Home

Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Report

1. s true of most The second idea is that when we meet complexity we tackle it by modelling When Eric says model he does not mean a UML diagram He showed a 1700 s map of China China was in the centre with the rest of the world briefly summarised round the edge He then showed a more 20 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 modern map which just happened to have the U S in the centre when he gave this talk in Europe they saw analogies This map shows Greenland and Africa the same size so it s not accurate But it is conformal the angle a navigator measures from the map is the one they can use to travel along The model you choose is driven by the use you intend It is not as realistic as possible Our intent is to allow software to enter the user s domain Eric therefore feels that a model not reflected in code is irrelevant His example was of a shipping application containers are routed from suppliers to customers by truck rail sea He showed a possible design of a user s current system cargo object gt routing service gt table of bookings each row handling one leg of travel This is a very common style of design becoming even more common thanks to fashionable service oriented architecture ideas Eric dislikes this design He dislikes the side effect of the routing service generating a complex solution that then changes the database state Testing it is tedious run test check
2. He then went to WithStyle to show authentication and to take people round the developer programme offers They show the test results against each version so you decide which one you want to take The first demo was last StS s example slide viewer His slides were running in it he had been demoing from the start of the talk He showed the pause button completely defined in HTML hidden at top left until you hover over it It minimises the slide and shows another button to pop it up again It is very easy to make simple windows about window help window etc that get their content from Smalltalk The next demo was V4 using Pollock XML with embedded HTML with embedded Pollock widget tree view He browsed the Smalltalk code that assigned a WithStyle document to a window sized it and opened it He talked through the text CSS flow means things move from left to right or otherwise as needed He displayed it and showed changing the widget having the DOM tree update in an inspector etc Sames you can see the Pollock widget by the lines around it this is not faked Michael showed a WithStyle widget in a WithStyle widget no lines to see The tree view expand contract menu appeared and he ll add some content soon Backmapping is what WithStyle has that noone else does It makes XSLT transformed XML know where it came from in the Smalltalk He walked through the code showing how they could make text editable by the user in the
3. Monticello 2 will replace Monticello 1 It keeps the philosophy and breaks the stranglehold that packages had making it easier to rearrange things Like Envy Monticello uses global ids an important idea Store Bob Westergaard is a member of the VW engineering time Store was called Stash which was called Bernstein which was called Eagle and originally came from Andersen Consulting It is similar to Team V bundles packages It is the VW CM system Store is slower to set up than Envy Store is optional in your image which can help deployment and size Store blessing levels let you adapt it to your process If methods are invoked as they are loaded Store can have problems e g adding methods and icons to the visual launcher Bob felt the comparison tools were poor Niall he should try Envy and the shadow browser tools were old and in need of updating true Publishing the base is something every one does their own way today they will provide a single solution Store unlike Envy does not have atomic load but will in 7 4 put code into shadow namespace At the moment you can have a load fail and leave your image in a very poor state Q Envy in VW7 JPMorgan Chase has bought certain rights to Envy VW and hopes to implement a VW7 version of it However they do not have the rights to offer it outside For that they would need further permissions from IBM and maybe also from Cincom Eliot has indicated Cincom has no fundamental obj
4. so they correct the data these corrections being tracked and removed when the report is fixed Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 19 Next he showed a graphical screen moved some data points relating to on demand deposits and showed the smoothing effect on the Fed s deposits Sweep accounts cause a marked monthly effect Sweeps are banks trying to manage their deposit requirement by moving money to non requirement accounts at the start of every month and then dribbling it back to cover cheques the users write as the month progresses Sweeps being new are not yet removed by seasonal adjustment because it relies on past data The earlier system took three people two years to write It had 83 000 lines of code and 27 mostly generated make files adding another 10 000 lines of very unreadable code that broke from time to time when the IT people changed the system His Smalltalk system is one fifth the size much more functional and took just him six months of work It has 1900 methods Q Niall user interaction Yes he can be called round for a walk back or just because the user dislikes the screen appearance and he can fix and resume or change the look in ten minutes He has done in ten minutes things that took the old C team weeks He was a user of the old system so had the great advantage that he knew the requirements Keynote The Value of Smalltalk Niall Ross This talk was a straightforward union of the material I
5. and searching what config maps use app what prereq config maps have shared apps etc At this point Eric s microphone stopped working so he relied on speaking loudly A good change list like tool lets you see the list of methods you ve visited and changed and browse any of them You can find all classes a user controls in a list of apps Eric then showed some of the UI building stuff morphing widgets in the UI builder to see what UI design would be best easier window resize behaviour setting for widgets new kinds of widgets and much else He also showed GF ST 2D and 3D demos At this point his microphone started working again Q Michael do you want goodies Yes They re delighted to talk to people about goodies and also willing to talk about things that need to be in the base not for money but maybe for cheaper free licences Q Envy for VisualWorks Our IBM deal gives us full source for all Envy VA related stuff We do not have the VW Envy base If anyone ever has a licence to use that it might begin to be possible Q Niall Envy derivation tracking There is a GF ST graphical tool and also some stuff in TrailBlazer Q David Pennington Macintosh We don t think it s that easy If anyone does we re happy to help them and we would be ready to do it if the market were 200 licences or more but at the moment our customers do not indicate anything like that Question led to discussion of many non corpora
6. buttons round a workspace plus a few widgets Inspect button shows a PollockPlayground instance eventHandlers widgetInventory all the usual Pollock stuff These are all in scope in the workspace so you can dolt expressions using them thus putting stuff in the widgets making widgets do things or whatever Using this Vassili did a tutorial on fractional frames Width of frame divided by fraction and then offset from boundary sounds easy in theory but users find it hard to understand in practice You need only grasp three cases e fixed left top all fractions zero widget fixed in position top left of parent e g window e fixed right bottom all fractions one usually with negative offset widget in bottom right of window e stretchy top bottom one fraction left right other fraction centred stretchable e long floating point fractions all offsets zero easy to do in Wrapper never looks good don t do it You set these directly via leftFraction leftOffset orby convenience methods above rightOf top bottom good for labels fFullyAttached leftOff Vassili showed these in PollockPlayground inside createInterface createTextEdit He has its widgets set to leftClick gt inspect rightClick gt browseClass not good in general but useful for demos He uses hookupInterface to get the Playground text from a shared variable so he can close it open a new one and continue the demo Vassili then t
7. code from you and from others The other great thing tests do is let you refactor Seaside testing David Shaeffer I missed David s talk but he gave me a quick version during a lunch break He will be at ESUG where I hope to catch the full version Meanwhile be aware this talk was noted in great haste and may be poorly written up David s tests run on the server side so have access to live instances of components being rendered to the debugger etc His framework is a web test runner It is available in Squeak and in VW He had to tag some Seaside code better in order to test it since tests need tags to find the things they are checking This is why his framework overrides some Seaside methods David provides a web browser simulator which can e g simulate a click on anchor tracking it by CSS If there is no CSS key in the component he has to dig in via e g elementNamed hr SCComponentTestCase is the root class Subclass it and write tests such as testMyComponent self newApplicationWithRootClass MyComponentClass self establishSession self followAnchor self lastResponse anchor self assert self componentAnswered lastResponse returns a SeasideResponse wrapper of the XML DOM tree The wrapper has convenience methods for pulling things out of the tree e g anchors anchorWithTIa least brittle anchorWithLabel These return wrapped XML elements typed in buttons or text areas Seaside s use of conti
