Cincom Presentation Abstracts and Speaker Bios for ESUG 2014

Cincom Smalltalk Roadmap (Arden Thomas)

Monday, August 18, 9:45 – 10:30 a.m.
Abstract: In this presentation, Arden Thomas, the Product Manager for Cincom Smalltalk, will discuss recent, current and future product changes and developments for Cincom^® ObjectStudio^® and Cincom^® VisualWorks^®. 

Bio: 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 it prompted him to make a full commitment to using Smalltalk. Arden used Smalltalk in his post-graduate work thesis and projects. Arden has worked with Smalltalk for IBM, Parcplace Systems, ParcPlace-Digitalk, ObjectShare and a hedge fund in a number of capacities including developer, trainer, architect, consultant and sales SE. Arden is currently the Cincom Smalltalk product manager for Cincom’s ObjectStudio and VisualWorks products. Arden has a blog titled “Less Is More,” which is an interesting principle, as well as a reference to an attractive design philosophy of Smalltalk. When not working with Cincom Smalltalk, Arden can be found doing cycling, CrossFit, coaching soccer, officiating at swim meets or attending events involving his children.

GLORP for Beginners Tutorial (Niall Ross)

Monday, August 18, 2:00 – 3:30 p.m.
Abstract: The target audience for this hands-on tutorial is those with little or no GLORP experience (but more-experienced people who are willing to pair-program with beginners are most welcome). The tutorial will help participants to start using GLORP in their own applications. Participants will create a simple GLORP descriptor system for a domain model, then they will generate a database from it, incorporating some existing legacy. They will write and read between the database and their domain model using GLORP commands. The issues of transactions, caching and refreshing will also be addressed. The skills taught will generally parallel with those taught in Roger Witney’s GLORP course (not all of it, of course, for reasons of time). Anyone who knows the material that is covered in Witney’s GLORP course need not attend, unless as a refresher. This tutorial’s exercises will diverge from Roger’s course in the following ways:

• The tutorial will use more modern (more terse) GLORP protocol.
• The tutorial will provide additional context for the example work such as where a particular piece fits into GLORP, how GLORP makes it work, etc.
• The tutorial will address some items that Roger leaves open such as “I have not tried that,” “No idea what this does,” etc.).
• The tutorial uses a different (hopefully, slightly more interesting) domain example than the (all too common) person, address, etc. The domain example will help students understand the more complex material that’s included in the GLORP talk later in the week. (One of the tutorial’s motives is to make the later talk accessible to the whole ESUG audience—GLORP-experienced and GLORP-newbie alike.) After the talk, interested students can make arrangements with the presenter to hold follow-up GLORP “how to” sessions during lunch breaks and other out-of-hours times—either one-on-one or in larger groups. The tutor will be demonstrating GLORP in VisualWorks driving a PostgreSQL 9.3 database.
• A tutor will assist any student who requests it, so that they may obtain this specific setup before the tutorial starts.
• All students will need a GLORP installation and GLORP-capable database, or they need to be pair-programming with someone who has one.

Bio: 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 caused him to decide on doing 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. At first, 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 telecoms 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 six years ago. His first task was to lead the team that does the weekly 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 teams. He also leads the Custom Refactoring open-source project, which he co-founded, and the SUnit open-source project.

2048! (Arden Thomas)

Tuesday, August 19, 11:00 – 11:15 a.m.
Abstract: This presentation will discuss the game, 2048, including how it is played as well as design, implementation and playing strategies. This project was created to serve as a fun introduction to Smalltalk for those new to Smalltalk, while presenting challenges to experienced Smalltalk developers. The idea to challenge developers resulted in the Cincom 2048 contest. The winners of the contest will be announced at the conference.

Bio: 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 it prompted him to make a full commitment to using Smalltalk. Arden used Smalltalk in his post-graduate work thesis and projects. Arden has worked with Smalltalk for IBM, Parcplace Systems, ParcPlace-Digitalk, ObjectShare and a hedge fund in a number of capacities including developer, trainer, architect, consultant and sales SE. Arden is currently the Cincom Smalltalk product manager for Cincom’s ObjectStudio and VisualWorks products. Arden has a blog titled “Less Is More,” which is an interesting principle, as well as a reference to an attractive design philosophy of Smalltalk. When not working with Cincom Smalltalk, Arden can be found doing cycling, CrossFit, coaching soccer, officiating at swim meets or attending events involving his children.

Advanced GLORP: Round-trip Refactoring of a GLORP Application Tutorial (Niall Ross)

Thursday, August 21, 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Abstract: This talk refactors the application of the earlier tutorial to use more advanced GLORP techniques. These refactorings are shown in the context of modelling/mapping tools (from Cincom ObjectStudio), database drivers and web techniques, to demo end-to-end development.

Bio: 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 caused him to decide on doing 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. At first, 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 telecoms 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 six years ago. His first task was to lead the team that does the weekly 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 teams. He also leads the Custom Refactoring open-source project, which he co-founded, and the SUnit open-source project.