Another great meeting. Got insights into some of the work that Joseph was involved in i.e. the enhancement of the Sunit framework. As we all know automated unit testing i.e. the Sunit framework which was then the model for Junits and others came out of the Smalltalk world. Personally, I learned a few things. For one, I had never taken the time to learn what TestResources do. In the past I used the TestCase subclass class to build resources that could then be made available for the TestCase instances. TestResources are more flexible and can be shared across different test cases. As has proven to be the case so far the informal discussions that arise at the bar are as interesting as the presentations. It also helps to have a local Smalltalk legend in our midsts to get those historical insights on the Xerox Parc days and the various Smalltalk personalities.

Joseph Pelrine will be presenting at NYC Smalltalk on September 14th. Same place same time. A post in comp.lang.smalltalk and the NYC Smalltalk yahoo groups will follow. It will also be announced on our wiki shortly. Anyhow here’s the heads up, it should be an interesting presentation.

Abstract:

Rarely have 3 classes and a handful of methods changed the face of software development more. SUnit, first described in an article published in the October 1994 Smalltalk Report, was an instrumental part of eXtreme Programming and its offshoot, Test-Driven Development. It has also spawned a legion of clones for other languages.

The last few years have seen a number of powerful features added to SUnit, features whose use isn’t all that easy to understand. In this talk, Joseph Pelrine, current maintainer of the Camp Smalltalk Sunit project, will talk about the past and present history of SUnit, the reasons behind the new features, and will show a number of handy tips and tricks which can be used to turbocharge your testing.

Bio:

Joseph Pelrine is C*O of MetaProg, a company devoted to increasing the quality of software and its development process, and is one of Europe’s leading experts on eXtreme Programming as well as Europe’s first certified ScrumMaster Practitioner and Trainer. He has had a successful career as software developer, project manager and consultant, and has spoken about it at such diverse places as IBM, OOPSLA and the Chaos Computer Club. His work in organizational complexity has led him to currently focus his interest on the Cynefin sense-making framework and its application to Agile processes.

Bruce is one of my favorite presenters. He has that witty British thing going and no matter how boring the presentation may be he is always fun to watch. Not that he was boring this time, the presentation was brilliant we had a lovely time.

Bruce’s OpenSkills related presentations are interesting because of the various open source technologies used which are combined with Smalltalk and often leveraged from Smalltalk. On this occassion , the OpenPGP stuff and it use to support a trust network was very interesting. Also of interest to me was his use of Glorp since we intend to use it to provide a pluggable rdms backend to our product.

After the meeting we went to the bar which is now apparently becoming part of our custom. I’m glad we started to do this since it allows us to interact in a way one can’t during a presentation. We had two guests i.e. newcomers , Matt and Jerome. Good meeting you all, hope to see you next time. Any questions you know where to ask. BTW, next time would be September since we take August off. The fall season should be a good one. I potentially have more presentations than available time slots , a good thing since that means that we should have material available for first Q 2006.

Bruce Badger , a long time friend of NYC Smalltalk , will again be gracing us this year with a presentation on another support system for his OpenSkills organization. Last year the presentation involved Gemstone , a Smalltalk based oodms/app server as well as the use of Squid, and a Smalltalk based wiki.. This year the presentation involves using GLORP ( the reincarnation of TopLink) and the generation and management of PGP keys among other things. Bruce always presents the week after Smalltalk Solutions since that is when he makes his pilgrimage from the land down under up to the States. So invariably, we will also be discussing Smalltalk Solutions which I hope will not include my mishap but more on that later.

If you are in the NYC area please join us. More information can be found at the NYC Smalltalk wiki.

First came E-Toys an environment built on Squeak , a Smalltalk dialect developed by the original inventor of Smalltalk – Alan Kay. Now, we have Scratch a learning environment that unlike E-Toys targets an older audience, the 10 – 16 crowd. Scratch is being built on Squeak that is clear. Not sure , if it is being built on E-Toys. Nonetheless, this is exciting from a Smalltalk promoter’s perspective since there will now be two learning environments that at least acquaint young humans from kindergarten through high school to Smalltalk.

