8 posts tagged “fisl”

View other items tagged “fisl:” Photos, Audio, Videos, Books or Links. View “fisl” on Vox.

FISL 10 is 25 to 28 June 2009

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.


Consider this post the pre-pre-announcement. :)

2 comments Tags: brasil, brazil, smalltalk, fisl, fisl 10

Interviewed by Ronaldo M. Ferraz

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!

Post a comment Tags: interview, seaside, caipirinha, smalltalk, copacabana, fisl

Smalltalk at FISL: now and forever!

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!

1 comment Tags: brazil, seaside, xo, smalltalk, gemstone, porto alegre, olpc, fisl …

Seaside tutorial at OSCON - accepted!

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.


This will be an expanded version of the talk I'll be presenting at FISL in two weeks, and rehearsed for the Portland Linux and Smalltalk groups already. I'm happy that OSCON accepted the talk... this helps confirm that this is indeed the year of Smalltalk via Seaside.

I'll be co-presenting the talk with fellow Stonehenge trainer, Tom Phoenix.  He's busy working on some really cool examples of code to use in a Seaside training course, and has been somewhat active on the Squeak mailing list over the years.

2 comments Tags: tutorial, seaside, smalltalk, oscon, fisl, tom phoenix

The year of Smalltalk

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!

2 comments Tags: squeak, seaside, smalltalk, gemstone, fisl, gnu smalltalk, cincom …

Previewing my FISL Seaside talk at Advanced Topics PLUG

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.


Based on the very helpful feedback I got when I presented this talk at the PDX.st meeting last month, I'll be throwing away more of the background, and delve more directly into showing Smalltalk syntax by example, rather than by concept.  I'll even include some demos, where I'll solve the ARC Challenge both the simple way, and the right way, from scratch.  Boy, am I brave!

Post a comment Tags: portland, preview, seaside, plug, smalltalk, fisl, advanced topics, arc challenge …

Previewing my FISL Seaside talk at PDX.st

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 agreed to present this just to keep the fires burning on getting the talk written.

I decided to tackle the Arc Challenge, based on what I've seen Lukas and the gang do it with Seaside. I actually refined all three pages into their own components to precisely meet what Paul demands in the challenge, and it's still only a dozen lines of code total, and very easy to understand.  For me, far more easy than Arc, anyway.

I'll be incorporating the comments from the tuesday meeting, and then publishing a version of my talk here for comment.  I figure the more eyes that see it before FISL in Brazil in April, the better.

Post a comment Tags: seaside, gemstone, fisl, arc challenge

Accepted to talk about Seaside at FISL 2008

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.


And, heck, any excuse to spend a couple of weeks in Brasil isn't all that bad.

1 comment Tags: brasil, brazil, seaside, fisl
Randal Schwartz

About Me

Randal Schwartz
United States
View my profile
Just another [insert technology here] hacker!
Jaiku:
merlyn

My Links

My Groups

View my groups

Neighborhood

Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.

View my neighbors

Tags

View my tags

Archives