8 posts tagged “fisl”
I'm in the process right now of preparing a "call for assistance" for my role as the Smalltalk MiniConf Chair for FISL 2009. I'll be looking for sponsors, assistants, and potential speakers for the 3-day 12-hours-per-day track, as well as the four talks we also get on the main track. This event will be attended by at least 8K people (probably closer to 10K), in Porto Alegre Brasil from 25 to 28 June, 2009.
So, I'm apparently at the point where I'm getting interviewed about my progress with Smalltalk and Seaside. I met Ronaldo M. Ferraz at FISL a few weeks ago, and he asked if he could interview me. He sent me a list of questions by email, which I answered a week later (too busy enjoying Caipirinhas on the beach in Copacabana), and he's posted the result in both Brazilian Portuguese and English. It's a good summary of how the first part of my "year of smalltalk" has gone. Enjoy!
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 just got word that my proposal for a 3-hour Seaside tutorial at OSCON has been accepted. Here's what I pitched:
Introduction to Seaside - Powerful web application development in Smalltalk
Description: Introduction to the Smalltalk Seaside web application framework: an open-source (but vendor supported) challenge to the classic web design strategies, using test-driven development, continuations for easy workflow abstraction, and view components for consistency and re-use. Includes introduction to Squeak Smalltalk, but general OO principles won't be covered.
Abstract: Sure, Smalltalk is where we got our modern view of windows and mice and “the desktop” and object-oriented programming and extreme programming two decades ago, but what has Smalltalk done for us lately?
I’ll answer this by showing off the Seaside web application framework. Imagine being able to debug a broken web-hit in the middle of the hit, fixing the code, and continuing before the browser knows that something went wrong. Imagine being able to re-use control flows and web components with the ease of OO programming. Imagine being able to do test-driven development, even for HTML delivery. Imagine taking an application from “three guys in Starbucks on a laptop” to “3000 hits per second on your Amazon EC2 cloud” with no major changes in design. No need to imagine… I’ll demonstrate all this and more.
Smalltalk knowledge is not required: I’ll start with a brief overview of Smalltalk using Squeak, the free implementation that’s even included in the OLPC XO. General knowledge of Object-Oriented Programming basics would be helpful, though.
- 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
If you're anywhere near the Portland area on the 19th of March, I'll be previewing (again!) my FISL talk on "Introduction to Seaside" for the Advanced Topics meeting of the Portland Linux/Unix Users Group.
If you're in the Portland Oregon area, I'll be previewing my "Intro to Smalltalk/Squeak/Seaside" talk at the PDX.st meeting this Tuesday night (with the usual Gemstone headquarters meeting location).
I forgot to blog this earlier, but my proposal to give a talk about Seaside at this year's FISL has been accepted. I believe this will accomplish two things. First, I'll have a good reason to concentrate on writing what will be the beginning of my Seaside training materials. Second, the FISL-attending free software and open source community will hear about yet another emerging technology that will help them write rich web applications easier.