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Original Post: Cincom Smalltalk 2004 Users Conference - Schedule
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During the conference there will be the opportunity to Meet the Experts
in a seperate room to discuss the presented items - or other - more in
detail.
In the Customer Advisory Board sessions you'll
have the opportunity to tell in public our product, support and engineering
management what you think we should add or enhance in our product
and services offering to meet your specific needs. This information will
flow into our plannings for the further direction of Cincom Smalltalk.
We will not only serve food for the brain: during
the Coffee Breaks you'll get refreshments and we'll invite you to
Lunch
and Dinner. During these times you'll have the opportunity
to talk to Cincomers in a relaxed casual athmosphere. And of course you'll
be able to exchange your experiences, opinions, questions and solutions
also with other users of Cincom Smalltalk.
Tracks:
Cincom Smalltalk general
Cincom Smalltalk ObjectStudio
Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks
Topics of general interest
Talks:
Cincom and Cincom Smalltalk: Commitment
and Progress, Dave Wood (Cincom
Systems)
In his presentation Dave Wood, Managing Director of Cincom EMEA, will
present the history of the company Cincom and our mission and business
ethics. While our whole industry has been suffering from the burst of the
".com bubble" and the various incidents of world wide politics and economics
Cincom and Cincom users have been able to continously draw increased benefits
from Cincom's High Value, Low Cost, Rapid ROI and Low Risk solutions. Dave
Wood will describe Cincom's market strategy and which important role Cincom
Smalltalk plays in Cincom's offering portfolio.
Cincom Smalltalk Product Roadmap,
James
R. Robertson (Cincom
Systems)
I'll be talking about the roadmap for Cincom Smalltalk - where we are,
what we are working on, and what we plan to support in the near-medium
term.
Building Web Applications in Smalltalk,
Alan
Knight (Cincom Systems)
The VisualWorks Web Toolkit is a standards-based mechanism for building
and serving web applications. Implementing mechanisms compatible with servlets,
ASP, and JSP, it makes it easy to build scalable web applications leveraging
standard industry patterns, and in ways compatible with other servers.
This talk will describe the basic architecture of the Web Toolkit, and
some tips for working successfully with it, recent additions, and future
plans.
ObjectStudio Opentalk, Len
Lutomski (Cincom Systems),
Andreas
Hiltner (Cincom Systems)
VisualWorks and ObjectStudio each have their own advantages, but until
now it has been difficult to use them together. That has changed.
Cincom has ported Opentalk-STST, VisualWorks' Smalltalk-to-Smalltalk communication
framework to ObjectStudio. Now, the two dialects of Cincom Smalltalk can
interoperate. This presentation introduces Opentalk-STST and the
ObjectStudio port, provides a quick Opentalk-STST tutorial, and discusses
the things you need to keep in mind when interoperating across Smalltalk
dialects.
The VM Plugin Framework for VisualWorks,
Sudhakar
Krishnamachari (Cincom
Systems)
The VM Plugin framework is used to develop higher-performance C implementations
of algorithms or code sections for use as primitives dynamically loaded
into the virtual machine. The major part of the development effort is in
working at Smalltalk level coding to create all the methods that are finally
exported as a C code file for compilation as a dll and relinking.
ObjectStudio on the Web using Opentalk and Web
Toolkit, Mark Grinnell (Cincom
Systems), Andreas Hiltner (Cincom
Systems),
Alan Knight (Cincom
Systems), Len Lutomski (Cincom
Systems)
The ability of ObjectStudio and VisualWorks to interoperate over Opentalk
gives ObjectStudio users access to the whole range of web capabilities
in VisualWorks. The possibilities range from giving an ObjectStudio application
access to corporate data provided over web protocols, to providing Windows
native widget clients for VisualWorks applications. In this presentation
we demonstrate the design and the mechanics of a sample application which
uses ObjectStudio and VisualWorks, interoperating over Opentalk-STST, to
put an ObjectStudio application interface on the Web.
VisualWorks DotNetConnect: Bridging worlds,
Andreas
Tönne (Georg Heeg eK)
.NET is one of the emerging technologies that Smalltalk developers
cannot ignore. Integrating Smalltalk applications with .NET-components
will be a regular requirement in projects. The new VisualWorks component
DotNetConnect allows a VisualWorks application to import .NET-Assemblies
and use the contained types as Smalltalk classes in a transparent way.