I recently learned about this since I had invited one of the principals of the E-Toys project to present to us (NYC Smalltalk) in the April/May timeframe. Unfortunately, some last minute schedule conflicts forced us to postpone the meeting. We are still hopeful for sometime in the Fall. This would not have been the first presentation on E-Toys. Last year we had a teacher at a private school here in NYC share with us his work using E-Toys actively in the classroom. I also met a public school teacher doing the same. Columbia Teacher’s College is actively involved with E-Toys and there has been an active pilot if not full-blown program in the California School System.

Hopefully, I’ll manage to convince one of the principal developers for Scratch to present.

I am slightly behind on my blogging , better late than never. Last Wednesday James Robertson, product manager for Cincom Smalltalk and which is now co-in charged of business development, stopped by to give NYC Smalltalk a presentation on 7.3 and their immediate plans.

I think that by now it is clear that Cincom is committed to Smalltalk. Ever since Cincom took over , their Smalltalk division has been aggressively improving the VisualWorks product line. This next year does not let up the pace. The current product roadmap for VW 7.3 can be found here.

Some of the more interesting questions that came up during the presentation dealt with whether Cincom anytime soon planned to support / become involved with Croquet and Traits. The answer was no and maybe.

There is no current plan for Cincom itself to port over Croquet. For those that don’t know what Croquet is it is an amazing collaboration framework which has an even more amazing 3D virtual world interface to it. Croquet is currently written in Squeak a dialect of Smalltalk. More info can be found on the NYC Smalltalk wiki for which I provide a link below.

As far as Traits , there has been some interest expressed by at least one of the engineers at Cincom. The maybe answer is that were something to be built by the community Cincom Smalltalk would evaluate it and contemplate its integration or at least supported distribution.

Currently, there is an initial port of Traits out in the Cincom public repository which was implemented by Terry Raymond. The port basically provides “core” trait services i.e. synchronization between client and traits and installation albeit manually. I have extended the initial port so that it integrates with StORE and is in general more transparent in use but more about that later.

One further very noteworthy news is that Cincom Smalltalk plans to support a migration path for VisualAge Smalltalk customers who wish to stay with Smalltalk and keep up with the new developments in Smalltalk. Talks are underway with some potential partners.

Next month we will have a presentation on Traits. More info on Traits, a new and very interesting mechanism for code re-use, can be found along with info on Croquet on our wiki.

A couple of years ago I had made a suggestion that a bof be put together at Smalltalk Solutions on Smalltalk user groups, why they are important and what can be done to help spawn more of them. One of my recommendations was that user groups share presentations. The more presentations that are around , the more reason to meet, and the more Smalltalkers meet the better. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the conference that year. I know that the bof was held but so far have not seen any activity on that front.

Anyhow, recently I was given the opportunity to “put up or shut up”. A new stug out in the L.A. area recently put a post out on c.l.s announcing its birth. I emailed them with some suggestions and hopefully words of encouragement. Daniel, their leader, mentioned that some presentation material would be nice which reminded me of the idea that I had not acted upon.

So here:

The NYC Smalltalk User’s Group will make its presentations available to other Smalltalk User groups. We encourage other stugs to take advantage of this and we hope that other stugs will reciprocate and follow suit. We hope that this will motivate current stugs to meet more often but more importantly encourage Smalltalkers to start stugs in their local areas.

So currently, I am in the process of digging up some of our old content, dusting it off and hopefully sending Daniel something soon. I plan to put a link on our wiki sometime in the near future.

Now, what do I mean by open source Smalltalk presentations?

The presentations will be under something akin to GPL i.e. more specifically:

• Presentations are to be used to promote Smalltalk in the context of a Smalltalk user’s group meeting.
• The original authors needs to be credited on the introduction of the presentation.
• Any amendments /extensions need to be documented i.e. the amendment’s author’s name and date.
• The modified presentation must be made available to the original author and any other Smalltalk user’s group which expresses interest.
• There are no warranties whatsoever made with regards to accuracy of the content.
• Any actions taken on the part of a reader based on the content provided is solely the responsibility of the reader.
• Any disparaging comments as to the content or authors of the content cannot be included in any of the presentation’s versions.

