Methods and Messages: Randal Schwartz on Smalltalk

My first big Seaside tutorial: three hours at OSCON

nobody@vox.com(Randal Schwartz) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:49:01 -0700

Wow. What a rush. But I mean that literally.

I've known for a few months that I'd be delivering a three hour tutorial on Seaside at OSCON. But like many of the activities, I didn't actually start writing the materials until last week, and I'd been sweating bullets trying to generate what I believed to be enough material to fill three hours.

I'd settled on a basic outline that included:

A quick intro to Smalltalk and the Squeak GUI
Basic concepts of Seaside (starting from configuring a "hello world" application)
Forms and state
Subcomponents and call/answer
Magritte
Persistence
Other bolt-ons (testing, ajax, etc.)

The last few items existed only as a single page each full of about eight bullets, hoping that when I had gotten to there, I could simply go off and show web pages and do some handwaving, rather than produce real code, because I was running out of time to write the code I wanted to show.

I had decided to use a "demo first, then summarize what I showed on slides" approach, because this means that the slides could be a bit more outline-like, since they didn't need to actually teach the material. This is a different teaching style from what I am most familiar with—the Perl classes are almost all slide-driven, not demo-driven.

I decided for the demo that I would create and elaborate on a simple "To Do List". Yes, I was inspired by the now-classic Potsdam Tutorial, but I came at it my own way, trying to figure out how to change the fewest lines of code to get to the next working program and yet continually illustrate a new feature each time. I rehearsed my presentation Saturday with Tom Phoenix, my fellow Stonehenge presenter, who was also going to be in the front of the room with me in case I passed out or got tongue tied. When I realized that this particular example really illustrated a lot of good ideas, I knew I was on the right track.

When I had first pitched the idea to OSCON, I wasn't sure what kind of turnout I'd have. After all, my Seaside talks hadn't been accepted to the main OSCON tracks (I believe they were deemed "not relevant enough"). So with the idea of an additional three hours for which people would have to pay to attend, and on Monday (the most distant day from the rest of the conference), I had decided that I would be "extremely pleased" if as many as 15 people showed up.

At Smalltalk Solutions 2008, James Robertson of Cincom offered me the opportunity to hand out Cincom VisualWorks installation disks to my students, which I readily accepted. I said I'd get back to him with a number so he could ship them to me. When I asked O'Reilly what my pre-registered number was, I nearly fell out of my chair when the response was a whopping 41 people. James sent me 50 disks (bizarrely each individually bubble wrapped, and in a box that also had bubble wrap filling), and that was followed by Monty Williams of GemStone quickly burning 50 DVDs of GLASS for me to hand out as well.

And, it turns out that by noon today, a total of 55 people had signed up! The room was nearly packed. The people were attentive, and asked good questions, and were generally following along, including being in wonder and awe when I got to the intra-hit debugging and talked about how the continuations provided a level of control-flow abstraction.

But, here's the crazy part. By the midway break, I'd covered only the basics of Smalltalk. I hadn't even started the Seaside part! I spent the last 90 minutes building the basic "To Do" application as a simple single-page form, adding items from a field at the bottom, and having a "delete" button by each item to remove it. So I had clearly underestimated the amount of time it takes to walk through the material, and had clearly over-prepared.

I didn't even get into changing each item from a simple string into an Action object, creating a subcomponent for the bottom form, or using call/answer for validation. None of the stuff that I had prepared beyond the initial code. Well, sounds like I really have eight hours of material already. That's good, because I'm going to need it on my next delivery. Yeay.

In short, my first "big" Seaside tutorial went very well, and the feedback was great, and I suspect quite a few of the students will be experimenting with Seaside (or at least talking about it), if not strongly considering it for a near future project. Smalltalk and Seaside clearly are on the radar of many people now, and the attendance and the attentiveness of this tutorial shows that we are on the right plan.

But I'm beat. And tomorrow's another day.

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The Elevator Pitch for Seaside

nobody@vox.com(Randal Schwartz) — Sat, 03 May 2008 07:37:49 -0700

I'm at BarCampPortland this weekend, scheduled to introduce a whole new batch of folks to Seaside this afternoon.

But as we were organizing the "unconference" last night, I found myself having to repeatedly describe Seaside and why I'm so excited about it. This is good practice for me, and I'm happy that I did a bit of that for the interview a few days ago.

But I think I've come up with a good elevator pitch for "why Seaside and not [insert other framework here]", that centers on three key items: abstracted control flows, live debugging, and persistence without ORMs.

Because Seaside has a continuation-based framework, I can write a single method that captures the flow of my application in a natural way: "show page 1", "show page 2 until the data validates", "show page 3". My local variables and state of execution persist transparently between page hits, so I don't have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to leave myself notes for the next hit. This also means I can build a reusable library of control flows ("login page", "validated multipage form", "paging through a dataset", "breadcrumb trail") and save myself development time in the long run. Without continuations, this is a difficult thing to do, and I know, having coded control flows in Perl webapps for many years.