8. control e g whether to allow not in production or block in production maintenance activities There is a machine namespace so they can call to any object in the system performantly He showed some UI screens typically these showed status displaying graphics of the tools and tool clusters plus tables and fields Experience small teams work better than either individuals or large teams They ve been using Envy for years They like some things about Store but wish others were more like Envy For example Envy unique ids were very useful when they changed Control WORKS code and gave it back to Adventa reconciling unchanged code to its equivalents in Adventa was a non issue and the ancestors of changed code could be tracked provided the complete set of parents were provided They need Store to maintain this this came from that synchrony between their repository and Adventa s The learning curve for their system is a challenge Smalltalk is quick to learn but the domain is hard and the class libraries are large An experienced Smalltalker can take six months to be let lose on real machines Names in code are very important they must be accurate and readable Sometimes two application are identical or nearly so in code just differently configured Would they consider anything other than Smalltalk They find Smalltalk fast 10ms resolution so the perception that Smalltalk is slow is now quite wrong Smalltalk is a small communi
9. image If the server knows it is out of date the new image recreates it and the old image dies Variants of this general start pattern use the HTTP server to see if an image already exists so the new image just hands over to it or not so continue start up Blaine works in Omaha in a group of 4 Smalltalkers running rings around a 25 strong Java group I thought Omaha was a state when I was young since I only knew the name from Omaha beach of WWII D Day history where it is paired with Utah beach and Utah is a state Georg Heeg has ported ADM s Control WORKS to the latest version of VW Helped by this they have just finished a huge project ahead of schedule how often does that happen and so the Dresden site has won another major project Meanwhile whenever any Java and C code utilities they have cannot talk to each other due to minor protocol difficulties they put Smalltalk between them as it can be quickly made to talk to both Thus Smalltalk is becoming universal in the company DeutcheBahn has RUT K see my ESUG report as the first page story in their latest report before even the picture of their general manager John McIntosh told me of their test facility developers print lists and then sit in an office overlooking the Frankfurt station with binoculars checking the trains that arrive and leave against the times and serial numbers on the list Energy trading systems seem to be common in Smalltalk Adriaan van Os is doi
10. in a spawned process as another way of addressing this issue There was discussion about how to address windows and other widgets in tests I use method wrappers following John Brant there are examples in the custom refactoring tests Others have various approaches It would be useful if patterns that people found useful were added to the Open Repository or sent to the SUnit SourceForge site Remote Computing OpenTalk at Large Martin Kobetic Cincom Martin works on networking and security in Cincom This talk will focus on the more exotic features of OpenTalk things you won t find elsewhere Martin will talk about multi casting IP multicasting and OpenTalk groups Then he will discuss grid computing Martin started by inviting everyone in the room with wireless to connect browse a URL and download an installer windows or image and VM IP multicasting sends packets to a range of IP addresses The multicast range is 224 0 0 0 239 255 255 255 The API is the usual UDP datagram sockets differing only in that receiving sockets must join a specific multicast group e g 224 3 67 119 Multicast can work with loopback on or off Obviously you rarely multicast outside your own network it is an invitation to Denial of Service attacks However it can be done using the 44 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 IGMP routing protocol if you see a packet for here send it there as well Sending is standard he sho
11. it has its own database and data format Envy is easy to set up and has a small footprint Because this DB and format are proprietary and the code is hidden most un Smalltalky some people have the code going behind the scenes at the lowest level is hard Component lifecycles and roles can puzzle starters Novices can find some of the Edition Version Release x Config Map Sub App Class Method details unintuitive However Envy s choice of how versions and line ups interact is defensible if rigid Configuration expressions are powerful but their UI is wretched The component ownership model presumably looked like a good idea at the time I can t say anything nicer about it It is unintuitive to starters supports what programmers don t do and frequently trips you up doing sensible things Eric s explanation of why he has added a superuser to VASmalltalk see his talk is a good example Experienced users 26 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 routinely switch off what they can and code work arounds for the rest everyone tells everyone else where the hidden code is that lets you fool password checking because everyone knows you need it A model that you find you should routinely workaround is a bad model Using Envy Envy generates globally unique version ids from machine timestamp db identifier This means you never need to reconcile which is almost always good Send a version round the world and you
12. lookup optimisation mechanism described in the first edition of the Java book details removed in the second edition Object puts method abc in slot24 in the method table so every subclass puts abc in slot24 so no need for lookup just call method 24 Allen remarked that Java is very mechanical in how it makes decisions Engineering decisions bleed through to be visible in the spec Suppose A and B have a method xyz that is not on Object or on any common superclass now you have the lookup problem They therefore just filter the methods up by generating a common ancestor for every single method with implementation you guessed it DNU Now every method has its assigned slot and the type lookup problem has vanished and Object and other high level classes have vast numbers of synthetic methods hidden in your browser unless you check the option to see them In theory not every JVM need provide this mechanism e g a cellphone JVM might do a slower but smaller footprint method lookup They know of no exceptions You could define a common interface for e g xyz This resurfaces the lookup and so interfaces are slower in Java though it is never admitted You can double your performance by changing types from interfaces to classes They have not found a JVM where you cannot re evaluate the method table to get back to the common implementors They have looked at systems with 60 000 methods The overhead is small compared to what
13. must track button entry exit events so the structure in ToolbarTooltipAssistant is slightly different Vassili set a tip on the PollockPlayground toolbar and demoed it His next demo was the EntryAssistant This behaviour is also in Wrapper as CompletionDriver it would be called CompletionAssistant if he wrote it today The aim is to insert the possible completion text selected so user can type over it In Wrapper privateShowComplet ion is spawned ina block Vassili could not do it more nicely in Wrapper it took him a day to see that he could not since it looks like there are lots of events you can hook into but they are all too early the controller is still sending events and wipes over whatever you insert That s why he has to spawn that call In Pollock it is nicer He demoed in the Playground and then showed the implementation EntryAssistant has four methods In suggest it just tells the agent to insertAndSelect He then demoed an entry assistant with popup EntryAssistantWithPopup gt gt suggest This has a subtlety we want arrow keys to be received by the popup but if the user continues typing we want the entry field to get the keystrokes The popup filters them and sends to the main widget if appropriate This would be very hard in Wrapper He then put a class list into a playground widget where some class names were too long for the widget Vassili set it to display longer names when the user mouse overed ItemOverlay As
14. new db state reinitialize db This confounds the task of mapping OO to relational with that of finding the correct route A more fuzzy objection is How do I talk about this design When you say Each stop in the route is a table row either users ask what s a table row or worse every future requirement from them comes as table rows Eric cares about the language people use in talking about the problem the concepts they need The concept of a stop a cargo being unloaded from one mode of transport and loaded onto another is needed not a row Or maybe a cargo is a series of legs loaded at the start and unloaded at the end Or maybe legs are just from and to leave loading for stops The cargo the route specification start end and the itinerary can all be distinguished People are to apt to grasp the first thing that occurs and stop but they should not brainstorming is cheap In his revised design the routing service takes in a cargo and a route specification and returns an itinerary that satisfies it No side effect of table population is specified Our code is now likely to resemble our domain oriented conversation Is an itinerary made up of stops or of legs Eric likes to talk around many ideas e g ten but eventually you want to decide which is best Obviously we want the one that is most useful to us A concrete reference scenario helps find this Scenario 1 send toys from Hong Kong to Dallas via ship
