Category: ESUG

Carsten Haerle delivered a presentation on a server system for continuously running tests. When the test in an application start to grow in number, it may become cumbersome to coordinate the execution of them suite and the repair of failing test cases. Carsten solutions delivers a highly parallelized test case execution environment and a self service tool for developers to coordinate the repair of test cases.

Michael and Grit from Impara delivered a presentation on how to build end-user oriented application using Squeak. They went into the design principles and the issues that they had to solve in order to build two applications: Plopp, a 3D drawing tool for children, and the Sophie multi-media authoring tool.
Each tool was also demoed live in front of the audience, after having been showed during last night’s Innovation Awards presentations.

The first talk of the Tuesday afternoon session was a Seaside tutorial by Lukas Renggli. In little more than one hour, Lukas has shown the basics to start creating web applications with Seaside. The tutorial used a pre-made Squeak image which may be found on the ESUG 2006 DVD.

For the first time at the ESUG Conferences, there was a Fast Track, which included many short presentations. Anyone with something interesting to show could ask for a slot, even at the last moment.

This year there were five presenters. The first one was the Bob Nemec, Executive Director of STIC (Smalltalk Industry Council), who provided the latest news: three websites (Smalltalk Central, the STIC home site and the newSmalltalk Solutions. Bob also announced the new Smalltalk logo [ | ] (opening bracket, vertical bar, closing bracket).
After Bob, Frederic Pluquet from Belgian university ULB introduced Object History, a system for storing and querying each successive state of an object.
Karsten Kusche and Damien Cassou then showed their Dakar Testing tool, an extension to VisualWorks’ browser and test runner which makes it easier to create SUnit tests for your classes.

Alexandre Bergel talked about Realtalk, a dedicated language to control wireless sensor, based upon Smalltalk.

The last presentation was from Stefaan Denolf from the Dutch company MediaGeniX NG. This is an all-Smalltalk company which produces a software system from managing broadcasts and TV/Radio schedules. Their software, written in VisualWorks, is based upon a Supermodel framework which allows to model uniformly many different subsystems (UI, storage, etc.)

The first Tuesday session started with a presentation by Cincom’s Martin Kobetic, who gave an introduction to Public Key cryptography (RSA, DSA, RH), the applications for the various algorithms and other practical aspects. This talk is the continuation of similar talks presented in the previous Smalltalk Solutions and ESUG conferences.

The abstract may be found on the ESUG website.

The presentations for the Esug Innovation Awards were held on Monday, September 4th.

Soon after the end of the afternoon session, the conference room became a demo area where 9 different software applications were shown by their authors. They were:

• BotsInc by Stephane Ducasse
• SqSquare by Kazuki Minamitani, Masashi Umezawa
• Plopp by Grit Schuster, Bert Freudenberg (and everybody else at Impara)
• Sophie by Bernd Eckardt, John McIntosh, Steven Riggins, Tim Rowledge, Michael Rueger, Bob Stein
• Mondrian by Tudor Girba, Michael Meyer
• SqueakBot by Serge Stinckwich, Séverin Lemaignan, and co.
• UbiquiTalk by Noury Bouraqadi, Michaël Piel
• Statistics on-line by Dario Trussardi Romano
• Dakar Testing by Damien Cassou & Karsten Kuche

The partecipants to the competions demoed their software to the conference attendands, who could vote for the best three entries. Votes have been collected and processed, and the winners will be announced on Wednesday during the conference Social Dinner. About two thirds of the conference partecipants decided to vote, and by a first count of the votes it can already be said that competition has been fierce. We wish to say good job to everyone who entered the competition.

During monday afternoon, the congress hall has hosted the research track of the conference. In this tracks there were many presentations involving the Smalltalk language and the state of the art of the research around it.

The presentations were:

• Application-Specific Models and Pointcuts using a Logic Meta Language, presented by Andy Kellens
• Unanticipated Partial Behavioral Reflection, presented by Marcus Denker
• Stateful Traits, presented by Stephane Ducasse
• SCL: a Simple, Uniform and Operational Language for Component-Oriented Programming in Smalltalk, presented by Luc Fabresse
• Let’s Modularize the Data Model Specifications of the ObjectLens in VisualWorks Smalltalk, presented by Michael Prasse
• Meta-driven Browsers, presented by Alexandre Bergel

Here you may find the papers which were discussed.

After Joseph Perline’s talk, it was the turn of Alfred Wullschleger, who talked about a system for managing states in a dynamic way, without resorting to the State pattern and leveraging Smalltalk’s event model and reflective message sending capabilities.

Alfred’s abstract and slides may be found on the conference website.

After a brief introduction to the conference by Stephane Ducasse and a coffee, we start with a presentation by Joseph Perline about Coding Dojos. A coding dojo is a place where, with the help of other practioners and experts, you may hone your programming skills by doing Code Katas, small and simple exercizes which may be solved in a short time.

After having explained what a code kata is, Joseph proceeded with an example, taken from the list of code katas on “Pragmatic” Dave Thomas’ site. Some of the attendants joined in and tried to solve the problem while pair-programming in a test-first way.