3 posts tagged “glorp”

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Teaching GLORP with Squeak at PDXPUG Day

Jul 21, 2008
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Sunday, I spoke at the pre-OSCON Portland Oregon PostgreSQL Users Group (PDXPUG) DAY mini-conference about how to connect Squeak to Postgres using GLORP. I had originally pitched the talk with about 45 minutes or so of material in my head. When I got the final schedule, my time had been cut back to 20 minutes (and the coordinator wanted half of that to be "introduction to Smalltalk"), so I realized I could really only do a simple demo. Of course, I was working hard on my materials for my 3-hour OSCON tutorial the following day, so I waited until Sunday morning to actually start writing my PDXPUG talk.

I created the classic BlogPost and BlogComment tables a little bit at a time during my testing. I also set up a Workspace with a series of Do-Its and Print-Its that I knew I could simply run down and fire off to show what was happening. Once I had finished that, I created another workspace that showed a series of Print-Its to show off the basic Smalltalk syntax. I then resized my image to fit into the 1024x768 projector size, and saved it, and waited.

Well, it turns out that lunch ran an hour late, and since my talk was in the afternoon, they asked me to shorten it up a bit. In 5 minutes, I quickly ran through all of my Smalltalk Print-Its. In another few minutes, I showed off the table definitions and object descriptions of my GLORP system, and then I ran through all of the Do-Its and Print-Its of my GLORP demo. Total time: about 12 minutes.

When I sat down (without time for questions), I was sure that it had been a waste of everyone's time. But much to my surprise, the coordinators came over and said "great job", and one-by-one as the afternoon progressed, many of the attendees came up to me asking specific questions that definitely related to my presentation.

So, don't be dismayed if you get only five or ten minutes on a longer agenda somewhere. Squeeze in some Smalltalk. There's always room.

Reviving the IRTC in Smalltalk

Mar 26, 2008
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One of my fond memories of years past was reviewing the frequent submissions to the Internet Ray Tracing Competition (IRTC), being consistently stunned at how Dave Buck's povray could be used to generate some remarkable photorealistic images, even back in the early days when 10 Mhz was a fast machine.

When I interviewed Dave for a recent FLOSS Weekly, I discovered that the IRTC had fallen into limbo, and was saddened by that. But apparently, my wish to have it revive was enough of a nudge for Dave to look in to it, and a few weeks later he announced that the IRTC was going to be revived. Even better, the new website would be written in Seaside, and that I had volunteered to help him with it. (No, he didn't ambush me... we had discussed this in email the previous day.)

Last night, Dave and I started chatting for the first time about the project. I managed to download the latest VisualWorks NC version, and get it up and running, and got connected to Dave's repo. Within 20 minutes of wandering through the code to understand what had been written so far, I found a common Seaside misunderstanding (calling #renderContentOn: a subcomponent rather than #render:), and pointed it out to Dave, so the relationship has already been useful. We also talked about the need for class comments, especially since WAComponent's comment is where I learned about the #render: mistake.

What I find exciting about this is that I have a solid project to get VW experience in, and since we'll be using Glorp, I also get to learn Glorp with a practical project. I believe the code will be dual licensed (both MIT and LGPL), so this will also be a great example for others to use of a reasonably interesting and complex Seaside application.

Thanks to Dave for letting me apprentice with him (including the patience to explain VW to me, one crazy step at a time), and have the opportunity to contribute to a visible project!

Smalltalk Solutions 2008 - Invited Speaker

Feb 20, 2008
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Apparently, I've made the cut, and have been selected at Smalltalk Solutions 2008 as an invited speaker. I'm planning on talking about Seaside and the various persistence solutions, including Magma, Glorp, and Gemstone. Throw me a line if you're planning on being there and want to hook up.