NYC Smalltalk

Abstract:

If you enjoy frequent (and long) personal breaks while waiting for your code to compile, stop reading now.  If tears of pride well up every time you behold the library of books you steamed through to learn C++, don’t come to this presentation.  We’ll be talking about Squeak & Pharo - active, open source, production-quality Smalltalk, and what makes it the baddest language on the block… 30 years later!  You may never have the heart to open your Java IDE again - here’s why:
* Productivity - 2.5 times more productive than Java or C++, with less errors
* Easy to learn - sending messages to objects is the only concept
* Fun - write only code that matters, just the way you want; make any part of the system work how you say it should

Bio:

Please join us on  wed, Sept 22, 2010. We are located right by Grand Central , we have an open house from 6:30 - 7pm and the presentation starts 7pm. Please make note of our new directions:

60 East 42nd Street, Suite 914

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Tags: « Pharo »
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First presentation of the year is by our good friend James Robertson. Please note that our venue has changed. Our very gracious and kind host Gerard has moved to the Grand Central Area of town.

The new address is:

60 East 42nd Street, Suite 914

I will update the site soon, just got back from a quick vacation visiting my 91 year old Dad.

Details:

Bio:

http://www.jarober.com/blog/blogView?content=aboutMe

Abstract:

Smalltalk and network APIs - I’ll talk about, and demonstrate, interfaces to services like Twitter and Facebook, as well as some simple examples of building RESTful interfaces within Smalltalk.

We’ll of course go out for drinks after the meeting .  Bring a friend.

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Julian Fitzell which along with Avi Bryant co-created Seaside is coming through town and wanted to stop by and visit with us.  So we figure we would catch up with what  he is doing with Squeak and of course go for drinks afterwards.

The  meeting is on the 10th. Same time same place. Open house at 6:30 , presentation at 7pm.

See you all there.
Bio:

Julian Fitzell is, among other things, the co-creator of the Seaside
framework. He currently works as an independent consultant, providing
Seaside and Smalltalk consulting, development, and training.

Julian has contributed to numerous other open-source projects
including Monticello, Squeak and Pharo Smalltalks, the Mantis bug
tracker, and Dovecot mail server. He has been using Smalltalk since he
made the jump from Ruby in about 2001. Over the past 18 months, he has
lived in China and Germany as well as his original hometown:
Vancouver, Canada.

Abstract:

Seaside is a rare example of software that runs on all the major
Smalltalk platforms: Pharo, Gemstone, GNU Smalltalk, Squeak, VA
Smalltalk, and VisualWorks. We’ll take a look at some of the
challenges in keeping the framework portable and some of the
techniques the team has developed to deal with these. Along the way we
may also touch on tools such as Grease, Slime, and Monticello and how
they help the process. And then we’ll see where the discussion
lead

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Join us on November 18th for Dan Antion’s experience report on their return to Smalltalk.

Bio:

Daniel Antion is Vice President, Information Services at American Nuclear Insurers. He is responsible for the overall planning and implementation of technology and communication services for ANI and is part of a team addressing Enterprise Content Management. Dan is also responsible for technical and ECM training. ANI is a small but technically oriented company so Dan’s view is both from 30,000 feet and from in the trenches.
Dan has been working in Smalltalk since 1994 and develops most of ANI’s transaction processing systems. Dan has presented at Smalltalk Solutions, OOPSLA and the AIIM Expo on topics related to systems development, content management and SharePoint.

Talking Points:

1) Why we were driven away from Smalltalk – I think our environment is not unlike many shops in that we have good, solid but aging systems lacking hooks into modern technology

2) The analysis round #1 – In our first study, Smalltalk (and our other existing platform) lost big time to C#.

3) Turning Points – There were several bits of information that came to the surface as we started to make our move that made us want to reconsider our decision. These are the things that I think would be most useful for others in a similar situation.

4) Analysis round #2 – This was harder. We had already announced our plans and now we had to argue against our previous decision but still look like we knew what we were talking about.

5) Revised Direction – I’m not sure we saved Smalltalk forever but we bought it some serious time. The technical details that work for Smalltalk include its stability, malleability and extensibility. We still have concerns but we think they can be mitigated.

Filed under: community by charles
Tags: « C# »
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Please join us for our next meeting on Oct. 21st where Paul Bennett will give his Smalltalker’s perspective on Ruby based on his recent experiences.

The presentation starts at 7 pm , however there is an open house from 6:30.  Presentations are generally up to 1.5 hours after which most of us go to a local pub and continue the discussion there.  Our meetings are opened to the general public , so bring a friend.

Bio and abstract provided by Paul below:

Bio:

Hi, I’m Paul Bennett, president, janitor and teaboy of Prajna Inc, an
independent software consulting firm based in NYC. I’ve been building
software systems for over 25 years, and have extensive experience in
the architecture, building and specification of custom, large-scale
enterprise IT systems, mostly in Smalltalk. My clients have included
MorganStanley, Keyspan/National Grid and JPMorganChase. I’ve also had
major exposure to C/C++, and have also built a couple of Java
projects. I’m currently oriented to programming in Ruby and Erlang.

