languages
Submissions are due on 30th of May 2007.
Notification of acceptance on 15 of June 2007.
More information here.
Research Forum : International Conference on Dynamic Languages
Smalltalk is one of the oldest object-oriented languages, but its conception and programming environment can still be considered as a design pearl and as a beacon in the realm of programming languages and programming environments. The bulk of its modern contenders are still lacking many of the features that Smalltalkers find both mundane and essential. Nevertheless, as software engineering practices and new application fields evolve, Smalltalk should keep up. This concerns the language, its implementation technology, its programming tools as well as the software development culture it supports. The research forum invites scientific articles that report on original research conducted in and/or for Smalltalk. The list of topics includes, but is not limited to the following:
* Aspects, Aspect languages and Applications
* Ambient Intelligence, Ubiquitous & Pervasive Computing
* Embedded Systems
* Compilation Technology, Optimization, Virtual Machines
* Formalizations
* Language Engineering, Extensions
* Model Driven Engineering
* Programming in the Large, Design, Architectures, Components
* Development Environments
* Program Analysis
* Reflection and Metaprogramming
* Testing
* Agile Techniques
* Web Services & Internet Applications
More information can be found here.
Technology Forum
We are proud to announce the 4th Innovation Technology Awards. The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, 500 Euros, 300 Euros and 200 Euros during an awards ceremony at the conference. Developers of any Smalltalk-based software are welcome to compete.
Student Volunteer Program
If you are a student wanting to attend ESUG, have you considered being a student volunteer? Student volunteers help keep the conference running smoothly; in return, they have free accommodations, while still having most of the time to enjoy the conference.
More information is available here.