15. potential gotcha is Export Changes a very useful optimisation most of the time but very confusing if you import someone else s exported changes without knowing it and without your repository containing the base version they used as warnings are minimal Extending ve done a certain amount of this to make Envy cooperate with the Refactoring Browser with other CM systems and to improve the tools Envy s Ul end is well factored Envy has many front end utilities some significant The code that accesses the database is robust but it is less well factored it is also hidden but my impression is that it is innately less well factored over and above this Envy in VW is intrusive sometimes in ways that trip up utilities obstruct refactorings and generally force small but irritating code differences between Envy VW and non Envy VW As Envy is an integral part of VA it is hard to say if the same is true there Envy s Future Envy is VA s past present and I assumed Eric confirmed future In VW I have done work that has made me very aware that there is no need for all the code in an image to be managed by the same system Alan Knight s Store in VA etc work proves the point And the fact that VW can organise code in categories parcels and or pundles is also an example With a better factored DB end it would be straightforward to have only some code in the system managed by Envy with applications presenting a pundle in
16. practice needed discipline so their code and issues are coherent Their GemStone is on Linux Cron starts statmon every morning so they have stats but they have no RT monitoring services Instead they have tools to view the session stats times since last transaction asynch abort keeps their commit counts low and transactions short there is no transaction until the user hits save Colours change as the commit backlog increases and since last week the system will email warnings They use icons a lot Their slides are colourful as is the system They store all icons in the image so they have no file dependencies a goodie manages this Email notification is used for lots of things warnings walkbacks commit conflicts etc The emails include stack traces and as much information about what the user was doing as possible sometimes they call a user before said user knows they have bug 24 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 They use WindowBuilder Pro and have an editor for attribute specification editing A generic attribute view lets them view any new objects that have an edit policy spec Later they can develop a fancier UI but still use the generic for many inspectors and analysis and debugging things Because they use the same code in VA and GemStone they can have a mini model in memory so they can run SUnit tests against it Their group is very talkative and encourages debate to make things better Mont
17. presented at ESUG 2004 in Kothen last September and the material I presented at CSUG 2004 in Frankfurt last December Both conference reports are on the Events and Trip Reports page of the whysmalltalk site immediately under where you found this one so to learn what I said just read my very long write ups of my own talks in those two reports if you haven t already even my vanity shies away from duplicating them into a huge block of text here I had a generous time slot which meant that afterwards Adriaan van Os told me For the first time Niall I realise that you can speak slowly Process Techniques and Tools Keynote Domain Driven Design Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software Eric Evans Eric started out as a Smalltalker wishes he could say more than started out as Smalltalk was his first love in programming The Smalltalk community is also the root of domain driven design and many other things In the 80 s Eric was sure that he would not be programming in Smalltalk in 2005 but he thought it would be a superior descendant of Smalltalk not Java Domain driven design first define your terms Niall standard Oxford Philosophy start The first key idea is that the main source of complexity is Niall should be understanding the business domain There are exceptions a simple transaction that you must do thousands of times a second with five nines accuracy is mainly a technical challenge but it
18. reserves so decides what reserves to supply The Money And Reserves System MARS loads several dozen reports and adjusts for known reporting errors Banks are good at minimising their reserve requirements e g You can have more interest on your current account if you let us put your money every night into a money deposit account without reserve requirement and keep your transaction rate low MARS loads all this into a huge matrix called the money files weekly money file and monthly money file MARS then recalculates The basic calculations are done in C code They are mostly linear but there are a few non linear calculations You can then make a textual or graphical forecast which automagically adjust its components to satisfy various constraints MARS is support by two components R and Smallpack Smallpack is in the Cincom Open Repository MARS was first built with C and a product called PowerBuilder whose supplier went bust two years ago Recent OSes break PowerBuilder so they had to rewrite After a year of politics and a visit by Jim Robertson Jeff persuaded them to let him use Smalltalk Jeff fired up the tool showing a data screen He has development tools inspectors etc available so if anything goes wrong he can fix it on the user s desk conveniently the users are all in the same section so they are to hand and he to them Often the data coming in is wrong but they cannot get the reports changed in time to fix it
19. same style as one uses when writing Smalltalk UI tests What are you testing e what s being painted what component thinks going on state and the component API does it answer when you call e components have hooks blocks to evaluate to test callbacks e internal state ask for last component and look at it example of WACounter test e Doback and see backtracking works Browsers can do different things on back Some always get it from the cache some check page meta data to see what to do He intends to implement subclasses of test browser to replicate these possibilities e check answers What was the answer Would it crash if the answer was fail You just call componentAnswered if you only care whether it did You can also mark tests for visual inspection This spits out flat files that can be opened in your browser later and eyeballed David also has slides on the other free frameworks SmallHttpUnit runs outside the server but is better than his at pulling apart the web page Selenium is a Java testing framework you could use for checking the behaviour of any Java script you use If you are always on server then as Seaside builds the DOM before rendering it you could just check that instead of waiting till it is HTMLed when you need tags to find elements There are a few exception cases but you could let SmallHttpUnit do them 42 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 SUnit BoF Niall Ross and M
20. there They find what classes they need by tracing from a set of root classes They drop methods that are not called but do not consider the receiver they may use advanced type inference in future The OSVM runtime does not allow dynamic loading of classes Instead they have on demand code uploading from the IDE including evaluation support and debugging This changes perform to use obj perform someSelector where these selector values can be restricted Bill Shwaab mention Dolphin s restriction approach which he has just been studying Christian has not looked at it but will do now do so He unpacked literally his demo device and connected it to his laptop running the IDE He then evaluated some Transcript printString code already on device In this version a debugger is running on the device all the time The next version will make this startable The code that interacts with it is uploaded on demand and GCed again when unused He next made the transcript code repeat in a thread which needed code upload The image is on the device The image descriptor has var names selectors and class names for debug so e g instance of 71 field 2 3 is translated to more meaningful text and source code They use RAM to allocate objects running the image directly from ROM with debugging and code updating still working OK Changing a class e g adding a method in RAM would be easy With the class in ROM they have a table of class
21. things item by item so they know they ve missed nothing This is for the good reason of being thorough and the bad but these days essential reason that one mistake in the record makes a lawyer very happy Physicians are good people and want to avoid mistakes Smalltalk lets him deal with physical challenges by giving him the time to do so it s productive It also lets him support domain experts who cannot give him specs because they do not understand software jargon so he has to show them the wrong thing to discover the right thing Lastly Smalltalk is robust these tools run 24 x 7 and he reboots every 7 weeks to reset the Dolphin timers in synch with the system clock which wraps around at 49 days plus change but otherwise they would run for months on end Smalltalk in Medical Instruments Andy Hodges Medtronic Andy is an electrical engineer who develops in Smalltalk Medtronic s 16 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 mission statement was written in the 50s 60s and has never needed changing People in the company like it It focuses on tasks worth doing and preserves the feel of this 50s started small company They build deep brain stimulators for Parkinson s disease which block bad signals in the hypothalamus that cause trembling cardiac management devices and spinal devices The cardiac rhythm management system is an implanted cardiac device pacemaker or defibrillator and a programmer device tha
