The Weekly Squeak

Category: Conferences

  • ESUG Awards for innovative software

    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.

     

  • Conference news: C5-09 in Kyoto

    Bert Freudenberg posted the following conference announcement to the squeak-dev mailing list.

    Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through Computing
    January 19 – 22, 2009
    Kyoto, Japan
    http://www.cm.is.ritsumei.ac.jp/c5-09/

    Join us at the 7th annual gathering to learn and share about recent work in the areas of collaborative systems, connecting people around the world through computing, and creating new media for business, social development, learning and play!

    The C5 conference is for researchers, software developers, educators, designers, and technology users who are concerned about developing and enabling human-oriented creation, connection, and collaboration processes. C5 is an international forum for presenting ongoing work as well as new work currently under development and for discussing future needs and directions in creative computing and multimedia authoring environments.

    Conference sessions will include invited talks, including one from Dr. Alan Kay, Viewpoints Research Institute, formal paper presentations, hands-on workshops, informal “un-conference” and “lightning” sessions as well social and sightseeing events.

    Please save the date and plan to join us in lovely Kyoto, Japan!

    — The C5-Organizing Committee

    There’s also a call for papers in three areas:

    • Theoretical papers
    • Case studies and experiment reports
    • Papers that ‘bring theory into practice or practice into theory’ bridging between practice and theory in creating, connecting and collaborating through computing.

     

  • Conference News: Smalltalks 2008 in Buenos Aires

    Following the success of last year’s Smalltalks 2007, the organisers are now planning to hold the Smalltalks 2008 conference on 13-15 November at the Universidad Abierta Interamericana in Buenos Aires.

    As with last year’s event, registration and refreshments will be completely free.

    The conference will be divided into two modules, Scientific Research and Software Industry, as well as hosting a coding contest. See the website for details of deadlines and speakers.

    You can get a flavour of last year’s conference by viewing some of the videos posted by Andres Valloud.

  • Smalltalk Solutions 2008 – two weeks to go!

    The Smalltalk Industry Council’s annual Smalltalk Solutions conference is coming up on 18-21 June 2008 in Reno, Nevada. Smalltalk Solutions brings together Smalltalk users, developers, and enthusiasts as well as those interested in the latest Smalltalk technology.

    This year’s agenda has a host of fascinating topics and speakers lined up, with keynote presentations from Gilad Bracha comparing Newspeak with Smalltalk, Randal Schwartz reviewing persistence solutions for Seaside, and David Simmons from Microsoft on dynamic languages and secure cloud systems.

    Other topics include Sophie, uses of Smalltalk in industry, running Seaside on Gemstone/S, an introduction to Aida/Scribo CMS, as well as overviews of many new tools and packages.

    It looks like a packed agenda, but no doubt there also will be ample time to get to meet other Smalltalkers, put faces to names, and catch up on the newest developments in the Smalltalk world.

  • S3 Highlights: Lively, COLA, Huemul, Squeak on Python and more

     

    On 15/16 May, the workshop on Self-Sustaining Systems (S3) took place at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Potsdam. An exciting event at a beautiful place, it featured invited talks by Ian Piumarta, Dan Ingalls, and Richard P. Gabriel, and five presentations of reviewed papers that approached self-sustainment from different angles.

    (more…)

  • 16th International Smalltalk Joint Conference – Call for Contributions

    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

    ESUG 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:

    There’s lots more material, and links to photographs taken during the events, at the ESUG 2007 media page.

  • A report from Squeak’s booth @ Smalltalk Solutions 2007

    William Hartford writes:

    Fellow Squeakers,

    As most of you know, due to the fantastic work of Chris Cunnington, Squeak was able to acquire a booth at Smalltalk Solutions this year. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to volunteer to work the booth for the two days of the convention. We had a fabulous location and got a tremendous amount of traffic. The Smalltalk community, while small, is one of the most intelligent, kind, supportive, and fun communities I have ever been involved in. I would like to thank all Smalltalk Solution attendees for there kind words, Squeak cheerleading, and help with answering questions when the crowds got large.

    Bert Freudenberg was kind enough to lend us a OLPC laptop. This was the major draw of non-Smalltalkers to our booth. Many of the people knew nothing of Smalltalk but had heard of the OPLC project. The etoys demo was beautiful and if gave us a real opportunity to explain a little about Squeak, Smalltalk, and etoys.

    Tim Rowledge generously sent me 45 silver and 5 gold badges. We were able to sell 27 silver badges raising $324 Canadian for the Squeak Foundation. The badges are beautiful and if you have not yet had the opportunity to buy one I recommend that you do. If you are in the Toronto area come out to the Beach Outings Club and I will have some on hand.

    I could not of dreamed how well it went. The booth was fantastic, the people were kind, and the interest in Squeak exceeded my expectations.

    Thanks for all the support,
    Will Harford

  • ESUG 2007 Call for Contributions

    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.

    More information.

    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.

  • ESUG 2006 – Friday’s presentations

    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”.