5 posts tagged “oscon”

Smalltalk Week at OSCON

Jul 14, 2009
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Next week at OSCON 2009 in San Jose is going to be a very busy week for me. I'm managing the Stonehenge/LinuxFund party on Wednesday night, which includes hanging out at the LinuxFund booth during the day on Wednesday. I'm also appearing at the usual O'Reilly Author meet-and-greet Wednesday evening.

I had also been accepted some months ago to teach a paid 4-hour tutorial "Introduction to Web Application Development Using Smalltalk Seaside" on Monday afternoon, and a 45-minute talk "Persistence Solutions with the Smalltalk Seaside Web Framework" on Thursday morning. For some reason (which I'll blame on the drama around my broken arm), I forgot to blog about those here, although I'm sure I Twittered about it. :)

But on top of that, I had originally pitched an "intro to smalltalk" course that would precede my Seaside talk to prepare people for the afternoon talk. It had been summarily rejected, and now I know why. Avi Bryant (co-creator of Seaside) had been given that task Monday morning. But he wrote me a couple of days ago, asking me to take the talk over, as apparently he will be unable to make it to OSCON. So, now I'm also doing roughly the talk I had originally pitched as well: "Finding the Swan in Squeak's Ugly Duckling" on Monday morning. And I'm now scrambling to prep for that too, although a lot of it had already been planned for my 5-day "intro to Smalltalk and Seaside" course that Stonehenge will be offering soon.

So, there was one talk on Smalltalk last year at OSCON, and now three talks this year (including two paid tutorials). I'd say Smalltalk is making a good comeback.

David Mertz reviews my OSCON Seaside tutorial

Jul 22, 2008
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David Mertz reviews my presentation yesterday in his blog post:

The framework itself is based on continuations and maintenance of session state. As with other rapid-development web frameworks, a very small amount of template code does a lot of work. In contrast to, say Ruby or Django, Seaside gives you far more capability of poking inside the running sessions, and even greater dynamism in seeing your code changes reflected on web pages. As a development feedback process, this is great. You can build your applications in baby steps, seeing the changes and improvements at each one, and getting immediate notification and feedback on bugs and glitches. Another respect in which Seaside is unusual as a web framework is that its "templating" language is just Smalltalk itself. While somewhat novel as a concept, in practice it seems little different: it is really just a matter of sticking some method names where you might put various meta characters and escape sequences in other frameworks.

Thanks!

My first big Seaside tutorial: three hours at OSCON

Jul 21, 2008
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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.

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.

Seaside tutorial at OSCON - accepted!

Apr 1, 2008
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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.