Seaside is Smalltalk, and inherits Smalltalk's live debugging feature. When something breaks, I get a stack backtrace that is live, and I can find the problem, edit the code, and proceed from that point, returning to the same hit done correctly, instead of restarting my testing from scratch. (I hear the folks at GemStone are even persisting failures from test suites overnight: the bug report has a link that takes them right to the precise broken state, and they can fix it and continue the suite from there. Incredible.)

Through GemStone/S, or the open source Magma tools, I can tell Smalltalk to simply "persist these objects", meaning that I don't have to build complicated and computationally expensive strategies to take my naturally-shaped objects and map them through a narrow SQL bottleneck to a database and back again. The objects are shared in their natural shape using Smalltalk-aware strategies.

These are the three key points. If the elevator ride is a long one, I would also include that Seaside is supported by two commercial vendors (Cincom and GemStone) and two open source Smalltalks (Squeak and GNU Smalltalk), providing lots of options for support, scaling, and philosophy of development.

So, I'm going to quickly be writing up some slides that look like these talking points, since I found out I have only 45 minutes for this talk, and my 60-minutes of material won't fit, nor will the audience sit still for a longer talk, I suspect.

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Smalltalk at FISL: now and forever!

nobody@vox.com(Randal Schwartz) — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 11:07:21 -0700

I gave my Seaside intro talk earlier today at FISL 9.0 (pictures being uploaded to my flickr account already). The talk was well-attended (about 200 or so in the audience), including some Rails folks. I was surprised though when I asked how many people had coded in Smalltalk before, and got about 25% of the hands raised! Most of them were also web-app programmers.

I had only 35 minutes for my presentation (even shorter than I had planned), so I just barely got to the part where I alter the WACounter class to divide by 0 to show fixing things that break. But the questions were very good, and everyone stayed to the end. Afterward, I continued the discussion with a smaller group for another 20 minutes in the hallway, and have had a half dozen people stop me in the hallways in the following two hours, so the interest is high and the news spreading.

But the biggest news is that based on the preliminary interest in Seaside because of my talk, the FISL conference organizers offered an entire room for next years conference (the full three days with 12 hours per day), as well as four or five main-track hour talks, if I could help organize the subconference details! This is quite a gift, because it will mean that we can expose the 7000 conference attendees to a variety of Smalltalk programs, without paying for rooms or badging or promotion. The conference asked if I could get some corporate sponsors on board, and I immediately fired off email to James at Cincom and Monty at GemStone, and thank goodness they read email on Saturday, because they offered their support quickly. Of course, we have many details to work out, but everyone agrees that we will move forward!

We also have a great opportunity to overlap a bit with the OLPC folks. They also have a room for the entire conference, and I can see some "Squeak on the XO" talks overlapping between the tracks.

So, mark your calendars to be in Porto Alegre Brazil at end of June 2009! We're gonna be smalltalking!

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The year of Smalltalk

nobody@vox.com(Randal Schwartz) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 06:39:15 -0700

Last night, I gave the second presentation of my "Intro to Seaside" talk: this time to the patient people of the "Advanced PLUG" group. I had incorporated comments from the previous presentation by including less information about Smalltalk history, and more live demos to illustrate by doing instead of talking.

However, even after these adjustments, my should-be-50-minutes talk ended up taking almost 90 minutes. The consensus of the group seemed to be that I could eliminate even more of the "intro to Smalltalk" part, and concentrate on the meat of the talk: how Seaside workflow helps me get my webdev done faster, better, and cheaper, by abstracting and reusing in the two directions (web components, and workflow steps). Apparently, the simplicity of the Smalltalk code that I end up demoing is nearly self evident, and what's more important is that I show Seaside working, and my enthusiasm makes up for the lack of technical details. And with my next presentation to be at the largest open source conference in the world (FISL in Brazil in April), that's really what matters.

One of the things I discovered is that I can neither cut-n-paste from Keynote, nor type very fast. So I think the next time I do this talk, I'll pull a "Julia Child" and have "the cake already finished in the oven". I'll start to enter the code, and then switch to one already finished to skip the rest of the boring typing, unless there's a point to it. I have to work out the details of that, but I'm confident that there's some way to do it nicely.

Some of the attendees stayed around afterwards for a bit more detailed feedback, and I appreciated that. During this conversation, I observed and shared that my dozen years of experience as a leading Perl lecturer and writer are proving useful in determining how to present Smalltalk and Squeak and Seaside. My dedication to finding the sweet spot between free/open source and commercial viability has worked well for Perl, and I am sure I can bring that same skill set to the Smalltalk world as well.

If there is any year for Smalltalk to regain a commercial visibility, this will be it. I mean, look at all the things coming together:

the OLPC XO is putting Smalltalk into the hands of thousands of young kids
Cincom and Gemstone are stepping up to support Seaside in a big way
Gemstone is offering the single-instance free commercial license and GLASS quickstart appliance
Squeak's license is finally getting cleaned up
Seaside is reaching a nice level of maturity
Seaside running on GNU Smalltalk for those that want a command-line environment
Croquet is maturing, even being adopted as a commercial "virtual meeting" space
Ruby on Rails has reestablished dynamic languages as useful for the web

Looks like we really have an opportunity here. Carpe Diem!

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