Cincom Smalltalk™ Speakers Gear Up for ESUG 2013

Posted on July 23, 2013 by Jeremy Jordan in ESUG

How and Where in Glorp Tutorial – Niall Ross

Wednesday, September 11, 10:45 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

Tutorial aspect: Niall will present examples of how to code some less-obvious queries in Glorp and invite attendees to bring their own examples of things on which they want advice regarding the best ways to code in Glorp. In addition to functional tasks, he will look at performance such as how to code queries from a performance standpoint and/or refactor GLORP using applications for performance. Niall will also look at coding errors to avoid.

Talk aspect: Niall will present recent and upcoming Glorp-framework and tool development.

Open-forum aspect: Niall will connect to a database, auto-generate a Glorp descriptor system (instance and class) and the domain classes for it in the Smalltalk image, then show Smalltalk queries reading and writing to the database. If time allows, he will then show refactoring (e.g., a legacy database to a better domain model) and demonstrate the new Glorp refactorings as examples of framework-specific refactorings. The examples will either be simple or complex, depending on the audience level of the interested non-Smalltalkers.

Biography: Niall ended his undergraduate career with two intellectual interests: computing and the theory of relativity. A quick check of how much commercial work was available to relativity and gravitation theorists made him decide to do academic research in that field and then seek a commercial job in computing, rather than the other way round.

Niall started working commercially in IT in 1985. Initially he was assigned to designing and implementing software engineering process improvements and only three years later he began significant writing and delivering of commercial software. This experience taught him that intelligent people can nevertheless form foolish ideas about software engineering if they have not worked at the coding coalface of real, large commercial projects. Learning from this, Niall spent the nineties working on software to manage complex, rapidly changing telecom networks. A side effect of this work was that it taught him much about how scale and rate of change affects software.

Early in the nineties he discovered Smalltalk. The more he used it, the more he came to recognize its power in this area. This perception was strengthened when he spent a year delivering a telecoms management system in Java. At the end of the decade, Niall formed his own software company to offer consultancy in meta-data system design, Smalltalk and agile methods. Over the next decade, he worked on a variety of meta-data-driven systems, mostly in the financial domain.

Niall joined the Cincom Smalltalk Engineering team nearly five years ago. His first task was to lead the team that does the weekly Cincom^® VisualWorks^® builds—an experience he likens to doing brain surgery on yourself every Friday (e.g., “prepare new memory for insertion, remove old memory, uh, I can’t remember what I was going to do next … “). Currently, he leads the Glorp and Database team. He also leads the Custom Refactoring open-source project, which he co-founded, and the SUnit open-source project.

UI Unlimited: Things You Can Do with the New Cincom Smalltalk UI – Dirk Verleysen

Wednesday, September 11, 11:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

Abstract: In this talk, Dirk will show how the user interface looks in the current environment and some code on how it was created. He will also show some tests with the drawpad and shapes Cincom did to see how they could be used for upgrading the Modeling Tool—a tool that allows the business architect to design and generate the framework for a software system using a powerful UML-based tool.

Biography: Andreas Hiltner is currently the Lead VM Engineer for Cincom® ObjectStudio® in addition to having a hand in most aspects of base- image and database development. He works from home near Nuremberg, Germany, where he just recently returned after spending five years with his family in the US at Cincom’s world headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Along with many contributions to ObjectStudio over the years, he was the project lead in Cincom’s development of the current 8.x versions of ObjectStudio, based on Cincom VisualWorks. Andreas is a seasoned architect who has specialized in ObjectStudio for more than 15 years. In his years of working with Cincom, he has had the opportunity to assist key Cincom Smalltalk users worldwide including one of the world’s top-five financial institutions and several government agencies. Recently, Andreas accepted the responsibility of being the Lead Engineer for the GUI Project of ObjectStudio.

Biography: Dirk Verleysen has 24 years of experience working for various industrial and consulting companies and doing projects in different Smalltalks (Cincom ObjectStudio, Cincom VisualWorks, Smalltalk/V and VA Smalltalk). Dirk has consulted for many companies including Fabelta Ninove, Infosoft, Sanpareil, Roots, KBC Asset Management, Argo and ADP.

