Scheduled for Thursday March 17th , 2011

Redline Smalltalk is Smalltalk for the Java Virtual Machine, because nothing is as productive as Smalltalk and the app has to run on the Java Virtual Machine.  Redline compiles from source code directly to bytecode and is compatible with Pharo syntax. While Smalltalk on the JVM has been tried before there are some significant innovations coming with Redline, which will be detailed. These are:   1. Tight integration with Java (call Java from Smalltalk and Smalltalk from Java). This brings a wealth of libraries into Smalltalk including good Concurrency support which some Smalltalks have been lacking.  2. New tooling to support faster development and testing: stir – Smalltalk interactive command line, with the ability to connect to local and remote servers. stake – Smalltalk make tool (like Make and Rubys Rake) cucumber – Smalltalk port of the popular BDD tool Cucumber.  3. Eclipse plugin and hopefully soon an IntelliJ plugin.  The talk will also detail the journey from an idea of Smalltalk on the JVM and various attempts at building it, through to Redline now.   It will present that Smalltalk is not dead nor dying but in fact about to take on a new life on a platform where it can gain more traction and wider adoption. The presentation will also call for people to participate in the further development and support of Redline. Redline is free and open source under the MIT license. See http://redline.st.

Bio:
James Ladd has been developing software for 25+ years, using most core languages from Assembler through Smalltalk and now Java and Ruby.

I’m keen to help others learn how to be better developers as well as improving my own skills. My mission is to see Smalltalk make a comeback in a big way.