The talk shows on a small example how simple it is to use .NET-Assemblies
even without knowing much about .NET itself. We also show the practical
limitations and the future direction of development. DotNetConnect was
developed for Cincom by Georg Heeg eK.
Next-Generation Database Mapping and Dialect
Interoperability, Alan Knight (Cincom
Systems)
Smalltalk has long been a leader in storing objects in databases. For
relational databases, Object Studio's POF, and the VisualWorks ObjectLens
were very early examples that were also very powerful and still in active
use today. This talk describes efforts towards a next-generation database
mapping library that can preserve high-level compatibility with these older
systems, while greatly expanding on their capabilities. The core mapping
engine for this is the open source GLORP library, which is portable across
Smalltalk dialects. One of the things we have done is to map the Store
database schema using this library. This enables a variety of tools which
can work with Store data directly from other dialects, including Squeak,
VisualAge, and ObjectStudio. We hope that this can serve as a mechanism
for interoperability between dialects.
Support to the Rescue...oops... Resolution,
Kim
Thomas (Cincom Systems)
This talk will cover
What's going on with my case?
1. Cincom's support response process.
2. Support levels and severity levels
3. Resource infrastructure
What's new about support?
1. Publishing resolutions
2. Cincom Smalltalk Customer news group as a support avenue
3. More information sharing, i.e. e-mail announcements on available
resolutions
4. Past staff expansion and development
What the future holds
1. Continuing to develop the support organization
a. Identify areas of expertise
b. Continue certificaton process
c. Development related activities
2. Reduce time to respond
3. Reduce time to resolution
Agile Project Management using SCRUM, Joseph
Pelrine(MetaProg GmbH)
Agile software development methodlogies, XP being the most known one,
are becoming more and more accepted. They take the different nature of
software
seriously and help delivering usable software to the needs of the customer
on time and on budget. At the same time agile methodlogies minimize the
risks and even if a project should be stopped for whatever reason the customer
has not wasted his investment but owns a working system which operates
to his specification up that time. But how would one control and manage
projects using such methodlogies? In deed classical project management
has typically still the "waterfall" in mind and isn't well suited at all.
SCRUM is a proven project management methodlogy that fits nicely with agile
processes - especially XP. We will show and explain the underlying principles
and report from real life projects.
XPerience eXtreme Programming, Joseph
Pelrine(MetaProg GmbH)
eXtreme Programming - the most widely known agile software development
methodology - consists of a set of best practices that mutually support
each other to reach the goal of a user centric reactive and lean development
process. This talk will give an overview about these best practices and
how they are supported in the IDE of Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks. In a
life demo it will especially be shown how easy and efficient it is to conduct
the "test first" paradigm with the current SUnit implementation in the
tool set.
Tips and Tricks for developing GUIs in ObjectStudio,
Eduard
Maydanik (Cincom Systems)
In my talk I will give you an overview about the current and upcoming
features of the ObjectStudio GUI system. Especially you will hear - and
see - about:
- what was fixed
- what is new
- how to use new features
- what you should and what you shouldn't do - and why!
- how to customize the default behavior of widgets
VisualWorks Tools and Pollock, Vassili
Bykov (Cincom Systems)
Pollock is the new VisualWorks widget set, which recently has reached
the Feature Set 1 stage. The most important widgets are implemented, though
both interfaces and implementation are still being cleaned up, and no visual
GUI builder is included. This presentation will outline the future path
in making Pollock the default VisualWorks widget set and developing VisualWorks
tools, as well as demonstrate both building applications using Pollock
in its present state and various interesting features of the current VisualWorks
tool set.
Multithreading in ObjectStudio,
Andreas
Hiltner (Cincom Systems)
We will discuss the design and implementation of multithreading in
ObjectStudio. We will discuss some common situations where a multithreaded
approach could improve an application, using examples of how to modify
existing code to use a separate thread. We will explain the particular
issues involved with doing GUI programming with threads, and accessing
databases with threads.
Never mind the quality, feel the width!
64-bits and beyond...,
Eliot Miranda (Cincom
Systems)
Eliot will demo the new 64-bit implementation of VisualWorks and describe
its key features, both existing and planned. He will also give brief overviews
of some short to medium-term directions for VisualWorks such as AOStA,
an adaptive optimization framework for VisualWorks and the Smalltalk Runtime
Environment, a "scripting" focus.
