Smalltalk Digest: August Edition

Congratulations to the Cincom Smalltalk 2048 Contest Winners

At the recent ESUG 2014 conference, the winners were announced for 2048—a new and very popular game that has recently become a mobile gaming craze. Recently, we created a contest to program or enhance the game, and we’re happy to announce the winners. Click here to find out who came out on top.

Be Part of Our Growing Cincom Smalltalk Team!

Cincom is seeing increased interest for Cincom Smalltalk and with that increased interest comes more requirements for enhancing, improving and advancing Cincom ObjectStudio and Cincom VisualWorks. Our Cincom Smalltalk engineers are very busy keeping pace with our existing partners, and just as we need to enhance our products, we need to enhance our product team—especially our VM team on which we are focusing our current hiring efforts. Why not join an exciting, growing team that’s making innovative strides at an astonishing pace? If you’re interested in applying for a position as a Cincom Smalltalk engineer on the VM Team for Cincom’s Smalltalk Development Team, please contact Cincom Smalltalk Program Director, Suzanne Fortman, by clicking here.

Cincom Supporting Customer and Partner Success

The Cincom Smalltalk Team is extending an offer to its current users to let us assist in helping to promote their applications or services. For more information, or if you are interested in participating in this offer, click here.

Contributed Components

We’re happy to announce a new feature of the Cincom Smalltalk website: the Contributed Components Directory. Here you can find all of the contributed components that are available with our current product offerings. Click here for more information on other components.

Cincom VisualWorks on Display at the Singapore Sports Hub

Recently a software architect who works for one of Cincom’s customers demonstrated her software-architecture achievements at the Singapore Sports Hub. The tool she used to accomplish her results was Cincom VisualWorks with IIRC—the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) library graphics on Windows. Click here to read more.

Smalltalk Plays an Important Part in University’s Curriculum

Associate Professor of the Technical University of Catalonia’s Software Department, Jordi Delgado, teaches a course called “Advanced Programming Concepts” to sixth-semester (third-year) computer science undergraduate students. Not only does he believe that Smalltalk is the perfect teaching tool for the class, he also recommends that his students use Cincom VisualWorks. Click here to read more.

Product Manager Mini-Survey

We realize that when our clients and partners succeed, we succeed. So, Arden Thomas, the Product Manager for Cincom Smalltalk, puts a lot of time and effort into listening to the needs of our customers, partners and prospects. This month’s survey talks about Cincom Smalltalk security and asks questions regarding the use, planned use and issues with TLS (Transport Layer Security) as well as its predecessor, SSL (Secure Sockets Layers), which are protocols that provide secure communication. Click here for more information and to access the survey.

“Common Tools” Tutorial Videos Available

The Cincom Smalltalk Team has made a series of several new tutorials available. The first set of tutorials focuses on “Common Tools” and how many of these tools, which are used for development in Cincom ObjectStudio and Cincom VisualWorks, are now shared.

• For information on the System Browser Overview tutorial, click here.
• For information on the Core Browser Usage tutorial, click here.
• For information on the Inspector Tool tutorial, click here.
• For information on the Debugger Overview tutorial, click here.
• For information on the Debugger Usage tutorial, click here.
• For information on the Version Control tutorial, click here.
• For information on the Process Monitor tutorial, click here.
• For information on the Code Recovery tutorial, click here.

Additional Tutorial Videos Launched

For the past few weeks, the Cincom Smalltalk Team has been launching a series of several new tutorials including our “Common Tools” tutorials and product-introduction tutorials.

• For information on the Cincom ObjectStudio Product Introduction tutorial, click here.
• For information on the Cincom VisualWorks Product Launcher tutorial, click here.
• For information on the Cincom ObjectStudio GUI Designer, Part One tutorial, click here.
• For information on the Cincom VisualWorks Product Introduction tutorial, click here.
• For information on the Cincom ObjectStudio GUI Designer, Part Two tutorial, click here.
• For information on the Cincom ObjectStudio Modeling Tool Overview tutorial, click here.
• For information on the Setting Up Your Environment tutorial, click here.

Concurrency and Leveraging Multi-Core PCs — The Solution? MatriX

For a while now, companies have been using concurrency in their development. But going all-out into concurrency is difficult. We have a solution to that problem: MatriX. Click here to read about some of the problems involved in concurrency, click here to read about the solution to the currency dilemma: MatriX, click here to access the video, “Getting More from Your Multi-Core with MatriX,” and click here for an answer to “How Can We Get the Most Out of Our Modern CPUs?”

