22 posts tagged “squeak”

My first big Seaside tutorial: three hours at OSCON

3 days ago
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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

3 days ago
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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.

Interviewed on WebDevRadio

Jun 12, 2008
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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!

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

Jun 11, 2008
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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.

Now reading the Squeak News for Industry Misinterpretations

Jun 8, 2008
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James Robertson of the weekly Smalltalk Industry Misinterpretations podcast has graciously offered me the opportunity to add a short weekly Squeak News segment to his podcast. I'll be selecting the most recent posts from news.squeak.org, and reading them at varying speeds, depending on the amount of news. Hear the result at the current podcast, and subscribe to get future (weekly) releases.

It would be really cool if my appearance reading the Squeak News gets picked up for Squeak News, so I'll be reading an article from Squeak News for the podcast about reading the articles from Squeak News for the podcast. Turtles all the way down!

Dan Ingalls interviewed on FLOSS Weekly

May 23, 2008
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In yet another overlap of my interests, Dan Ingalls (co-inventor of Smalltalk and co-creator of Squeak and the Lively Kernel) agreed to be interviewed for my FLOSS "Weekly" show, and the show is now available. Check it out... great interview (thanks Dan!).

Presenting Seaside at Myspace.com headquarters

May 13, 2008
2 comments

Seaside90

My longtime friend (and fellow Perl book author) Carl Dichter now runs the show at Myspace.com for the infrastructure team (or something like that). He invited me to present Seaside at their regular "programming dojos" where experts are called in to expose the company to bleading-edge technologies for possible assimilation into the already diverse frameworks within Myspace.

I beefed up the "elevator talk" because I knew I'd have about 90 minutes. So this is yet-another version of the "intro to seaside" talk, and the one I'm happiest with so far.

The talk was well received, with many good questions and (once again) a standing-room-only crowd. However, this time, I was also videotaped, and I'm told it will appear on "myspace TV" very soon, and I'll link to that when it goes up. You can all see how bad my typing went on the live demo, and how I couldn't figure out how to get Squeak to resize to the 1024x768 screen very well.

Metaprogramming in Squeak

Apr 8, 2008
2 comments

In comp.lang.smalltalk today, I got to answer a simple question about metaprogramming. My classic example is being able to create an anonymous class simply by calling "Behavior New". Here's my code:

   | myClass myInstance |
   myClass := Behavior new. "create anon behavior"
   myClass compile: 'theAnswer ^42'. "add a method for instances"
   myInstance := myClass new. "create an instance"
   Transcript show: myInstance theAnswer; cr. "shows 42"

There might be some more responses in the thread, or maybe you can add some of your own. Enjoy.

Where Perl and Smalltalk collide

Mar 31, 2008
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As I'm chatting in the #squeak channel this morning, I was reminded that I had adapted Kent Beck's Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns for a half-day Perl coding tutorial. In fact, I referenced this book in a Perl Column I had done for Linux Magazine. If you know both Smalltalk and Perl, you might get a kick out of that.

The year of Smalltalk

Mar 20, 2008
2 comments

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!

My first big Seaside tutorial: three hours at OSCON

Teaching GLORP with Squeak at PDXPUG Day

Interviewed on WebDevRadio

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

Now reading the Squeak News for Industry Misinterpretations

Dan Ingalls interviewed on FLOSS Weekly

Presenting Seaside at Myspace.com headquarters

Metaprogramming in Squeak

Where Perl and Smalltalk collide

The year of Smalltalk

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