The Weekly Squeak

Category: Publicity

  • 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.

  • Seaside: your next web framework

    Randal L. Schwartz had a “standing-room only” audience at BarCampPortland for his presentation on why web developers should consider using the Seaside web application framework. BarCampPortland is described as an “unconference for the Portland [Oregon] tech community”, and aims to offer the attendees interesting topics, cool people and great networking opportunities.

    Randal was offered a 45-minute slot, and took the opportunity to explain what makes Seaside such a powerful framework for professional web developers. His material, which incorporated feedback from colleagues on the Seaside mailing list, was very well received, and will form the basis for future presentations by Randal to raise the awareness of Seaside in the web development community.

  • Video of Newspeak lecture now available

    The video has now been posted of Gilad Bracha‘s talk on Newspeak that we mentioned last month. Newspeak is a new dynamic language being developed at Cadence, and is descended from Smalltalk and Self, with influences from E, Scala and Scheme, exploring ideas around combinatorial parsing, strict message-passing, reflectivity, capability-based security and actor-style concurrency.

    Newspeak is being developed on top of Squeak, and the presentation makes a number of direct comparisons with Squeak, especially when discussing UI matters such as the Newspeak widget framework, application framework and Class Browser, and how they’ve improved on Squeak’s access to the operating system with a new FFI framework.

    The roadmap for the future development of Newspeak is also laid out, including a discussion of when/whether the code will be published.

    (If you’re having trouble viewing the video, see this thread for help).

    [Edit – Gilad Bracha has a fascinating blog that records his ongoing development of Newspeak.]

  • Waveplace in the US Virgin Islands

    WavePlace

    WavePlace 2

    Hi everyone,
    We’ve just posted two new videos from the St John Waveplace pilot, which concluded three weeks ago. The first shows mentoring during the pilot. The second shows students presenting their Etoys storybooks.
    1) Scenes from the St John pilot (4 minutes)
    2) The St John Storybook Awards (8 minutes)
    We will be posting the actual storybooks to our website soon so you can see them for yourself.
    In other news, the Haiti pilot will resume next week, since things have calmed down in Port-Au-Prince. The kids and teachers are well.
    As always, if you’d like to hear more from us, please subscribe to our newsletter or donate money on our website to help with our courseware and pilots.
    Take care,
    Tim
    —
    Timothy Falconer
    Waveplace Foundation
    610-797-3100

  • The Year of Smalltalk

    The Year of Smalltalk

    Randal L. Schwartz just announced that he will be giving a 3 hour tour of Seaside at OSCON 2008. We are very proud to have Randal on the Squeak Foundation Board. We are looking forward to more of his “Year of Smalltalk“.

    [Edit: corrected spelling]

  • Seaside startup snapped up

    Auctomatic

    The news is spreading that Auctomatic, a Vancouver-based startup using Seaside, has been bought by Live Current Media for $5 million. The company, which produces a tool to ease selling and inventory management for eBay sellers, was funded by a number of investors including Paul Graham’s technology investment company Y Combinator, and its staff including founders Kulveer Taggar, Harjeet Taggar and Patrick Collison will join the new owners. Lots more details are available from Phillip Kast’s blog.
    It looks like Vancouver is becoming a very exciting place to be for Seaside developers!

    [Edit: Corrected the information about Y Combinator]

  • Dan Ingalls demos Lively at Google

    Dan Ingalls gave an interesting Tech Talk on the Lively kernel (best viewed in Safari 3 apparently) at Google a few weeks ago – what better way to (re)introduce our new board member?

  • Talk on “Newspeak” today

    Jens Lincke informed the mailing list that the Software Architecture Group at the University of Potsdam are hosting a talk today (11th March) by Gilad Bracha on Newspeak, described as a new dynamic language, descended from Smalltalk and Self.

    From Jens’ note:

    Newspeak is a new dynamic language, descended from Smalltalk
    and Self. Like Self, Newspeak is a message based language: all
    computation – even an object’s own access to its internal structure – is
    performed by sending messages to objects. However, like Smalltalk,
    Newspeak is class-based. Classes can be nested arbitrarily, as in Beta.
    Since all names denote message sends, all classes are virtual; in
    particular, superclasses are virtual, so all classes act as mixins.
    There is no static state in Newspeak. Instead, top level classes act as
    module definitions, which are independent, immutable, self-contained
    parametric namespaces. They can be instantiated into modules which may
    be stateful and mutually recursive. Naturally, like its predecessors,
    Newspeak is reflective: a mirror library allows structured access to the
    program meta-level. In this talk, we’ll expand on these topics,
    illustrating interesting uses such as class hierarchy inheritance and
    domain specific language support.

    Gilad Bracha is a Distinguished Engineer at Cadence Design Systems.
    Previously, he was a Computational Theologist and Distinguished Engineer
    at Sun Microsystems. He is co-author of the Java Language Specification,
    and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages.
    Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk, the Animorphic Smalltalk
    System. He received his B.Sc in Mathematics and Computer Science from
    Ben Gurion University in Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the
    University of Utah.

    The talk is from 16:00-17:00, at the Hasso Plattner Institut, B-E.2 (library). Directions can be found at: http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hpi/campus/anfahrt.html

  • The Squeak Foundation Board 2008

    Gaylord Opryland

    Hi all Squeakers!

    Ok, the Squeak Foundation Board Election 2008 ended 19 minutes ago –
    promptly at 18.00 UTC, 8 March.

    For this year we had 437 authorized voters of which 178 voted, that is
    slightly more than 40% voting – a bit disappointing IMHO since we had
    157 voting of 347 last year which gives above 45%.
    On the other hand 178 is more than 157, so we had more voters and thus a
    growing community, which of course is the most important aspect!

    And without further ado I bring you the board for the following year
    starting from NOW. The order reflects the ranking from the election:

    1. Dan Ingalls
    2. Craig Latta
    3. Bert Freudenberg
    4. Yoshiki Ohshima
    5. Tim Rowledge
    6. Randal L. Schwartz
    7. Igor Stasenko

    (more…)

  • Randal Schwartz Talks With Leo about Squeak, EToys and OLPC

    Randal Schwartz and Leo

    Don’t miss this fun new video from Randal Schwartz and Leo about Squeak, EToys and OLPC.  Randal builds a very nice car demo.