Smalltalk with James Robertson

Spotted in The Hitchhiker's Guide to ...

Riak is a scalable database (written in Erlang, C and a little bit of JavaScript) that is being used in production by companies like Mozilla and Comcast. It is based on Amazons Dynamo using key-value storage (bucket-keys to be exact). It has peer-to-peer replication without a specific master - this allows for a fault-tolerant system.

Runar Jordahl created the interface, in Pharo 1.1

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I just finished my talk, which seemed to be well received. Right now I'm listening to Don MacQueen (Now with Instantiations) talking about the now cancelled JWars project. It was a system to model military conflicts for planning purposes. Here's Don:

Technorati Tags: jwars, sts11

I had to take a phone call after the last session, so I got in too late to record the audio for Paul Baumann's talk. The good news is that STIC is recording video, so it'll be out eventually. In the meantime, Paul is talking about a library to create Views (like relational database views) in Gemstone, and he's giving examples of how you achieve the kinds of results you get with various SQL statements in his GS View library. I don't really use Gemstone much (the shop I'm in now is an Oracle shop), but it sounds quite useful. Here's Paul:

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I got into John's talk a bit late - Michael and I were recording a chat with John McIntosh, contrasting IOS development and Smalltalk development. I'm here now, and John is talking about what's up with the latest edition (8.0.3) of VA Smalltalk. Here he is:

What's coming down the road after the summer release?

• Full Unicode
• Seaside 3.x
• SST Improvements

I missed a few things on the slides there :) - below are candidate items for future releases - meaning no time scales for this stuff:

• GTK 2.x on Linux
• Monticello Importer
• New Settings framework
• More and better GLORP support, including ActiveRecord
• TCP/IP V6
• Full SSL wrapper
• Incremental GC
• 64 bit support
• Some integration of various goodies for VA, like KES/Stats
• Windows Services control moved from external to Smalltalk
• Interfaces to .NET/C#
• Better install/repair/uninstall tools
• Better hashing and sorting in Collections (policy mechanism)

And you can download the eval free, or buy a license. There's now a developer program as well, where you can get in-process development builds. The schedule is "irregular" :)

You can also get a perpetual NC license by committing to an open source project (VAStGoodies.com is a good starting point)

Technorati Tags: vast, sts11

John McIntosh is delivering the second keynote - he's talking about Scratch and the iPad (the first public discussion of this, as it happens). We did talk to John and John on the podcast about this awhile back - part 1 and part 2

Funny start - John wanted to talk from the iPad, but ran into issues getting video out to the projector :)

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Stephen Baker set up a new google group to help promote Smalltalk. Go ahead and join now!

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We're continuing on the Rails and Seaside topic with Pat Maddox:

Pat started with a basic comparison of how Rails and Seaside manage workflow in a web app. I'm recording this talk; it will appear in the podcast stream at some point.

Technorati Tags: sts11, ruby

First talk of the morning - Stephen Baker's "What Smalltalk can learn from Ruby". He's starting with a brief overview of how we got from the state of the industry in the early 90's to where we are now. I have my own notions on this topic, as many of you already know :)

Anyway, here he is getting started:

So if Smalltalk is so great, why do we have so many problems getting traction? Here's what Ruby has:

• Low barriers to entry
• A blog in 15 minutes
• Community - so screencasts (etc) got immediate traction

I think the main take away from this talk is that we have great tools and web frameworks in Smalltalk, but we don't make it easy enough for people to get into the community.

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Interesting project announcement from Nicholas Petton:

I would like to share a project I'm working on on my spare time: Jtalk Smalltalk.

http://nicolaspetton.github.com/jtalk
https://github.com/NicolasPetton/jtalk

Jtalk is an implementation of the Smalltalk language that compiles into JavaScript.

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Next up - Martin Kobetic and Michael Lucas-Smith talking about Xtreams - a new streams library (MIT license, in Google Code) they've been working on. It's already ported to multiple Smalltalk implementations (to Gemstone last weekend at Camp Smalltalk).

Why Xtreams? Simplicity and Consistency, mostly. Streams were implemented at a time when computing looked very different than it does now, and they thought it might be useful to revisit the entire idea.

So here's an interesting read example using Xtreams - try the second line of code a few times after you get the stream and see what you get :)

kernel := Kernel.ObjectMemory reading

kernel get

Technorati Tags: sts11, xtreams