The Weekly Squeak

Since I had to catch a plane to get back home, I couldn’t attend the session on Friday morning.

The last day of the conference saw three presentations. The first was delivered by Norm Green of Gemstone, who talked about the state of Gemstone 64, the 64-bit version of their database system. After that, Mathieu Van Echelt presented Cosmocows‘ development and modelling enviroment used to create database-backed web-applications. The last presentation of the conference was delivered by Rob Vens, on “Packaging freeware and shareware applications in VisualWorks”.

As the last presentation for Thursday, Niall Ross paused his incessant (and absolutely useful) note-taking to deliver a talk on how to use real domain objects in your tests. This objects can be created by leveraging the rewrite engine of the Refactoring Browser in order to create readable and easily-modifiable tests which nonetheless manipulate complex objects.

Rowan Bunning delivered a presentation on Scrum and its use at Wizard Information Services. Wizard has much benefied from the introduction of Scrum, both in conjunction with Extreme Programming and Smalltalk for its development process, and as an agile management framework for managing non-development processes. Rowan described the use of Scrum+XP in Wizard, then delivered a short demo on how a Scrum sprint should work, and then talked about how to “sell” Scrum.

One of the presentations of Thursday’s afternoon session was delivered by Romain Robbes, who presented SpyWare, a tool developed by the University of Lugano. SpyWare model the evolution of a program as a series of change operations, thus allowing a much richer analysis of your program and its evolution.

Right after lunch on Thursday afternoon, Lukas Renggli delivered a tasty presentation on how to integrate “Web 2.0” techniques into your Seaside application using the Prototype and Script.aculo.us libraries, which allow you web application to have nifty features like drag’n’drop, entry field autocompletion etc. Script.aculo.us is very well integrated into Seaside, to the point that the user doesn’t need to write even a single line of JavaScript code by hand.

Right before lunch, and in a little less time than planned due to the previous talk running late, Alfred Wullschelger showed a little extension to the notification mechanism included into the Gemstone DB. This extension is useful as a general mechanism for notifications from the DB, regardless from the specific configuration of the Gemstone server.

For this year’s conferences, the organizers invited Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, a dynamically-typed functional language, used for building massively concurrent applications. Joe went into the details on the requirement a fault tolerant system, and how Erlang satisfies this requirements.
Using the features of Erlang, Joe’s group at Ericsson managed to build systems with 9 nines availability.

Thursday’s first talk was delivered by Georg Heeg, a longtime Smalltalk programmer and Cincom Partner. Georg presented the process by which the ObjectStudio 8 environment is slowly being integrated into VisualWorks, using its sophisticated meta-modelling features.

As a social event, the attendants to the ESUG 2006 conference could take part in a three hours guided tour of the centre of Prague.
The tour started in Wenceslaus Square under the statue of King Wenceslaus (which English-speaking readers will remember from the Christmas carol). From there the groups went to the Old Town Square, then to the Charles Bridge and back to Old Town Square to watch the Astoromical clock mark the hour.
At the end of the tour, the guides brought the attendants of the conference to the Novomestsky Pivovar brewery, where they had dinner.
Later most of the attendands went back to the conference hotel, where they continued talking and hacking until late night.

In the only track of the afternoon, Noury Bouraqadi presented Ubiquitalk, a P2P system to connect disparate system, in order to create a network where different nodes can offer different services. Ubiquitalk has been built on top of Squeak, and relies on the rST (Remote Smalltalk system) for remote message sending.

Ubiquitalk is a the moment a research software, but the developers are trying to move it to real world software.