Fruit de ESUG 2009

[1]

That’s a huge platter of fruit de mer sitting in front of me (at the end of the table) and no it wasn’t all mine – there were 5 of us sharing that mound of seafood. The photo nearly says it all about ESUG 2009: a group of Smalltalkers eating seafood and talking shop.

Overall an excellent conference. Good presentations, good food, and good conversations. Congratulations to ESUG and the conference organizers for a job well done.

Follow these links for slides, pictures and videos. Here are some of my highlights

Glamour

Where did all the code go?

If you’ve ever tried to write a browser in Smalltalk you are aware of the amount of code that you must write. OmniBrowser cuts down on the amount of code involved, but you must still wrap your mind around the OB meta model, which is not always easy.

Enter Glamour. The following code produces an Object Explorer (multi-paned object explorer):

| browser |
browser := GLMFinder new.
browser list
	title: 'Collection';
	when: [:each | each isCollection].
browser list
	title: 'Object';
	display:  [ :anObject | 
        anObject class allInstVarNames collect: [:iv | 
            iv -> (anObject instVarNamed: iv) ] ];
	format: [:assoc |
        assoc key asString, ' : ', assoc value printString];
	send: #value.
browser text
	display: [:entity | 'self' ];
	title: 'Evaluator';
	update: #selection 
    on: $o 
    entitled: 'Open (o)' 
    with: [ :text :entity |
	    Compiler 
         evaluate: text selectedText 
         for: entity 
         logged: false ].
^ browser

Philipp Bunge and Tudor Girba have been able to distill window building down to the bare minimum. Very neat work. Oh, did I mention that besides a Morphic mapping, there is a Seaside3.0 mapping too?

Metacello

While I feel comfortable with the core engine of Metacello, I arrived in Brest, keen to get feedback on the spec creation API. Fortunately, I was able to spend the better part of 4 days working closely with Tudor Girba to refine the functionality and spec creation API. Following Doru’s suggestions, I have made some fairly significant changes to improve the overall usability of Metacello. Doru and I will continue working together on refining the things for the beta release of Metacello.

In addition to Doru’s feedback, I was able to talk to a number of different people about Metacello and the problems it is trying to address. All in all very positive feedback.

Seaside 3.0

Julian, Lukas and Philippe announced Seaside 3.0 at the conference and the Seaside Sprint brought Seaside3.0 tantalizingly close to beta.

GemStone will be releasing version 2.4 very soon now. Shortly after the 2.4 release is officially announced, we will make the Seasde3.0 beta available on GLASS.

The online book Dynamic Web Development with Seaside (sponsored by ESUG) was also announced at the conference.

CouchDB for GemStone/S

In the days leading up to ESUG Randall Schwarz visited our offices and piqued my interest in NOSQL databases:

Have you run into limitations with traditional relational databases? Don’t mind trading a query language for scalability?

Sounds like an ad for GemStone/S doesn’t it?

I chatted up the idea that it would a be a no-brainer for GemStone to provide a NOSQL database mapping for GLASS with a number of folks at the conference.

Philippe Marschall thought it was more than a good idea. In a matter of days (or was it hours) he had implemented a CouchDB mapping for GLASS using Seaside3.0. The code is up on GemSource in the CouchDB project.

Summary

There were lots of other conversations and many more interesting projects to discuss like Pharo and a port of Moose to GemStone. Needless to say, I came away from the conference with a todo list as long as your arm (to add to my already long todo list:).

The next few months should be a very interesting time as the seeds sown at this year’s ESUG come to fruition!

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[1]Photo by Damien Pollet (Creative Commons).