Interested in learning an alternative for getting the most out of your PC? Click here to try it, and see how you can use MatriX to leverage the most from your multi-core PCs.

Are You Looking to Boost Application Performance?

The Cincom Smalltalk team strives to deliver tools to simplify daily tasks for application developers. The complexity of concurrency can sometimes cause difficulties. However, we’re happy to tell you about a powerful solution to your concurrency issues. Click here for more information.

A Shared Cornerstone — The Cincom Smalltalk Foundation

The Cincom Smalltalk Foundation is the shared virtual machine and object libraries shared by the Cincom Smalltalk products. For more information, please watch Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager, Arden Thomas’, latest presentation from the 2013 Smalltalk Industry Conference here.

Cincom Smalltalk and Social Media Channels

We’re getting the word out … Cincom Smalltalk is an extraordinary and powerful product suite with amazing capabilities and a solid future! One of the tools that has been helpful in publicizing this fact is the use of Social Media. Click here for more information.

New Cincom Smalltalk Customer Portal

There’s nothing more important to the Cincom Smalltalk team than its customers. Therefore, we now have a portal on the Cincom Smalltalk website that’s devoted solely to making available information that may be useful to our valued customers. Click here to check it out.

Cincom Smalltalk Videos and Our Presence on YouTube

There are a wide variety of places where you’ll find Cincom Smalltalk and STIC on the web. You can find Cincom Smalltalk videos by clicking here. Also, Cincom Smalltalk and the Smalltalk Industry Council have their very own YouTube pages. To check out the Cincom Smalltalk YouTube page, click here. To view the STIC YouTube page, click here.

New Product Information Readily Available on the Cincom Smalltalk Website

The Cincom Smalltalk product suite is constantly being updated and improved upon. To help keep you up-to-date, we have several locations on the Cincom Smalltalk website where anyone can find out the latest product improvements, changes and release information. Click here to find out the locations.

The Cincom Smalltalk Academic Program

With a goal of increasing the quality of the available system design and engineering training, providing higher-quality engineers and developers to the industry and users, and expanding the Smalltalk community, we suggest that you look into the Cincom Smalltalk Academic Program. Click here to read all about it.

Cincom Smalltalk Community Blogs

There are many blogs run by the Cincom Smalltalk Group now. Check them out by clicking here.

PUL Versions of Cincom ObjectStudio and Cincom VisualWorks Are Available!

We are pleased to announce that the Personal Use License versions of Cincom ObjectStudio and Cincom VisualWorks are available! The current releases of ObjectStudio 8.5.1 and VisualWorks 7.10.1 are the maintenance releases of the ObjectStudio 8.5 and VisualWorks 7.10 major releases. To read about what’s included in these releases and how you can try them for yourself, click here.

News from the Cincom Smalltalk Team

Click here to get Smalltalk news from the Cincom Smalltalk team.

Components that Are No Longer Being Distributed

There are several Cincom Smalltalk components that are no longer being distributed, however, they can be downloaded and installed just like selectable distributed components:

• Aida/Web—Aida/Web is a Smalltalk Web Framework and Application Server.
• BottomFeeder—BottomFeeder is an RSS/Atom News Aggregator.
  NOTE: BottomFeeder does not work in Cincom VisualWorks 8.0. The untimely death of James Robertson, its creator and champion, means it will not work there or in later releases (unless another champion should step forward from the community).
• DoME (Domain Modeling Environment)—An extensible collection of integrated model-editing, meta-modeling and analysis tools.
• Jun for Smalltalk—A 3D multimedia graphics library that supports topology and geometry.
• Legacy PostgreSQL (Protocol 2.0)—This component provides the PostgreSQL driver for protocol 2.0, along with a Base64Encoding utility and the Sport dialect-neutrality framework.
• Swazoo—Swazoo is an open source, vendor-agnostic, dialect-neutral Smalltalk web server with resource and web request resolution framework.

For a list of additional components, click here.

Update on Smalltalk Events

Click here for an update on Smalltalk-related events you may want to attend.

Visit the Smalltalk Jobs Blog

Are you interested in a Smalltalk-related job? Cincom Smalltalk Support Engineer, James Savidge, keeps the Smalltalk community up-to-date regarding Smalltalk opportunities throughout the community. The Smalltalk Jobs Blog posts Smalltalk-related career opportunities from around the globe. Click here to see what’s available.