22. to read their take on things Discussions Dolphin s Envy like CM System James Foster The people who sell OmniBase also offer an Envy like CM system for Dolphin It needs only one system method override of Compiler gt gt save There is a Project Editions Browser like the config map browser It has edition version lifecycle and tree display of history Project editions contain package editions in load order c f applications There is no has no equivalent of SubApp or more surprisingly config map pre requisites might be because Dolphin already has pre req approaches but one would like to see what the versioning impact on them is There is a good shadow applications browser equivalent it is easy to browse the contents of editions You can browse method editions easily all saves are captured 54 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 Overall it gives a fair amount of the same functionality but is by no means a clone of Envy either in function or in nomenclature Dolphin out of the box has a directory tree structure and application i e package browser It does not define but calculates in detail prerequisites Dolphin file out is largely an import string but also has pre reqs these are not version specific General Michael MS installer can open a port on your machine even if run with no admin permissions XMLWithStyle update restart works by creating a new image The new image talks to the HTTP server
23. 00 anaesthesiology machine The hospital is more worried about the hub than anything else Keep our network pure At first it was on a separate cart but this was asking for trouble trip over it moving machine unplugs it He found a better location in the back of another unit and wired the electrics and stuff on the back panel which he assured us was simpler than it looked in the picture He did not want to have air pressure pushing dust out of the cabinet into the theatre so arranged the fans to cause slight underpressure within it He could rig up the power strip computer and wiring He had to be careful taping tablet pen holders in place and suchlike to avoid some obvious Oops moving that caught the pen top and broke it possibilities His GUI remembers connection details i e which monitor interface to use for each configured serial port It can nag the monitors and has device specific expectations which are often pessimistic Lastly he fired up the system It opens on a list of ORs templates these are controlled or everyone would have their own way of doing everything The chart is where you record It has a grid to help users avoid when the time is just before or just after midnight recording events as late yesterday instead of late today or early tomorrow instead of early today Don t put lots of stuff in front of physicians where something contra indicated might be buried Physicians like to be shown
24. 4GL then it may well create a simple input form database schema and have written one record to a simple table before a Smalltalker developing the usual way has done so A target audience used to 4GLs may miss the value of Smalltalk in such a demo altogether or may get the impression that later extensibility and refactorability is being paid for by a slow start Georgio has created a framework that creates an initial Smalltalk system at AGL speeds which can then be evolved in the more usual way Wizards let Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 13 you build a simple model input form and database schema and connect them He demoed for the example of a simple personnel data application The aim is to persuade a 4GL audience that Smalltalk is all gain with no initial loss of speed and it looked to me like it would do so You start from a text file defining the domain and mapping and another that can define how any non default elements of the app should be displayed He showed an example phone table name email address etc with simple type info for the DB mapping basic type or class You load that file and his system generates the application from the spec He opened a PostGreSQL DB and showed that the table had been generated into it from the VW he supports DB2 and lots of other DBs You can select from the tool to build not build table view etc He showed the generated Smalltalk classes for PhoneContactView e
25. Colin the Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 29 syntax elements of Smalltalk are the elements used by the CM IBM has thought of syntax aware CM in Java but it is hard and is going nowhere fast that he can see It is so hard to discuss this with non smalltalkers compare the ease of implementing Monticello merges with the amount of code other language s CM systems must write to do a rather simpler thing Monticello specifically stayed away from integrating with the IDE Niall Smalltalk s strength is that everything is visible You can interact and refactor CM system or items in small pieces Envy is a good example of this except at the low level data format level where violating this Smalltalk paradigm they keep key code hidden and undocumented Q Heeg Eric s keynote talk stressed the need for an appropriate model What rating 1 100 would the panel give as the appropriateness of their CM tools models e Niall Envy is a curate s egg At first I guestimated its model as 75 or 80 overall but after thought revised this down to 60 70 It would be lower still if I were thinking just of the model not of model plus mature implementation combined Some things in Envy are good but many are too specific and some the component ownership model are plain bad e Colin the Refactoring Browser is an example of a tool that is a better tool because it has a better model He would like a refactoring versio
26. Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 1 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 Jim John Michael Blaine Georgio and I went to the Magic Kingdom on Sunday Alone I would probably have spent the day trying to understand how to get on a single ride Instead I was astounded by Jim and John s incredibly detailed knowledge of layout and procedure Led by the two of them we moved rapidly from ride to ride avoiding long queues The rides themselves were enlivened by John and Jim s ability to provide a complete version history of how the layout had changed over the past decade or how a particular prop had functioned three years ago when it had been part of the alien encounter ride When I learned that Jim has an annual Disney pass and has been every year for decades while John McIntosh has a time share pass and has also been often I ceased to be astounded that they knew so much about Disney Meanwhile Blaine nobly refrained from taking the opportunity to nobble a competitor when Michael occupied the car directly in front of his laser cannon in the Buzz Lightyear ride In mid afternoon Giorgio and I had to return to the hotel The others should have come with us after we left the rides they queued for were closed whereas Georgio and I took a wrong turn driving back leading to an exciting ride round Orlando Style In the text below I or my refers to Niall Ross speakers are referr
27. The first release will be 100 VAST plus their utilities and will include VisualAge for Java if I heard aright I know that Sandstone and others find VAJ excellent for 99 Smalltalk products that want a thin Java skin at some points IBM thinks modernisation means moving to Java They think that modernisation means moving the VA IDE a very 90 s IDE forward Their team is as large as the IBM team was and many have 15 years of Smalltalk experience Instantiations may be smaller than IBM overall but they are well able to drive VASmalltalk forward 32 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 The purpose of their first release 7 0 is to re establish the brand and put an end to the dying impression Release is planned for July It will not make major changes in the product but it will include many integrated add on utilities previously offered separately VAAssist adds some 500 enhancements to the tool bar WidgetKitControls gives enhanced versions of some 20 widgets graphical buttons etc GF ST is a 2d and 3d graphics framework very portable across ST dialects Etc In version 7 5 they will e finish ANSI support e enhance the IDE IBM team has ideas they will now feed in e include an improved Envy QA e more integrated Refactoring Browser and its Envy extensions e support newer native Windows widgets e start enhancing VA web services they were powerful but have had little work in the last 3 4 years so they will
28. alked about tooltips see his Frankfurt talk but he has changed the implementation Tooltips need a state machine to track time since last user action and respond sensibly A tool with a tip starts in state cool If entered it becomes armed If the user promptly does something it returns to cool If not after 0 5 seconds it goes to state reaper wait five seconds and destroy tooltip if user remains in widget go to warm state if user moves to another tool In the warm state the tooltip appears immediately not just after 0 5 seconds After 0 3 seconds it returns to cool The state machine is in FlyByHelpTracker and is called to by enterEvent and by exit events thence coldEntryInto aController etc Vassili had to protect via self cautiously to allow for the debugger being able to open if the code is wrong as debugger has widgets with entry events too Vassili installed the tooltip system on a Playground widget and showed it working TooltipAssistant subclasses Assistant which provides plugins to attach to widgets installOn uninstallFrom this lets the widgets themselves know nothing of it buildStateMachine builds the machine inside set Pane making it easy to reuse code while building states as all are built in same scope There is one state machine per system 6 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 For toolbars you want one tooltip for the whole bar but it
