Pollock discussions with Sames: he has to complete tree and tab control; most other widgets are now done and resizable. It will be usable for some tools in VW7.2 (if you are happy with Windows-only feel; doing all feels is straightforward but tedious so Sames will do all widgets in one feel first) but expect it to be 18 months hence before you should use it generally.
Michael Ruger told me about the tweak framework. Think of it as Seaside for UI interactions. Seaside lets the web app designer put multi-page logic in a single method without having to manage interacting state models for the user's back and forth and sideways possibilities. Tweak, by using a similar approach, will let the UI app designer put e.g. drag-drop behaviour in a single method without having to split it across on-mouse-down do start, on-mouse-up do end, worry about what the user might have done in between these, state models. Michael suspects David's 'next month' may be 'before year end' since both teatime and tweak must be in there. The Croquet download has been pulled from the site (too big at 90Mb and not yet ready). Before year end may be the time to look for another download.
I talked to Joseph Pelrine about Rosetta and about Smalltalk configuration management tools, and to the Refactory about porting patterns and about finding unused code in large systems. To find unused code, John Brant has a lightweight class-instrumenting trick usable in performance-critical runs.
As David Pennington and James Foster remarked in the Remote Working panel, you can get to 'know' people from newsgroups and remote work. Then you meet them at conferences and discover what they actually look like. For some reason, this Smalltalk conference, far from my first, was one where I put names I knew to faces I previously had not known. I had not met Ginny Ghezzo before; she was merrier and younger than I had imagined the manager of an IBM product line. I had met the creators of the Refactoring Browser before but realised this conference that John and Don have a good sense of humour. Various other known names (Travis Griggs, Terry Raymond, Bruce Badger, Avi Bryant) I will now recognise if I meet them again. (By contrast, Colin Putney looks just as one might imagine the guy who landed the Squeak skiing job would look :-)).
ConclusionsA pleasant mix of the immediately useful (e.g. for me, the refactoring and porting talks), the relevant (Vincent's meta-programming system and Scott's agile methods overview) and the fun (Croquet, Travis' fonts). The UI and web testing talks and frameworks show other people's solutions to an area I'm already working in and I may well use some of the ideas.
- Dynamic languages are a renewed focus of interest and a Smalltalk opportunity.
- If SUN's problems become sufficiently visible, Java and J2EE may be re-evaluated in the marketplace as the task for pundits becomes to explain their sponsor's failure instead of their success.
Written by Niall Ross of eXtremeMetaProgrammers Ltd
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