NYC Smalltalk

Please join us this upcoming Wednesday, Feb 6th , for an interesting presentation on a new Seaside based framework which leverages Gemstone to provide for transparent persistence services to Seaside.

James Forester of Gemstone will be presenting.

Please visit our site for directions.

GLASS: Transparent Persistence for Seaside

While the Seaside framework elegantly addresses HTML generation and application flow-of-control issues, it still leaves challenges for the developer–including persistence, multi-user coordination, and scaling. With typical solutions (including object-relational mapping, external files, and multiple images) the “pure objects” experience of Smalltalk is compromised. In this presentation we will demonstrate GLASS (GemStone, Linux, Apache, Seaside, and Smalltalk), a stack (analogous to LAMP) that provides a robust environment for deploying sophisticated, dynamic web applications that can scale.

GLASS runs on GemStone/S 64 Bit, a Smalltalk application server and database, whose Web Edition is available for free–even for commercial use. Copies of the software will be available at the meeting.

James Foster is QA Lead on the Smalltalk Engineering Team at GemStone Systems, Inc.

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The next NYC Smalltalk presentation will be held Wednesday Nov. 7th.

I, Charles A. Monteiro will be discussing issues I encountered as well as techniques/strategies in our quest to have an Oracle centric direct sql VW application speak to a Postgres backend without having to change application layer code.

The presentation starts at 7pm but there’s an open house at 6:30 where people meet and freely discuss anything sort of Smalltalk related.

After the presentation many of us go to a local pub/bar and continue the discussions over some beer.

Our presentations are opened to the public. Bring a friend if you have one.

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Carl Gundel , developer of LibertyBasic , a development environment for Basic written in VisualWorks, will be presenting at NYC Smalltalk on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007. Open house starts at 6:30 pm and the presentation follows at 7:00pm. We usually go out for drinks/food to a nearby restaurant/bar..

Our meetings are opened to the general public.

For directions go to our web site:

http://www.nycsmalltalk.org

Bio:

Carl Gundel is a long time Smalltalker (since 1988) who got his start using Digitalk’s Smalltalk/V for DOS. Since then he’s used Smalltalk to craft everything from shop floor control to CNC editors to programming languages.

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

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Please join us for our next presentation Wednesday 28th of March 2007. See you all there and visit our web site for time and directions:

http://www.nycsmalltalk.org

Details:

BIO:

Mr. Panu Viljamaa is an OO-, XML-, and web-based -programming expert currently working as an independent consultant in New York City. He’s been working as a Smalltalk programmer-architect since 1986. His current tools include J2EE, “Ajax” and “REST” as well. His writings on software have been published in the Addison-Wesley series on Design Patterns and by ACM. He’s worked extensively as a software engineer in the telecom-, financial-, utilities- and e-learning domains in both United States and Europe.

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Abstract:

In this presentation Panu will talk about Unit-Testing in Smalltalk, including a new simplified “Method-Tests” -API for doing so.
He will demonstrate how unit-testing can be made more productive and totally integrated with the open IDE of Smalltalk. This presentation will be a precursor, and a dress-rehearsal for a more comprehensive presentation to be given at Smalltalk Solutions 2007, Toronto.

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Arden Thomas which is the new SE for Cincom Smalltalk will be presenting on January 31st , 2007.

Directions and time can be found on our web site.

Abstract:

I will discuss our new product roadmap, which has been changing and evolving more recently. I would also like to get feedback from the group on their product needs, and even do some group “thinking out loud” or brainstorming, about future directions for Smalltalk IDE’s, and ways to improve our product.

Bio:

Arden Thomas got started with Smalltalk in 1986, looking for better ways to do software development (he found it). He is currently a senior field application engineer for Cincom working to help Cincom’s Smalltalk customers, and to help move Smalltalk forward. Prior to this he worked for ParcPlace as a trainer, sales engineer, and consultant, and then moved into a senior development position at Forest Investment management, doing extensive software development in VisualWorks Smalltalk.

See you all there and as always we will get together for some drinks right around the corner at the La Vigna restaurant at the New Yorker at 34th and 8th.

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As I believe I have mentioned before I find that some of the ideas I have encountered in software engineering can be helpful in my music journey. On my music blog I talk about applying the concept of design patterns to the music creation process i.e. from composition, arrangement to mixing , mastering and publishing. Soup to nuts.

I specifically write about a way of doing an intro to a tune that permeates an idea across the tune all the way to the end. Some of this is based on stuff that I know I have listened to , some of it is I’m sure on stuff that I have listened to but not consciously aware of , is anything really new ?