29. ances add instvar migrate instances add another instvar migrate instances etc Q Niall Edit Monticello version histories e g make two method versions with same source become same version c f Store reconciles There are no tools to do it It could be done Colin knows no scenarios where he has wanted that After discussion it appeared that the method level granularity eliminated the scenarios where this would be wanted methods are either identical compare tool then identifies them or not in which case a human probably has to compare them Q Still need higher level ancestry So far they seem to find they do not Colin found that shift in thinking hard but is now used to it Monticello has Element Version Element state history Slice not versioned but a collection of versioned Elements Snapshot slice saved in repository MetaVersion is for non code things comment for snapshot version no of snapshot etc all these non code things are also versioned So you can search for package comments descended from the comment of the package you are viewing Colin then demoed the merge tool The UI is basic resembles that of the Store tool shows conflicts Team Programming Tools panel Eric Clayberg Colin Putney Bob Westergaard Niall Ross I gave a brief overview of my own feelings about Envy mostly as compared to Store since I ve used both a great deal and often moved code between them Starting Envy because
30. artment etc The next demo was XML WithStyle It can handle any XML and speeds you up by offering a lot of common vocabularies HTML transitional and strict docbook scrum backlog etc He opened some XHTML fragment in a raw plain format then switched to the WithStyle website format and suddenly it looked cool He used the menus to edit it and lay it out You have a complete unlimited undo redo stack for any XML in WithStyle If you call Smalltalk code that inverts your entire DOM tree you can undo it He opened an amusing XML for CVs page and showed the hierarchic menu outlining the larger and larger affected areas a menu item applies to as he edited it They have demos showing changing language on pages He then showed displaying the SCRUM backlog XML and editing it The XML is very simple the XSLT transforms it and the stylesheets make it look good At this point time forced him to drop the SmalltalkDoc and BottomFeeder demos He ended with the Seaside integration demo in V4 He popped up a window with a multi line text window that was Pollock not HTML with the Seaside halos and so on Onward to Pollock Vassili Bykov Cincom Systems Vassili s talk was about his experiments with Pollock and his initial work on building Splash the Pollock GUI builder 37signals com once challenged people to explain what API meant in 10 words or less As well as the jokes Data pimp 1 2 a piece of computer velcro Vassili noted
31. asic data capture is a key part of the system ARPN data entry a second kind of nurse almost always female gets patient histories sometimes from very ill people and builds up much knowledge about them These people are less likely to be in life and death time pressure situations but they may have a full waiting room They have much more a view of the whole patient as against doing this procedure repeatedly on many patients They start to see connections because they see the history Systems must let them just describe things Anaesthesiologists they are like airline pilots who are very busy at take off and landing and may just be watching the autopilot for much of the time between Anaesthesiology is boredom interrupted by moments of terror They may have to flat line someone at 17C for the briefest time possible to save the brain from harming itself They must watch hawk like at all times They have no reserve attention at such moments and need machines that are responsive and forgiving They are not people that a sales talk can fool They do not want to be distracted from watching the patient by the need to handle the monitoring machines Haemodynamics i e what is the blood doing an anaesthesiology record will capture every five minutes the heart rate pressure oxygen state Every fifteen minutes it records what oxygen is being breathed in what C02 is coming out what anaesthetic agent is coming out with it what the brain s sat
32. but the magic that makes resources work Niall see the SUnit BoF write up on pages 25 28 of http wiki eranova si esug nfrESUG2003reportPublic Joseph has written a draft TestResource manual which will be reviewed at ESUG2005 Sames recommends always nilling out your tests instvars in tearDown because you should not make assumptions about how the test runner will run your tests He almost always does so We discussed two possible 40 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 exceptions e Tonce had to code tests for a meta data system where TestCases needed some key instvars to identify the meta data configuration that each test instance was running I therefore recommend writing such nilling code so that TestCase subclasses can exempt selected instVars and have an example pattern From experience I m sure this is needed when testing meta data systems e Tve also encountered a pattern that nilled only if the test completed correctly its coder s idea was that users want to inspect the values of a failed test However this makes a rerun of a failing test not an exact repeat of the initial run conflicting with the repeatability criterion If it did affect the test s behaviour that could be very confusing to users Do you want to be proud of your work Do you want to have pride in your code Write unit tests You do not want someone to come to you and say Your code is broken Your unit tests will protect your
33. ce President and general manager of Instantiations Smalltalk Products Division He played a Nasa tape that started with The missile knows where it is because it knows where it isn t and developed by inexorable logic to a discussion of The missile subtracts where it should be from where it wasn t as an example of what rocket science could sound like Eric first saw Smalltalk in 1986 and started full time work in it in 1991 in the original ObjectShare company developing WindowBuilder Pro In the Parc Place Digitalk days he was development manager for both VSE and VW at one point Now with VASmalltalk he will have been development manager for three major dialects When Parc Place began its decline he and others spun themselves out into Instantiations They have been an IBM Advanced Business partner for a long time and supply many VA products VAAssist widget kits and WindowBuilder They also have some Eclipse targeted products Java GUI builder etc VAAssist won IBM s best add on tool award two years ago IBM have put Instantiations in their staged transformation strategy which they are of course well qualified to do for people who want that but that is not what they are seeking They are very happy if their customers stay in Smalltalk forever They will help but not encourage anyone who wants to port Their goal is to greatly lengthen the life of VAST applications The new product is called VASmalltalk
34. ct UI behaviour it worked well However the second evening found me looking at the actual upfront web layout that end users would see fine for a shopping app but counter intuitive for a questionnaire As I tried to make the end user look more in keeping with the app the CSS seemed to be saying Well if I were you I wouldn t start from here when he heard this Michael said it was a novel way of building a web app After much time editing CSS trying this and that style it did not look that much better to my jaded eyes nor did the clock No real problem it simply needed a larger refactor than my time remaining CSS skill ratio allowed On to displaying result stats I refactored the domain model so these could be found more easily I gave the question component a subclass showing result totals instead of selection widgets against the answer texts Then I create sibling refactored them to abstract superclass and two subclasses one concrete the other the abstract superclass for question answering I looked at it I thought about how Michael s could be expected to look displaying in WithStyle and about how any competing Seaside gurus entries would look I decided to place my bet on one of them Competition Second Part The winners of the first part were Michael Lucas Smith Blaine Buxton and Andrei Sobchuck Kevin Bradinger came fourth Two of the winning entries were in VW one in Squeak and Kevin s was in V
35. ction WithStyle V3 in use plus developer programme and WithStyle V4 today s demos Last StS he demoed V3 showing scripting support he made a presentation engine in the demo and rich CSS2 support Now they have rich support for CSS2 and 3 they have several sites in use and they have fewer methods As well as CSS3 V4 has a better box model StyledXML far better speed as fast as Mozilla from a Smalltalk image and they get more behaviour for the same speed It is much more flexible than V3 because it is based on Pollock so any UI widget will be a web widget It has sensible drag drop drag this XML to anywhere it can go only to here etc They have before and after CSS3 zooming lets them preview in tiles etc and paging web style MS style continuous stuff Pollock is the future is much easier to use even in its current changing form gives better widgets HTML forms any Pollock widget e g tree view In the future it will help them pick up XForms or whatever comes along You can edit widgets to Smalltalk objects or widgets to the DOM Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 3 tree and the DOM tree to Smalltalk your DOM tree object has an attribute that lets you connect any aspect thus giving you a natural mapping and backmapping between the two He showed the CSS working in zengarden etc He likens WithStyle to Gecko something you build a web browser such as Firefox on not a web browser itself