The Future of ObjectStudio, Mark
Grinnell (Cincom Systems),
Andreas
Hiltner (Cincom Systems),
Helge
Nowak (Cincom Systems)
Our research into possibilities for a next generation ObjectStudio
has opened two major roads to the future: a radical approach by fitting
ObjectStudio into Microsoft's .NET framework. Or a more evolutionary approach
by continuing to enhance the current technology to gain more performance
and robustness and at the same time increasing the collaboration with VisualWorks
to make the server features of VisualWorks even more easily accessible
from ObjectStudio. We will present the current state of the art of our
research on this topic. Either way we go we are committed to implement
your needs and keep any impact on your business as minimal as possible.
We will be interested in your feedback.
ObjectStudio Unicode, Alexander
Augustin (Georg Heeg eK)
ObjectStudio up to version 6.9.1 supports two eight bit character sets
of the underlying Windows operating system: the default OEM and Windows
character sets. In Western Europe these two character sets are Codepage
850 and Codepage 1252. Neither character set is capable of representing
Cyrillic, Greek, Japanese or Chinese characters. Not even Czech characters
like ? or Polish characters like ? can be represented. With the enlargement
of the European Union and with companies acting globally ObjectStudio customers
require support world wide languages. Following both international standards
and Microsoft's direction Unicode support is the decision of choice.
ObjectStudio Unicode is a complete ObjectStudio development and execution
System which uses Unicode characters instead of eight bit characters internally
as well as for input and output including database and file access,
user input and display output. This includes support for all European languages
as well as for Asian languages like Japanese, Korean and Chinese.
The presentation will deal with the differences between the Unicode
and the non-Unicode versions of ObjectStudio as well as show additional
features in the Unicode version and will give some examples on how the
new features can be used.
The Value of Smalltalk: valuing and risk management
in Smalltalk, Niall Ross The Kapital system is key to JPMorgan Chase' leading position in the
derivatives market (http://www.cincom.com/pdf/CS040819-1.pdf). Niall will
present some specific examples of how features of Smalltalk feed into capabilities
of the Kapital system that give business advantage.
Save your Investment: Re-Architecting
existing Applications for SOA, Helge Nowak (Cincom
Systems),
Michel Bany (Cincom
Systems)
A common pattern we meet in customer situations is that they have existing
applications and someone (typical a manager...) wants "a Web solution"
or "Web Services". Not only in the minds of non-technical people but indeed
in reality there is a lot of business potential associated with these new
architectures. So these are serious wishes. Is this the time to adopt a
new technology? Ask yourself: what would I gain? What would I lose? Looking
closer you'll see: you would gain costs and risks. And you lose the investment
already made into your existing systems.
Isn't there a better way? We will show that you can save your
investment. We will show that you
can leverage the existing knowledge
and expertise of your developers in both the technology and your business
processes to adopt the new architectures. We will show that you can
exploit the benefits from moving to these architectures much more rapidly
and with much less risk.
The talk will explain the fundamental differences between the various
software architectures from fat (or rich?) client to Service Oriented Architectures
(SOA). We will depict how you can go a straight and even route from where
you are to where you want to be. Don't worry, be happy: you got Cincom
Smnalltalk!
Koramis SpecSheet: an intuitive Web Application
for Electrical Engineers and how Smalltalk Saved me from an Error,
Hans
Peter Fichtner (Koramis GmbH &
Co.KG)
VisualWaf: Web application development in
the MVC style, Andreas Tönne (Georg
Heeg eK)
We show how to develop web applications easily with VisualWaf. VisualWaf
is an add-on for the WebToolkit with a powerful abstraction of Web idiosyncrasies
but without breaking with the Web style of thinking in sites, pages and
requests. It centers around a translation of the MVC-pattern to Web applications.
This puts the Smalltalk programmer in the position to program like he would
for a GUI application but still he can collaborate with Web-designers in
the way they expect it. VisualWaf is used for years by Georg Heeg eK as
a consulting tool in several customer projects in the banking, insurance
and engineering domain. It is now marketed as a product.
Reusable Web Development With Seaside,
Avi
Bryant (beta4 productions), Michel
Bany (Cincom Systems)
Seaside is a web application framework available for VisualWorks Smalltalk.
