Methods and Messages: Randal Schwartz on Smalltalk

David Mertz reviews my OSCON Seaside tutorial

nobody@vox.com(Randal Schwartz) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:01:03 -0700

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!

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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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Teaching GLORP with Squeak at PDXPUG Day

nobody@vox.com(Randal Schwartz) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:06:18 -0700

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.

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Dynamic languages for web development vs Java

nobody@vox.com(Randal Schwartz) — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 08:02:50 -0700

From a recent blog post:

[...]
The simple truth is that for web applications dynamic approaches are massively more productive. Take a look at Seaside (Smalltalk), Grails (groovy) or Rails (Ruby) and its clear that Java has nothing to compare. The DSLs provided by these languages make web development a cinch. Productivity improvements of 2-3 times is not uncommon. This translates to a reduced time to market, and better responsiveness to business needs.
[...]
The domains where Java makes sense are shrinking. Given the performance of dynamic languages nowadays and the ability to inter-operate with high performance system languages like C++, I see Java and C# being squeezed.
[...]

I couldn't have said it better. Go read the rest of the article, including the linked article where the Java people continue to spread FUD.

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Audio and video from my Smalltalk Solutions 2008 Keynote

nobody@vox.com(Randal Schwartz) — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 20:46:31 -0700

James Robertson has now published the audio and video from my Smalltalk Solutions 2008 talk. He's even put the audio into the Industry Misinterpretations stream, which I highly recommend you subscribe to.

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One stop shopping for Smalltalk Jobs, please

nobody@vox.com(Randal Schwartz) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:16:36 -0700

As I just wrote on the Seaside mailing list, when someone suggested posting a job elsewhere:

It's been very helpful to the Perl community to get one place for all serious Perl jobs: jobs.perl.org. Because then all the smart people look there, and all the clueful employers post there, and it's also free. And the stats at http://jobs.perl.org/about/stats show that Perl is far from dead.

I'm trying to do the same thing for Smalltalk. Please support me in that. Don't point at other places. Get them to post at http://smalltalkjobs.dabbledb.com. It will be good for all of us overall. Truly.

The DabbleDB interface has many RSS feeds for particular areas, and can be pulled out and searched in detail. It's also all in Smalltalk, which is a good demo.

Just passing this along to my blogreaders as well. Please, support me in this. Let's get all clueful people posting Smalltalk jobs in one place. Then, when someone says "But I can't get a job in Smalltalk", we can point them at one place. Maybe "jobs.smallltalk.org" should also forward here?

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Wonderful article on "back to the future for smalltalk"

nobody@vox.com(Randal Schwartz) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 07:49:54 -0700

From a great blog post by Rob Vens:

[...] That precisely the current state of the toolset most people use is counter-productive to that goal is often touched upon but hardly ever taken to its logical conclusion. In that sense I would argue that Microsoft Windows is not much different from Ubuntu Linux: both are totally closed for non-professionals. The development cycle is disjunct from the runtime environment. Code is different from the living thing.

[...] Smalltalk should look back to its rich history of now more than 30 years, and decide that the time to play is over. It is time to take its rightful place, to play the role it was designed to play from its very conception in the Xerox labs.

[...] Smalltalk should rise from its smug slumber, and offer the world the only viable alternative for a real future of computing. This is the year of Smalltalk. We are back.

Thank you sir. Beautifully written. This is the year of Smalltalk. Couldn't have said it better myself.

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Survived my double-header keynote at Smalltalk Solutions 2008

nobody@vox.com(Randal Schwartz) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:23:16 -0700

Grand Sierra Resort, Reno, NV

I just finished giving my jam-packed keynote at Smalltalk Solutions in Reno. I knew the originally proposed "persistence" part of the talk was going to come up a bit short, so luckily the organizers allowed me to also give my evangelizing talk (Seaside: Your next web framework) as well. Even though this talk was "preaching to the choir", it seemed people listened to it rather intently, to help them understand how to sell Smalltalk and Seaside to others.

James Robertson has the highlights (and an image of me that makes me look very tiny) over on his blog. Check it out there. The slides I used will be archived on the STIC site as well.

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Interviewed on WebDevRadio

nobody@vox.com(Randal Schwartz) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 07:02:23 -0700

Michael Kimsal runs a nice podcast on various modern web development topics, and agreed to interview me recently about Seaside. The show is now live. It's basically a more detailed version of my "Seaside: Your Next Web Framework" talk but with some side conversations thrown in, including my passion for Smalltalk and Squeak, and even a bit about MagLev. Check it out!

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Look Ma! I'm on (MySpace)TV!

nobody@vox.com(Randal Schwartz) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 07:54:18 -0700

My friends at MySpace.com finally transcoded my recent presentation at their headquarters of yet another version of "Seaside: Your next web framework", including a rather badly botched demo of Squeak. I haven't watched it yet, but feel free to review it for yourself. Please note that, yes, I made a few technical errors and have been amply corrected. Enjoy.

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