Dirk joined Cincom Systems, Inc. in 2008 as lead developer for the Modeling and Mapping Tools in ObjectStudio. The Modeling Tool allows a business architect to design and generate the framework for a software system using a powerful UML-based tool. The Mapping Tool connects your Smalltalk objects to relational databases easily, using object-relational mapping technology.

Cincom Smalltalk New Native GUI Implementation Preview: A Technical Overview – Andreas Hiltner

TBD

Abstract: In this talk, Andreas will compare the existing architecture of Cincom ObjectStudio to the new framework and demonstrate some of the new widgets and features. He will also be showing some code on how to use them. In addition, you will see how the user interface looks in the current environment, how it was created and how it will look with the new framework.

Bio: Andreas Hiltner is currently the Lead VM Engineer for Cincom ObjectStudio, in addition to having a hand in most aspects of base image and database development. He works from home near Nuremberg, Germany, where he just recently returned after spending five years with his family in the US at Cincom’s headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Along with many contributions to ObjectStudio over the years, he was the project lead in Cincom’s development of the current 8.x versions of ObjectStudio, based on Cincom VisualWorks. Andreas is a seasoned architect who has specialized in ObjectStudio for more than 15 years. In his years of working with Cincom he has had the opportunity to assist key Cincom Smalltalk users worldwide including one of the world’s Top Five financial institutions, and several government agencies. Recently, Andreas accepted the responsibility of being the Lead Engineer for the GUI Project of ObjectStudio.

Pursuing Performance in Store: Algorithms, Queries, Schemas – Tom Robinson

Wednesday, September 11, 2:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Abstract: Production Smalltalk systems tend to be large. Smalltalk’s adaptability means that they have long lives. An effect of this size and longevity is lots of large bodies of code … and lots of versions of that code. Many of Cincom’s customers manage codebases substantially larger than the ObjectStudio or VisualWorks products, even with their bundled class libraries. For Store to adequately manage these large bodies of code, performance must not deteriorate, even in the face of very large modules with lots of versions. In the past two years, significant work has been done to eliminate Store bottlenecks discovered by customers and Cincom engineers.

Tom will talk about improvements that have already been made to Store algorithms, query improvements that let the database do more of the work and exploration of schema changes to allow further performance improvements. In addition, he will talk about using Store while changing it, the experience of being Cincom’s most performance-sensitive Glorp user, changes made for testing and performance benchmarking and the additional complexity and side effects involved in working to improve Store (and Glorp) performance on multiple, different databases at the same time.

Biography: Tom Robinson started learning Smalltalk/V in 1987. His first Smalltalk job was working on a factory floor application in 1991. He has worked on manufacturing, insurance, banking and investment applications since then.

For the past five years, he has been working at Cincom as a Senior Software Engineer on the Cincom Smalltalk build process, weekly post build testing and Store. His office features a wood stove and has a view of 3,865-meter Hawk Peak in the Snowmass-Maroon Bells Wilderness of Colorado. Visitors to his deck this spring included five elk, a bear and a fox.

Cincom Smalltalk Roadmap – Arden Thomas

Thursday, September 12, 9:00 a.m. to 9:45 a.m.

Abstract: In this presentation, Arden Thomas, the Product Manager for Cincom Smalltalk will discuss recent, current and future product changes and developments.

Biography: Arden Thomas started using Smalltalk in 1986, when he was researching and exploring better ways to do software development. He found it! Smalltalk and object-oriented were such a profoundly improved approach to software development, that he made a full commitment to using Smalltalk. Arden used Smalltalk in his post-graduate work thesis and projects, as well as building applications for factory floor control for IBM.

Arden has worked for Parcplace Systems, ParcPlace-Digitalk and ObjectShare in a number of capacities including developer, trainer, architect, consultant, and sales SE. Arden worked for a hedge fund, which ran hundreds of applications in VisualWorks 24/7 to provide traders with decision-making information and tools.

Arden, who is currently the product manager of Cincom Smalltalk, has a blog titled “Less is More,” which is an interesting principle as well as a reference to an attractive design philosophy of Smalltalk.

For the complete conference schedule, visit:

http://www.esug.org/wiki/pier/Conferences/2013/Conference-Schedule?_s=d-9iKt5Nu1fO8xs6&_k=cSDZoTHwh9LF03Or&_n&29