36. customers who use C on the web and VB internally and he has interested them in Smalltalk through showing this Anaesthesia Information Systems at the University of Florida Wilhelm Schwab and Gordon Gibby University of Florida Department of Anaesthesiology This system would not exist if it were not in Smalltalk Smalltalk is Wilhelm s edge His talk focused on people and physics more than on his software showing why Smalltalk was needed It was very pictorial 14 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 The medical environment is very hostile to machines They get knocked over moved around etc Various people are involved Clerical staff Please don t tell them I called them clerks some are techno freaks some are people people and some are typists and hostile to Uls since typing is what they re used to One of his pictures of these people showing their environment just happened to have another Dolphin product of his visible on one of the screens RN data entry the next group are those nurses often male who serve the physicians Sometimes they are incredibly busy at other times they are sitting around playing solitaire They tend to be good at time keeping finding things spotting exceptions They may do surgical procedures They like forms where all they have to do is note any exceptions to the default situation As they are paid 15 minute it is important to track when they arrive and leave so b
37. d replicated a common Cincom conversation When will the nav issue be resolved I guess we ll have to ask Jim The unicast chat is effectively doing multicast things Using multicast makes it simpler people who want to talk to each other just join multicast groups Q Michael filtering When a host joins a multicast group it gets all packets sent to that multicast group The next layer of discrimination is the port number Thus multicast is very like unicast oneway messages differing only in their targets Multicast groups are tied to the object table You can only have one export per object and there is the issue that exported objects could be garbage collected if their local fails to keep them Martin then talked about grid computing When you have a complex task that can be broken down into subtasks and you have distributed resources then you have a grid computing opportunity Martin s demo was brute Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 45 force code breaking attacking the RC4_40_MDS crypto His strategy was to select ranges randomly search each range sequentially looking for the string GET likely to be present in target text We all started our images and the grid drone usual demo hiccough locked up for half a minute We inspected the drone and connected Needed to do GenericProtocol setos orGenericProtocol setHost When four people had connected successfully Martin started t
38. d the rewrite framework to applied the map in a systematic rename of instVars methods and classes My code now read much more sensibly I built an abstract question view component with concrete subclasses for single answer and multiple answer questions Refactoring put almost all behaviour in the superclass Questionnaire displayed but totalling code fell over unsurprisingly as it still thought I was buying things I changed the cash totalling and item number counting code so that results were totals of questions answered and the code knew answers can appear only once The shopping demo takes you from the list to an individual item view thence to buying By contrast my users choose answers directly from the batched question component list The predictable result of imitating the style of the shopping demo code was that while the answer widget updated in the component when selected the domain and the answered questions totals I display only updated when the user moved to the next page of the questionnaire This looked wrong and might cause unintuitive results in some cases Fixing it was not hard I just had to make the rendered HTML nest correctly but it was the kind of thing that someone who did web apps for their daily living would have seen in a second What next Oh yes the users may provide textual answers irritating people why can t they confine themselves to the choices provided Should I mutate the domain objec
39. delling tools strange that when people talk about software they sometimes forget this Eric has seen many teams fail despite doing all the above You also need strategic design creating the circumstances in which the above approach can work right Strategic design needs context mapping Eric was in a rowing eight at University There are no rowing sixteens because even with eight people someone gets out of synch every now and then and the results are dramatic and alarming if you are in the boat Software has the same issues eXtreme Programming is fast and works well with small teams Somewhere between 8 and 12 we reach the limits of people s ability to coordinate with each other But there are projects that must have more than 12 people to complete On a large project there are always multiple models always There are always 22 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 people trying to have one model Eric was one of them a long time ago Fortunately you can make multiple models work Imagine the team building the routing service that takes route specifications and cargoes and returns itineraries Their task gets much easier if they model their world in terms of arcs and nodes reusing existing knowledge on that problem Usually teams just have different models because they did not coordinate but it s worth remembering that shoehorning two teams into a model that fits one or none means the ill fitting team s must s
40. e tasks but it has proved to be extremely productive for them Romax started in 1989 Their first release of RomaxDesigner was in 1994 then written in Smalltalk C and Fortran It lets engineers model gearboxes and transition systems Dan showed a slide covered with logos of automotive firms wind generator designers agricultural machine designers aerospace firms etc on several continents who use Romax products Dan showed several gear shaft arrangements that Romax can model Romax uses static analysis Force stiffness of all components in six degrees of freedom times the deflection of the gearbox under load High distortion leads to excessive wear failure vibration noise all undesirable things Romax is part of the virtual product development market worth 2billion and growing at 10 annually Designing takes 3 4 years and much money via physical prototypes Romax cuts that to 1 1 5 years Customers are always asking for more complex simulations so they can reduce further the physical development Romax spends 20 of its time solving linear equations and the rest on non linear where traditional approaches don t scale for their domain They like Smalltalk because its simple syntax compiles lightening fast Working for Romax Dan missed the Java thing but suspects that their 400 000 lines of Smalltalk would compile slower Donald McQueen It wouldn t be done yet With late binding you can run tests even when the syst
41. e wait and they re off The smart money is on Michael His program alone never needs to be resumed and it even displays his name in the right box Michael races into an early lead beating Blaine and Kevin in the first round but in the round two Kevin s program stages a comeback out manoeuvring Michael s over when to play that key quarter coin The punters begin to look worried With Blaine out of the running it s neck and neck between Michael s program and had to resume but still hanging in there Kevin s Alan brings forth his own program for a decider play off Kevin beats it both times Michael beats it once but then it can t be the chants of Mich ael Mich ael fade away in disbelief as Alan s program wins And the bookies look happy as this surprise result leaves the crowd stunned Outsider Kevin has come from behind to scrape a triumphant finish Since Michael has to travel from Australia to attend a Camp Smalltalk which he may not be able to do soon on top of conference attendance he was actually happier with the second prize an iPOD Kevin by contrast lives closer to probable CS sites and was very happy to win the voucher As you may gather a fun time was had by all at the first Smalltalk coding contest See Jim Robertson s blog for the pictures e http www cincomsmalltalk com blog blog View showComments true amp entry 3297504143 and for refs to Michael s and Blaine s blogs
42. ection which is not to say there might not be some legal admin hurdles to clear JPMC technical people are well aware that it would be in their interest to amortise the cost of keeping it up to date by having some external group handle it and offer it to others These others may use it as an easier way of porting to Store step by step JPMC themselves because of the proprietary CM system they have implemented on top of Envy might be slow to port to Store However there seem to be significant political legal obstacles diffused between IBM and it might be JPMC and or Cincom It is just possible that as VAST approaches end of service IBM will become less hostile to the idea of Envy for V W being handled by another company ideally Cincom or a Cincom partner or they might simply become less interested in what happens to it As regards Instantiations quite apart from the work they have to do on VASmalltalk they do not have the Envy for VW code or the rights to it and so cannot help advance this Q Overrides in Store when you unload the current one of several overrides which one is then in your image It used to be that they were restored in order parcels but they have lost that and need to fix it for 7 4 Q Why can we not see class versions Store has a different history from Envy and though that knowledge is indeed there it has not been provided It was a design decision Q Alan What are common to Smalltalk versioning systems