Featured in keynote presentations at both Smalltalk Solutions and the ESUG
conference this year, Seaside has been praised for its innovative, radically
object oriented approach to web development. This talk will focus
on how Seaside leverages Smalltalk's strengths to enable a level of reusability
and maintainability in web applications that simply isn't possible using
other technologies. We will also demonstrate Seaside's strong, unique integration
with the VisualWorks development environment.
Speakers:
Alexander Augustin, Consultant, Georg
Heeg eK, Germany Alexander Augustin is working as a software engineer at Georg Heeg
eK. He is the author of ObjectStudio Unicode. Additionally he has the taken
over the responsibility of VisualWorks COM Connect. Both, ObjectStudio
Unicode and the new COM Connect will ship with Cincom Smalltalk 2004 available
in December 2004.
Michel Bany, Senior Consultant, Cincom
Systems, Switzerland Michel Bany is a technology consultant working for Cincom at the Geneva
office in Switzerland. Over the last 30 years he has helped many customers
to use Cincom technology like databases, transaction servers, programming
languages mainly on IBM mainframes to build successful solutions in various
business areas like manufacturing, banking, insurance, retail, government.
He has been interested in Smalltalk since '90 and became a Smalltalk consultant
when Cincom acquired ObjectStudio in '95. He is the main maintainer of
the Cincom Smalltalk ObjectStudio wiki where he contributed many goodies.
He is the maintainer of the Seaside port for Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks.
Avi Bryant, Senior Consultant, beta4
productions, Canada Avi Bryant is an independent consultant currently living in the Netherlands.
He is best known as the author and maintainer of widely used open source
version control, web development, and database access tools for Squeak
Smalltalk. He has helped his customers to use Smalltalk, Seaside, and Squeak
to build successful solutions for the travel and theatre industries, higher
education, and mobile devices. Avi previously worked as a developer and
research assistant for the University of British Columbia, Canada.
Vassili Bykov, VisualWorks Lead Engineer, Cincom
Systems, USA Vassili Bykov is the VisualWorks Tools project lead, and a VisualWorks
user since version 1.0. After joining Cincom in July 2000 he has been responsible
for modernizing the look and feel of VisualWorks environment. His interests
range from information and graphic design to programming language implementation,
and he searches for balance between them in his current position. Prior
to this, Vassili was an object technology instructor with The Object People
and a member of TopLink/Smalltalk team.
Mark Grinnell, ObjectStudio Lead Engineer, Cincom
Systems, USA
Andreas Hiltner, ObjectStudio Lead Engineer, Cincom
Systems, Germany Andreas Hiltner is a lead software engineer for Cincom Smalltalk ObjectStudio.
He works for Cincom since '97. Prior to joining Cincom he participated
in development and maintenance of a transaction-monitor and database access
system on various platforms.
Alan Knight, VisualWorks Lead Engineer, Cincom
Systems, Canada Alan Knight is a lead software engineer at Cincom Systems of Canada,
and one of the prinicpal developers of the Web Toolkit. He has been with
Cincom since 2000. Prior to joining Cincom, he was Chief Architect for
TOPLink, an object-relational mapping library that has since been acquired
by Oracle, and was a member of the EJB 2.0 and JDO expert groups. He is
co-author of Mastering ENVY/Developer (Cambridge, 2001) and has written
and spoken extensively on a variety of topics. He was recently program
chair of Smalltalk Solutions 2004.
Sudhakar Krishnamachari, VisualWorks Engineer, Cincom
Systems, India Sudhakar Krishnamachari is currently a Software Services Project Leader
(Smalltalk), with Cincom Systems India Pvt. Ltd. He has worked with the
Cincom Smalltalk Supports division prior to this for nearly a year. He
has also worked with ACA-Europe a French CAD firm as a Manager (Specs and
Testing) and handled development project team in C/C++ /VC++.
Born in '67,in India, he is a graduate from the Indian Institute of
Technology, Roorkee and a Masters in Computer Science from the University
of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was a practicing architect for nearly
a decade, with experience in CAD, animation and development of office automation
tools, prior to the shift into software development. He strives to contribute
very actively to the spread of Smalltalk.
Len Lutomski, VisualWorks Lead Engineer, Cincom
Systems, USA Len came to Smalltalk from Lisp. He began programming in Smalltalk
in the mid-1980s, working on a port of Smalltalk-80 to the 286. He now
manages the VisualWorks Protocol and Distribution Team.
