Category: ESUG

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.

The awards ceremony for the ESUG 2006 Innovation Awards was held in the main Conference room right before lunch on Wednesday.

This year’s awards saw 9 contestants and 62 voters. The competition was fierce, and the three winners were:

Plopp, by Impara
Mondrian, by Tudor Girba and Michael Meyer
SqSquare, by Kazuki Minamitani, Masashi Umezawa

All the partecipants also received a nice Smalltalk balloon as a gift, and the congratulations of the conference attendants.

The last talk for Wednesday’s morning session was delivered by Marcus and Stef, releasers of Squeak 3.9, and it was a quick recap on what happened in the world of Squeak in the last year. Here are the main points:

• The new SqueakFoundation is now working. It has 7 board members, and its role is to promote Squeak and coordinate the various Squeak communities
• The new Squeak Website is now managed by the community (the Squeak Webteam)
• The Team system is fully operational. Everything in the Squeak community is managed by Teams (3.9 development, Webteam, Tools etc.). Each team delivers a monthly report on its activities.
• Squeak 1.1 is now the open-source certificed APSL 2.0 license

The new Squeak version 3.9 has reached Gamma stage and will soon be available as a stable release. Its main features:

• Pragmas
• Merged back 3.8 Squeakland & Smallland changes
• A new default look
• lots of fixes
• ToolBuilder (UI abstraction)
• Services framework
• Changes in event notifications mechanism
• Lots of new tests
• New AST
• Closure compiler
• Monticello version management
• SqueakSource
• the Omnibrowser framework and related tools
• SqueakMap
• Shout, eCompletion
• Refactoring browser now integrated
• new SUnit browser.
• Christo: a code coverage browser

There are also a lots of projects going on which are related to Squeak. Stef did a brief presentation of each:

• Tweak
• Sophie
• Croquet
• Spoon
• Seaside
• Exupery, Chronos, Pier, Magma

Marcus and Stef also proposed some lines of action for the next 3.10 release
Lots of talks, few actions

Mondrian, by Tudor Girba, is simply a visualization tool. The cool thing about it is that it can be used to display graphs of any kind or size (classes with methods, methods invocations). Graph displaying may be obtained dinamically just by scripting the Mondrian engine, without ever manipulating the graphic engine: you just specify the nodes of your graph, how they should be connected, and how they should be laid out. A great tool, with many possible uses.

The first presentation for Wednesday was delivered by James Robertson, who recounted his experiences in building and mantaining Silt, the blog server written in VisualWorks which powers the blogs on the Cincom Smalltalk website.

As the last presentation for Tuesday, Adriaan Van Os talked about optimizing your code. Adriaan started with the basic advices on profiling (“keep your design simple, worry about optimization later”, and “don’t rely on assumptions – use the profiler”). From there, Adriaan added lots of useful tips which are more specific to the optimization of a Smalltalk application. Adriaan has also extended SUnit with some nifty profiling methods.