43. ed to by name or in the third person A question asked in or after a talk is prefaced by Q occasionally I identify the questioner if it seems relevant A question not prefaced by Q is a rhetorical question asked by the speaker or is just my way of summarising their meaning Author s Disclaimer and Acknowledgements This report was written by Niall Ross of eXtremeMetaProgrammers Ltd No view of any other project or organisation with which I am connected is expressed or implied It is as accurate as my speed of typing in talks and my memory of them afterwards can make it please send comments and corrections to nfr bigwig net I thank all speakers and participants whose work gave me something to report and the conference sponsors Cincom Gemstone Knowledge Systems Corporation Why Smalltalk Instantiations IBM HCL Synchrony Systems and CSC Summary of Presentations I have sorted the talks I attended into various categories e Web and GUI Frameworks e Applications and Experience Reports e Processes Tools and Configuration Management e Vendors VMs and IDEs e Testing 2 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 e Remote Programming e Miscellaneous after which I list any Talks I Missed describe Other Discussions note Follow up Actions and give my overall Conclusions from the conference I also describe the pre conference Coding Competition and the play off As there were often two and sometimes th
44. else such systems are doing they see no problem Q Niall Dynamic loading to change behaviour of existing instances e g add default colour method to domain class with existing instances then upload code that assumes all instances know their colour then upload colour choosing code thus adding a new feature without ever stopping the application Dynamic loading in general is not something they support Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 37 He thought maybe WebSphere had a means to do what I describe but was unsure and if it does it is very WebSphere specific not general to Java Q Persistent state across runs Java does not have this This is irritating when testing They use serialisation to get the state back but it can remain a problem crash in a test and you cannot see the state that caused the crash Q Perform Many Smalltalks will optimise a perform selector to just calling that selector and they can do that For true perform they use reflection to get the class hierarchy s selectors and they cache the selectors Q Eliot Exception semantics They run on top of Java exception handling which is unlike VW but not so unlike VA They generate the appropriate Java try catch code to let exception on do percolate back but you now do not have the stack you can only pass data back so they implement it with block behaviour and non local returns A block with a return is a return to the method where
45. em is broken allowing stepwise development They also like class extensions using these they extend the language for domain experts bounce GUI and test behaviour off the model etc Their FORTRAN code base does not need multiple callbacks they have a single exception throwing callback that the Smalltalk handles In C or Java they would need many callbacks Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 11 The technical computing market is huge Products like Matlab claim a million users but MUnit Matlab s test framework has had just 48 downloads which tells you something about their culture Matlab like products are designed for analysts own use and do not address the product development cycle Romax like arbitrary length integers blocks etc Smalltalk s quirks are noticed by their numerical analysts They are OK with keyword methods less happy about the unconventional arithmetic operator precedence and would like FORTRAN like array syntax for assigning into an array There is a lack of native solvers and libraries Floating point performance is poor by default but there are work arounds Fortran is 70 times faster for simple floating point operations If you profile a layered architecture calculate in FORTRAN do the rest in ST you find you are spending 60 of the time transferring data between layers plus you can t move the layer boundary easily to refactor and can t profile across barrier There is anothe
46. ences world wide In any simulation boundary conditions are key not just the accuracy of your calculations Their product model extends so far out that you don t have to guess your boundary conditions This is one of their selling points Q How fast A gearbox static analysis might take 30 seconds Q Pair programming how do the domain experts like it It started 4 years ago deliberately starting small and growing gradually You need to go slow be tactful make the organisation change Matlab code can take 5 10 years to reach the market whereas their analysts see their code in the market in a month or two that motivates Some of the best coders are engineers Q Niall Marketing It has been word of mouth and early adopters in the past Now they are in the second phase and have to market themselves but the market is growing quickly and they re lucky to be riding that wave Q Migrate to VW They re pretty happy with VSE although they may find themselves encouraged to think about migration anon Pushing Smalltalk on a 4GL Shop RAD the object way Giorgio Ferraris ElevenSoft I missed this talk but caught details later from James Foster who saw it and from Georgio Georgio lives near Turin but works only one day a week there others in Milan and elsewhere He drives 70 000 km per year Smalltalk can easily beat rivals even in short duration demos when those rivals are using statically typed 3GL languages If the rival is a
47. ere two browsers on same method will no longer risk overwriting each other A three pane implementors senders browser navigates chains of calls and supports multi select Colour highlighting in the navigator lets you see e g which classes and methods are scratched Drag drop in the navigator is there and does all that you would expect and maybe more drag method onto text window dumps its Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 33 text into that window The debug through blocks add on is now standard in the product Click to bring up inspectors on visual elements inspectors are enhanced with colour and icons to classify instVars Text windows remember past entries and do autocomplete Etc Envy tools have been enhanced with icons colouring and filters Versions can be renamed according to criteria e g rename all after date X You can customise your versioning template User management used to be painful and is now easier you can add a user to all apps in selected config maps replace user as owner of classes apps etc by new user A super user function finally lets you stop overriding hidden password methods and then changing who you are twenty times to do straightforward sensible things Prerequisite path tracing commands find all paths not just one and help you prune your trees Menus for allInstances of a class or of all classes in an app speed unloading things It supports unimplemented refs search string search
48. ere forever They have lots of tools to support their development process They have a custom menu on their development image for login to GemStone icon manager UI spec manager direct access to Envy and debugging Kimberley did this menu previously they executed code in workspaces The menu centralises all the tools It was a good task for a new starter and it helps others She added menus for saving a method and compiling it to GemStone immediately They develop in manual transaction mode all the time Every two minutes a process aborts their transaction so if you are developing without having disabled that process for you this one menu click save and compile in GS is safe The menu item is disabled in fact not there for non GS stuff UI views etc They also have an RB hook in menu to find lint more easily easier to find so more often used Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 23 They have a weekly cycle development ends Thursday and is applied on Friday weekend Every Friday afternoon they have a test demo plus users come and talk about their issues One day per week for testing is enough because they have a weekly cycle It is a positive way to end the week focusing on what you have achieved that week not what is still to do They have a group meeting on Monday each developer selects the issues to work on that week A major bug in the system would prompt patches but only that code would be released Th
49. et platform and test It s a life saver that they have the full debugger on the platform Whereas the C developers don t even have an IDE everyone uses their own favourite editor and compile flags The research team replace the C layer with the Smalltalk layer over the firmware layer for each new device EnVision is the framework for all their development It began with the code from the human factors group HF had used VA plus WindowBuilder Pro Research replaced the GUI with simple VA Composition Editor UI as they were less focused on UI He showed examples simple fields buttons notebooks tabs Typically they download the software into the device and then have to provide parameters for some customisation that must be done The drop down box in OS 2 is ugly he showed how only the arrow is active not the text box to its left but their researchers live with it The use the same DLL as their market release software Luckily Andy is good friends with the production guy that owns this DLL so it has been easy to get him to provide a simple C wrapper round the C DLL that the production team uses Most calls are synchronous but not all If the heart contracts by itself that is a self marker that gets sent back In VA these callbacks have to occur on the main Smalltalk thread or the VM crashes bad so they implemented a queue that holds these till the main thread can attend to them Why Smalltalk Reusing the HF work to av
50. ew and Smalltalk MyClass newInstance becomes MyClass new Here the message is sent to the instance MyClass not to the Java class MyClass And they have a global lookup Smalltalkat MyClass toimplement Smalltalk at MyClass The audience asked questions on various issues Blocks are a problem in 36 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 Java One ugly solution is inner classes and they do use it Assigning to local variables in an inner class is a known problem They create a context object that holds all the variables and pass that it the context object can t be changed but its values can A less ugly approach is to view a block as an unnamed method call the method with no name is what I call a block in my notes on Smalltalk for Java programmers so they define methods for the class and pass it the block arguments and the context object as described above holding the local variables Because the method is defined in the same class as the block it has the extended scope required Their final approach is to optimise out blocks This is what they do most often do select reject get inlined which is not so unlike what many Smalltalks do as part of their optimisation process By default every block is optimised that can be but you can suppress this Type constraints are another problem They have a mechanism for giving typeless behaviour not having to do method lookups exploiting the