Well, so much for my legalese. If this encourages the launch of just one more stug, I’ll be happy enough.

Tomorrow Maurice Rabb will present Microlingua at NYC Smalltalk. Microlingua is a Smalltalk dialect being designed for “resource constrained” environments i.e. its about embedding Smalltalk. I have been interested in embedded Smalltalk for quite a while. Smalltalk has quite a history in the embedded space. As most of us Smalltalkers know Tektronics had built an oscilloscope that ran Smalltalk. I don’t recall the exact time period but it must have been at somewhere in the early 90’s i.e. it was one of the first stories I heard when I started coding in Smalltalk which was back in 94. OTI , before they went over to the dark side, had embedded Smalltalk. I recently heard that HP had done similar work, The “network” car that IBM showcased at one of the earlier Java Ones was actually running Smalltalk to do the low level interactions with the vehicle while Java was only being used for the UIs. Some of the members of the NYC Smalltalk, myself included, met with the then president of the American division of OTI and over some Jack and cokes , were told about prototypes that Porshe was working on and how the developers would actually debug while driving the car. We were provided with some licenses and I played with the environment for a bit including playing with QNX a real time operating system. Another embedded Smalltalk that we got exposed to was PocketSmalltalk, an environment designed to run on a Palm pda. One of our members at the time, Steve Harris, was very much into PocketSmalltalk and presented a few times on the topic.

So what is new in the embedded Smalltalk space? Let’s see:

• OOVM — This is/was a Smalltalk embedded environment which was recently demonstrated at Smalltalk Solutions earlier this year. However, they have been acquired by a Java company so I am not sure what is available and in what form. Apparently, there is currently nothing that can be downloaded.
• Cincom VisualWorks PocketPC vms are now available.
• WISP , not sure what the status of that is. Maybe somebody can comment on this.
• PocketSmalltalk — There is still a site but it seems inactive.
• SmalltalkMT — not really for embedded applications but SmalltalkMT can generate very small executables and is used in PC gaming.

I’ll make time to make an entry in the NYC Smalltalk wiki for this topic. BTW, anybody interested in coming to the meeting can find details on our wiki.

We had a great start for our season. The turnout was quite good as well. Our resident Smalltalk legend, she was on the original team at XeroxParc with Alan Kay, made it even though she now has a gig with a large insurance company out in Jersey. Two of the guys from JP’s Kapital project made it as well. One of our members came all the way from Ithaca, just to name a few. Tom gave a great presentation and even included examples of integrating CSS with the Web Tool Kit framework. Having done some JSP work myself , it is quite clear that there are some real advantages in using the WTK, especially in debugging. It is as easy as dropping a “self halt” in the JSP.

After the presentation we all went to the New Yorker Hotel around the corner on 34th and 8th and had a few beers.

The next presentation is on Microlingua on Nov. 16th.

I first became involved with the NYC Smalltalk user’s group back in 1996 when I left Florida Power & Light to embark on a consulting gig at the then called Brooklyn Union Gas. Back then Jeff Britton and Ted McKnight were the co-chairs and I believe that before them there were some other leads. I took over, if I recall correctly, back in 2000. Ever since 1996 we have been meeting on a pretty consistent basis. Somehow, we just manage to get enough participation from the community as well as material that we ourselves put together. I do wish that more of our local Smalltalkers would make it a point to present at least once a year. I think that people make too much of a big deal of things. I am told that in Argentina and Europe Smalltalkers just meet in cafe’s and someone just takes the lead on a topic. Tonight, Tom Sattler will be presenting on VisualWorks Web Tool Kit , a JSP spec compliant implementation among other things. This is Tom’s second year. I really appreciate his participation at this level. Tom is also one of our regulars. In January we have another local presenting, my co-worker Rob Fossella. Rob has been “coerced” into that presentation but my sincere hope is that next year it won’t take too much arm twisting Next month we have Maurice Rabb visiting us. Maurice has developed a new dialect of Smalltalk called Microlingua which targets small devices. Maurice is from Chicago but I hear that he likes NYC quite a lot , so who knows maybe he will become a local.