Category: Conferences

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.

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.