Eduard Maydanik, ObjectStudio Engineer, Cincom
Systems, Germany Eduard Maydanik is a software engineer for Cincom Smalltalk ObjectStudio
specializing on the further development of the ObjectStudio GUI system.
He started to work for Cincom in '97. Before he joined the development
group he was a QA engineer responsible for developing automatic test suites
for GUI and base classes. Prior to work for Cincom he worked most of the
time for programming geo-data information systems.
Eliot Miranda, VisualWorks Virtual Machine Lead
Engineer, Cincom Systems,
USA Eliot has been implementing Smalltalk virtual machines for over 20
years. He's been a member of the VisualWorks engineering team since
April '95, becomming technical lead in '97. He designed and implemented
a number of key VisualWorks features such as the threaded interconnect,
immutability, and the 64boit implementation, and has helped the VisualWorks
market grow through efforts such as introducing VisualWorks Non-Commercial.
He has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of York
and is a member of the ACM.
Helge Nowak, Technical Account Manager, Cincom
Systems, Germany Helge Nowak is as Technical Account Manager the interface from the
technical side to all who are interested in Cincom Smalltalk. Apart from
consulting prospects and customers about what they can achieve with Cincom
Smalltalk he is the primary channel for his customers to product, support
and engineering management. He got infected by Smalltalk in '97 at ParcPlace/ObjectShare
where he served as Manager of the European Support Center and as a Business
Development Manager. Prior to that he gained experience in several positions
at the vendor-customer interface - on both the vendor and the customer
side.
Joseph Pelrine, Consultant and XP Guru, MetaProg
GmbH, Switzerland MetaProg is dedicated to improving the quality of software by improving
the quality of the development process. We do this by combining the latest
and
best technology with years of experience in proven techniques. A 15-year
perfect track record of delivering customers the software they want, on-time,
in-budget, and on-spec shows that that we don't just talk the talk, we
also walk the walk.
Joseph Pelrine, is an agile pioneer, one of Europe's leading XP experts,
and is Europe's first Certified ScrumMaster Practitioner and Trainer. A
member of the International Assocation of Facilitators, he concentrates
not only on the technical side of software development, but also on the
"people" side, working at enabling customers, managers and developers to
comminucate more easily and clearly with each other.
James R. Robertson, Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager,
Cincom
Systems, USA As Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager, I am responsible for working with
sales, engineering and marketing to drive the direction of VisualWorks
and ObjectStudio. I got started in Smalltalk quite by accident in '93
the time. Booz-Allen had a training contract with ParcPlace, but had lost
both of their instructors. I got picked because I had some teaching experience
no training experience, but some (about a year) Smalltalk experience, figuring
that the two of us would figure it out.
I spent 9 months teaching for Booz Allen, but got lured over to ParcPlace
I spent almost two years teaching the intro class before I moved into sales
along, retaining my role as a sales engineer. After about a year, I moved
up to Product Management, which is where I still am.
Niall Ross, Senior Consultant at JP Morgan Chase,
United Kingdom
Kim Thomas, Cincom Smalltalk Support Manager, Cincom
Systems, USA Kim Thomas holds a Bachelor of Science, Management Information
Systems degree. She joined Cincom in '94 as a project leader in the Professional
Services group. Since '97, Kim has been involved with ObjectStudio as
a trainer and a developer. She is currently an engineering manager who
is responsibile for Smalltalk Support for both VisualWorks and ObjectStudio
along with quality assurance responsibilities.
Andreas Tönne, Senior Consultant, Georg
Heeg eK, Germany Andreas Tönne holds a diploma in computer science (University
of Dortmund) and a minor degree in economics. His first full body contact
with Smalltalk was in a cold computer room of the department for cs where
a friend sat in front of a graphics display, apparently painting rectangles
and text on the screen with the use of a mouse. That was '86 and since
then he has learned that Smalltalk is a bit more than just painting and
moving rectangles. Still as a student he helped Georg Heeg with the Atari
ST port of Smalltalk-80 2.3 and other projects, followed by a diploma thesis
in Smalltalk. After a few years as a researcher in logic of programming
languages and type theory at the Max-Planck-Institute for Computer Science
in Saarbrücken he again joined Georg Heeg eK, first as a consultant
and later as manager. Today he is 'Prokurist' and managing the Dortmund
office, consulting projects, product development and a few more things.
Dave Wood, Managing Director EMEA, Cincom
Systems, Belgium