Abstract:

“From Smalltalk to Ruby - and back again ?”

Ward Cunningham once said “I always knew Smalltalk would make a
comeback, but I didn’t know it would be called Ruby”. Is Ruby really
the new Smalltalk? In this talk, I’ll introduce Ruby and it’s context,
explore some of it’s more interesting features and defects, and
describe what I think Smalltalk, and the Smalltalk community, might
offer it.

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abstract: we will start off with a survey of main language features esp. what makes groovy dynamic. then see some metaprogramming tricks that make it easy to work with xml and gui builders and creation of internal DSLs. finally touch on the grails web framework. there will be lots of demos along the way to show how programming in groovy can be fun.

bio: Numan Salati has a master’s in computer science from georgia tech speciallizing in artificial intelligence and has programmed professionally in java and python for over 3 years. He likes learning programming languages, traveling and reading.

Time: 6:30 - 8:30 pm

Date: Sept 23rd , 2009

Filed under: community by charles
Tags: « groovy - java »
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I have 20 years of experience in the software development industry, as a line developer, a consultant, a pre/post sales engineer, and most recently, as the Product Evangelist for Cincom Smalltalk. I’ve given talks at a number of industry conferences, including Smalltalk Solutions, Ot/SPA, LinuxWorld/NetworkWorld, ESUG, and XP/Agile conferences. I’m also the author of the Cincom Smalltalk Blog – “Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants”, and the leader of the “Industry Misinterpretations” weekly podcast. I’m also the author of a few open source tools, such as the RSS/Atom news aggregator BottomFeeder, and of the Silt Blog server.

I have deep experience in Smalltalk and OO development, and have pioneered various kinds of product evangelism at Cincom, including the use of blogging and podcasting as a way of expanding mindshare for the products I manage. Most of the tools I use in these endeavors are implemented in Cincom Smalltalk, as a way of “eating my own dogfood”. This work has given me a background in grassroots level PR and marketing.

I can be reached at jrobertson@cincom.com

Abstract:

WebVelocity is a new Smalltalk Development Environment that is oriented around Seaside for Web Development and Glorp for Object/Relational Mapping. Come and see how WebVelocity re-targets the Smalltalk development experience into the Web Browser and simplifies the challenge of learning a new environment for newcomers. We’ll even build an entire application using Active Record and Scaffolding during the presentation with minimal programming. If you’re a fan of Ruby on Rails, you should come out and see this presentation.

When: July 9th, 2009,  open house starts at 6:30 pm, Presentation at 7pm.

Where: Suite LLC , 8th Fl

For directions check out the directions tab on the our site.

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Carl Gundel , developer of LibertyBasic , a development environment for Basic written in VisualWorks, will be presenting at NYC Smalltalk on Thursday, May 21st, 2009.  He will update us on the evolution of his Liberty Basc IDE and its implementation as a Web based IDE based on VisualWork’s Seaside implementation.

Open house starts at 6:30 pm and the presentation follows at 7:00pm. We usually go out for a couple beers  to a nearby restaurant/bar.

Our meetings are opened to the general public.

Bio:

Carl is a Smalltalker since 1988 and has been developing BASIC language products in Smalltalk since 1991 along with various other kinds of software systems in Smalltalk.

Abstract:

Carl will present Run BASIC; a web programming system. Run BASIC focuses on making web development easy; sort of a QBasic for the web. Run BASIC is based on Carl’s popular Liberty BASIC language and is implemented on top of VisualWorks and Seaside.

http://www.libertybasic.com

Filed under: community by charles
Tags: « Basic - Seaside - Web »
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Here’s a quick and basic SMTP client demo.  Its obviously outgoing only.  VisualWorks has support for all the standard networking protocols i.e. http, ftp, smtp, pop , imap and tons more.

Download the demo and check it out.

The installer will create a Program Group entitled “NYC Smalltalk” wherein one will find a shortcut for the SMTP Demo. An uninstaller is provided as well.  Be forwarned I have not made this fool proof. However, if all the parameters are entered correctly for the signon you will be sending out emails in no time.

BTW, note that the SMTP Demo is divided into 2 componenets one is the Smalltalk Runtime Environment namely the sre.exe , this is a generic runtime environment I setup that is network client capable. That only needs to be distributed once. The application i.e. the demo is actually located in SmptClient.pcl which is a 7 kb file.

Filed under: VisualWorks Demos by charles
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Happy Holidays to all.

Please join us at our next meeting on Wed, January 21st, 2009 where Arden Thomas Cincom Smalltalk’s product manager will be presenting.

Also if anybody is interested in helping out with presentations related to Smalltalk and other technologies that can be leveraged from Smalltalk please send me an email here: presentations@nycsmalltalk.org.

thanks

-Charles

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