First talk of Saturday - Giorgio is talking about Opentalk, and how they used it to solve a customer problem. The issue: The database they needed to access accessible via ODBC, but the customer they were talking to used Linux. They didn't have an immediate solution to ODBC on Linux, so they went with remote access - ODBC on a Windows box, connected to the Linux system via Opentalk. VW on both sides, obviously.

The best part: "Three lines of code and the systems were connected"

Heh - Giorgio says that Opentalk is so easy to use that it's easy to make distribution mistakes - connecting and sending messages is "too easy" :)

The database itself was on an AS400, which is not a platform Cincom Smalltalk runs on anyway. The base framework Giorgio uses dates back to 1992 and VSE - it's been ported forward over the years.

Another thing they had to deal with - not all connected users were on fast connections - and the way you construct distributed messaging matters a lot with different connection speeds. You also need to be cognizant of two other things:

• letting the default "self" return from remote methods can be dangerous
• published objects are weakly held by default, so hold them strongly if you need them

Here's one of the slides Giorgio tossed up, explaining how the (many) clients on a system find a free port to connect on, without conflicts:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, smalltalk solutions