This pattern has helped me with one of my major issues and that being having a sense for the entire tune.

Here is the link:

http://monteirofusion.blogspot.com/2007/01/music-patterns.html

Some of you all may relate, or at least find it interesting.

Discussion of applying patterns to music I expect hopefully will carry on here.

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In case James didn’t see this one, caught it on my lawyer’s blog , bloged about here on my music blog:

http://monteirofusion.blogspot.com/2006/12/its-okay-if-your-dad-is-music-exec.html

sorry for the run around , music stuff I put on that blog but since at least James covers the RIAA pretty decently I thought it was relevant to point it out.

For those Smalltalkers out there that are music obscessed like me I think this post may be interesing:

http://monteirofusion.blogspot.com/2006/12/land-of-free-vsts.html

I started covering the world of free VST (Virtual Studio Technology). Great time to be doing recording from podcasting to full music production. There are ton of real high quality signal processing plugins out there which can be integrated into your audio recording software which btw includes Audacity. For Audacity you will need the VST enabler plugin as a pre-requisite.

I plan to specifically cover those VST plugins I use in my album project. The article does provide a link to a number of plugins.

Enjoy.

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Recently I was asked by Joe Backansas, and Joe forgive me if I have slaughtered your name, if I would consider podcasting the NYC Smalltalk meetings. In his words that “would really be cool”. Then a few weeks later James Robertson , which you all know very well, inquired as well.

Well, I’m swamped but with regards to this, things were just falling in place. I recently purchased a new PC to do be able to handle professional level hard disk recording. My hard disk recording software Adobe Audition recently won an award at a Podcaster’s conference. I have been listening to a podcast on how to podcast using Adobe Audition and I certainly could use exercising my sound engineering chops.

So I will be giving this a shot.

In my music blog I talk about some of the obstacles involved and how I expect those will be conquered.

I will report back and hopefully have a podcast to share fairly soon. Our next NYC Smalltalk meeting is actually tonite.

-Charles

http://www.monteirosfusion.com

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Give me more classes is what Andres Valloud says. He will shows us how more classes can in some cases equate to better Smalltalk performance.

Andres will be providing us with an encore presentation of his recent OOPSLA presentation.

The next meeting will be Wednesday November 29th, 2006. It will be the last for this year since we will be taking a break for the holidays.

Same place except its on the 11th Floor and our regular same time.

Directions:

Take A,C,E to 34th street Penn Station. For that matter any train stopping at 34th street would suffice such as N,R,2,3. The New Yorker Hotel is at the corner of 34th and 8th, see the star on the map above. Walk to the corner of 34th and 9th. Meeting is held at: 440 W. 9th Ave, Fl 11. Meetings run from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm .The first half hour is an open house where individuals new to Smalltalk can ask any question regarding Smalltalk of any of our seasoned Smalltalkers. After the presentation we go around the corner to the New Yorker Hotel and have a couple of beers and talk more Smalltalk and other related tangents that come up.

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The Presentation

The abstract:

This presentation shows how to substantially increase the performance
of Smalltalk programs by creating more classes to take advantage of
polymorphism. An improved implementation of the well-known message
match:, using this and other techniques, can run up to twice as fast
as the current inlined implementation VisualWorks Smalltalk includes.
In this particular case, creating more classes is shown to be so
powerful as to become preferable to heavy use of identity checks on
immediate objects by a margin of up to 20% on average. In addition,
non-inlined implementations compare quite well to the existing inlined
implementation of match:. While they can run faster in some cases,
their overall performance falls behind by no more than a factor of 2.

This is a quick summary of chapter 3 from my book currently being
written. It is due to be published in 2007.

The bio:

Andres has been programming since age 10, has been programming in
Smalltalk for the last 10 years, and has been an artist at it for the
last 5 years. He has received a check from Donald Knuth regarding The
Art of Computer Programming. He is currently writing a book on
Smalltalk. He won the Smalltalk Solutions 2006 Coding Contest, and
he was a presenter at OOPSLA 2006 as well. Presently, he works as a
consultant at JP Morgan.

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See you all there.

Charles

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MonteirosFusion

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due to the upcoming heavy rains on Wednesday, the fact that a lot of
our members drive including our presenter which is coming from deep
Jersey, the fact that the 18th also happens to be one of our regular’s
birthday which he will be spending with his immediate family, we shall
be postponing our presentation till next Wednesday the 25th which will
be in direct conflict with OOPSLA

we apologize for any inconveniences

BTW, anybody else that has a shrink wrapped Smalltalk application that they would like demo please send me email.

thanks

the management
NYC Smalltalk

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