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 by Example now available in French
11 May, 2008
Squeak by Example has been a hugely successful introduction to Squeak since its publication last year, and it has now been made available to a wider audience, following the publication of a French edition Squeak par l’exemple. As with the English edition, the book has been made available in print from print-on-demand specialists lulu.com for around €17/$20/£11, or can be downloaded from the site as a pdf.
Squeak par l’exemple was produced thanks to the hard work of the team of translators: Martial Boniou, Mathieu Chappuis, Luc Fabresse, René Mages, Nicolas Petton, Alain Plantec, Benoît Tuduri and Serge Stinckwich.
The Software Architecture Group at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut (who have produced a great online Seaside tutorial and associated book) have recently been involved in using Etoys in the classroom. They kindly sent us this report about the experience of two of their members when introducing Squeak and Etoys to high school students.
Immersive Education the focus of 2008 Boston Summit (January 12-13 at Boston College)
3 January, 2008
From Aaron E. Walsh:
Happy New Year, everyone. As we enter 2008 I’m happy to announce that the Boston Digital Media Summit (next weekend) is focused on Immersive Education and will feature Croquet in several sessions (see the schedule of events below; Julian’s keynote is on Day 1 — January 12th).
Please join us if you’re in the Boston area or would like to make a trip for the event. The news release is below, and I’ve attached the PDF version as well.
It’s also in HTML format along with related news items at:
http://ImmersiveEducation.org/#NEWS
The Summit schedule of events has been set, which you can also see at:
http://mediagrid.org/summit/ (main page)
http://mediagrid.org/summit/program.html (schedule of events)
Best regards,
Aaron
Problems with the Weekly Squeak RSS feeds
13 November, 2007
WordPress.com (the free service that hosts The Weekly Squeak) has recently done some adjustments to its blogs’ RSS feeds. This adjustment led to the discovery of a bug in the Universal Feed Parser used by some desktop and web aggregators (such as Planet Squeak). The bug has been promptly fixed, but if you’re still experiencing problems we suggest switching to the Weekly Squeak’s Atom feeds (Entries feed, Comments feed) until your service is upgraded to the newest version of the feed parser.
Athena Smalltalk for embedded applications
9 November, 2007
Alexandre Bergel has just announced on the Squeak Dev mailing list his work on Athena, a new Smalltalk environment intended to be embedded in Java programs. Athena comprises a set of tools to use the Smalltalk programming language in an embedded setting. It offers a small (100kB) virtual machine written in Java, a shell, and a set of tools to program Athena from Squeak.
The Athena VM is based on work done by Timothy A. Budd on Smallworld, and is released under the MIT licence.
You can see a video of Alexandre’s talk about Athena at the Squeak BOF at OOPSLA 2007.
Smalltalk to the rescue? Microsoft EX-execs sue Red Hat
12 October, 2007
Some Microsoft EX-exec’s sue Red Hat for patent infringement. How “EX” you say? Well the last one arrived Oct 1st. The patent is for a windowed GUI. Hummm that’s a good one. Wait didn’t Dan do that?
Smalltalk to the rescue?? Help is on the way!
A new home for the Weekly Squeak
16 May, 2007
The News Team is proud to announce that, as of today, the Weekly Squeak news blog has a new home at http://news.squeak.org.
The blog will still be hosted by WordPress.com, but its main address will be the squeak.org one. The old address, http://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com, will still work and will redirect the viewes and the RSS feed subscribers to the new address.
