Thursday 30

VA Smalltalk 7.5 and Beyond

9:00 am - 10:00 am

By: John O'Keefe. John O'Keefe, formerly a 39 year veteran of IBM, was a member of IBM's VisualAge Smalltalk team from its inception in 1991 and Team Lead and Chief Architect for VisualAge Smalltalk since 1996. He brings a wealth of knowledge and historical insight to the team. According to John, "I am very happy to continue my career in the Smalltalk industry with Instantiations and energized by the commitment the company has made to the product for the long term.

This session will discuss the current state of Instantiations VA Smalltalk and new features included in VA Smalltalk 7.5 such as the Refactoring Browser, the SUnit Browser, ENVY/QA, Windows Vista support, etc. Future development plans for version 8.0 and beyond will also be discussed. VA Smalltalk V7.5 enables software developers to create highly portable, scaleable, multi-tier business applications using object-oriented technology. VA Smalltalk allows for incremental and rapid development of new Smalltalk applications. Developers can build and deploy enterprise Web service solutions for dynamic e-business using VA Smalltalk. Join us for this presentation to learn about the new exciting features of VA Smalltalk 7.5, including support for Windows Vista, SuSE Linux, and Oracle 10.

Application Frameworks – an Experience Report

10:30 am - 11:15 am

By: Arden Thomas. Arden Thomas got started with Smalltalk in 1986, looking for better ways to do software development (he found it). He is currently a senior field application engineer at Cincom, working to help Cincom's Smalltalk customers, and to help move Smalltalk forward. He worked for ParcPlace for many years as a trainer, sales engineer, and consultant, and recently did extensive software development at Forest Investment management, which included choosing and using an application framework.

This talk and short demonstration discusses the experience of choosing and using an application framework for Smalltalk based development. Discussed are factors such as what an application framework is, what it should do for us and some criteria for selection. Two known frameworks are contrasted and discussed, and an example of the chosen framework is given. Finally, the experience of years of use of the chosen framework, its advantages and disadvantages are discussed.

Capture Accurate Solution Requirements with Exploratory Modeling at SAP

11:15 am - 12:00 pm

By: Ralf Ehret. Ralf is a development architect at SAP. He joined SAP in April 1998 as a developer working with HR and Workforce Management software before moving on to the Business Process Renovation Team. One of his first challenges was to evaluate Smalltalk as a tool for rapid prototyping. Together with consultants from Georg Heeg eK he has successfully completed two Smalltalk projects at SAP. At the end of these two projects he became the main SAP contact during the VisualWorks to SAP integration project.

Perhaps the most difficult (and most fundamental) challenge SAP project teams face is defining accurate, implementable solution requirements for the business problem they are trying to solve. Consider the following example: imagine that you need to write an algorithm to check for duplicate invoices at some point in the process, such as following data entry or during a nightly batch job. You'll quickly find yourself asking: "what specifically qualifies an invoice as 'the same' or different from another? Should two invoices be considered the same if simply the sold-to and total quantity are identical, or do we need to check that every single field is identical? What if all of the data 'matches', but the lines are out of sequence? Do these criteria differ by company, department, or user (very common!)? What other potential cases have we failed to recognize/consider?" - and you'll get no answers from the business experts!

Unfortunately, the example above is not fictitious. This was the exact solution we were trying to build on a recent project at SAP, a project that caused us to reevaluate our approach to application development.

In this talk we will present you two projects at SAP where we successfully used Exploratory Modeling (xM) to get a much better understanding of the application domain and to nearly eliminate the typical post-go-live application design failures.

Seaside

1:30 pm - 2:30 pm

By: Lukas Renggli. Lukas Renggli is expert in the development of Web applications and Content Management Systems. He is a core developer of Seaside. He is the author of Magritte, a framework to ease domain object modelling using meta-data, and Pier, a meta-described CMS entirely based on objects. Lukas Renggli is currently doing a PhD at the Software Composition Group, University of Bern, Switzerland.Lukas Renggli has given talks at various conferences.

Seaside is a web development framework that provides a layered set of abstractions over HTTP and XHTML. It was the subject of various presentaions at past ESUG conferences. This presentation will summarize how Seaside evolved since ESUG 2006 in Prague. One part will cover API changes and new features in version 2.7 and the upcoming version 2.8. A second part will cover the broader picture and present changes to the environment like vendor support. Finally some future plans in general will be presented.

How to promote Smalltalk

2:30 pm - 3:00 pm

Show Us Your Projects

3:30 pm - 5:00 pm

This slot is a special slot for people willing to present on the spot their projects. We will have 4 slots of 20 min each

SummerTalk and SOC Gathering

5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

The Summertalkers and Summer of Code Gathering.... Come to see the results of the projects sponsored by ESUG and Google