51. ey should cut the config map for every release for a small patch they might decide not to Their issue management UI holds feature requests bug requests entered by users and bug lifecycle new prioritised opened dev working on test so marked on a Thursday user knows to test it on Friday closed bug icon turns into butterfly icon Users get emails whenever issue state changes so knows to test this Friday They have a code compare tool between image and GemStone This is used to update the test database with code being worked on and also to compare all classes every Thursday The tool scans for method code changes and 2nd pass class structural changes deletions additions etc Recently they refactored this to speed it up gaining 20 They also have a migration tool in which they can specify which instVars to map to where whether to map only specific subclass instances etc A few weeks ago they migrated 30 million objects 10 of the database which was done staged over two weeks Happily the tool tolerates mixes of migrated and unmigrated instances by just ignoring the migrated Envy change reports they compare the opened and versioned config maps versioning only those apps that have changes releasing the parent version of those editioned apps that have no changes They always open all apps in the Dev map as it simplifies permissions issues and also tracking issues Class comments have been made issue reports this
52. he attack A black square gradually filled with green dots tracking the ranges searched scattered within the overall space oY keys to search in each range A completion widget showed the total percentage searched Martin started another drone on his machine showing that it connected to the list and started working The Grid framework is quite simple The controller is task specific It maintains the grid and configures the drones Drones are generic They look for a controller when started While Martin was explaining this the key was found by Georg Heeg s computer OpentalkMatrix Charles Monteiro Charles runs the NYC Smalltalk User Group He had worked for a p2p Java EAI company Now he works for a finance company that uses Smalltalk which he is much happier with He planned to do two demos one structured the second a demo that everyone could join and we Il see what happens He configured three peers himself Martin and Alan Knight acting as the inbetween peer Martin was to search for stuff Charles has being brokered by Alan He showed this three years ago at OOPSLA His demo encountered serious projector problems Charles machine did not like the auditorium s projector Remembering my own experience at Frankfurt last year I felt for Charles He and Martin worked hard for ten minutes to sort it finally being rewarded with slides on the screen They used TypeVNC an optimised variant of VNC which he recommend
53. hli e GemStone S 64 bit strategy Dan Ware and Norm Green I have brief remarks in the Discussions section below e Introduction to wxSqueak Rob Gayvert 50 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 e Integration of Smalltalk Systems E g ObjectStudio inside VisualWorks Georg Heeg I describe a little of Georg s work in my ESUG 2004 report I hope to learn more at ESUG 2005 later this year e A Smalltalk based system for dynamic multi context information processing Adriaan van Os and Eugene Westerhof my ESUG 2004 report describes the talk Adriaan gave in Kothen on this system Tutorials e Smalltalk Garbage Collectors John McIntosh see my reports of John s talks at last year s ESUG and Smalltalk Solutions conferences e Web Services Allen Davis e Domain Driven Design Eric Evans and Ralph Johnson Other Events and Discussions Smalltalk Coding Competition The Smalltalk coding competition had two parts Competition First Part The first task to be done over two days was to write an application to generate questionnaires from text file specs to present them on the web for users to complete and to present stats on the results For descriptions of how Michael and Blaine approached the problem see their blog entries e http www cincomsmalltalk com userblogs mls blog View showComme nts true amp entry 3293985879 e http www blainebuxton com weblog 2005 05 smalltalk coding contest s
54. hore wait on the completion of several processes by allowing negative values of the signal count Michael said he thought VAST semaphores already did this I will extend the pattern to let specific test cases override the generic wait behaviour e g with a fixed delay Post BoF Michael found that the code does not handle deferred blocks i e DeferrableActions I will work on this before and at ESUG CS10 SUnitResourcePatterns it is not uncommon that the test resources for a system cannot all be available at the same time For example developers working on a system that can only be logged in to one database at a time may naturally write tests that run against different databases If each test uses a resource to login to the appropriate database these tests cannot be combined into an overall XP suite without rework The Competing Resource pattern provides a minimal cost solution useful when using XP in a tight deadline environment is there another kind If the competing resources can be re parented under an abstract subclass of CompetingResource suites using them will run correctly Currently the pattern makes no attempt to optimise the switching between resources users should construct the suite in a sensible order so that tests using the various competing resources occur in groups This is usually very natural to do Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 43 The pattern makes a minimal change which I see as a
55. hose known and can add new nodes in the tree for skills they have that are missing For caching to work nicely you need every resource to have a distinct URI Thus every member s skillset customised as they wish ends up as a URI which you can then email to a recruiter and they will see just what I want Talks I Missed To make it easy to see whether I have reported on a talk or not here is a list of all presentations that are not reported on above Where I have reported relevant material elsewhere it is noted other reports mentioned are reachable from the whysmalltalk Events and Trip Reports page Talks e Object Relational Mapping Alan Knight see my report of Alan s talk at the Cincom Users Group conference of December 2004 e The VisualWorks VM Plugin Framework Sudhakar Krishnamachari see my report of Sudhakar s talk at the Cincom Users Group conference of December 2004 e Aggregating the Commentary James Robertson I hope to report on this after I see James at ESUG later this year e Complex Reports in VisualAge Smalltalk Dan Antion and David Pennington Bob Nemec gave a talk at last year s Smalltalk Solutions on another reporting system that also uses David Pennington s utilities e An Overview of the Cincom Smalltalk Business Suzanne Fortman I hope to report on this after I see Suzanne at ESUG later this year e Programming with Software Components From Globals to URIs Classes to Interfaces Richard Stae
56. icello 2 Colin Putney Monticello started as a thought experiment between Avi and Colin Squeakers work by mailing each other code so typical CM stuff is not quite their need What they need is good merging Thus Monticello 1 did little except merge Merging is simple in theory Ancestors have descendent branches which then remerge Typically find common ancestor apply changes of lesser branch to greater to get new version Almost every CM system that does merging does this Problem is when first branch changes alpha and beta second changes beta and gamma A human must merge beta s code Then the secondary branch goes on and now you have another set of changes to remerge Using single parent reasoning the beta conflict reappears but it should not if we ve merged it and the secondary branch has not changed it again Monticello 1 had a package level solution to this see last year s talk Monticello 2 keeps all ancestors of all methods a much finer grained solution Thus beta knows both its ancestors and the second merge uses this to see that there is no further merge problem for it The next issue is cherry picking users merge by only fixing interesting conflicts Suppose beta in the main branch being un cherry picked is not merged Now the secondary merge either sees a false conflict or worse thinks beta was merged when in fact it was simply ignored Monticello 2 by using method granularity histories solves thi
57. ichael Lucas Smith I discussed two of my SUnit patterns e capturing defects raised in subthreads spawned by a test e grouping tests whose resources cannot be enabled simultaneously into test suites Implementations of both patterns are in SUnitUtilities in the Cincom Open Repository I will port the first to VASmalltalk it can be ported to any dialect that allows method wrappers The second should run with minimal code changes in any dialect SUnitXProcPatterns either subclassing from CrossProcessTestCase or cloning its single method to your test causes the test to wrap the method forBlock priority while running the test so that blocks spawned directly or indirectly by the test process but not those spawned by other processes run within same test handler that the main SUnit thread is using Thus during a run but not during a debug any errors raised will be trapped just as if they were raised by the main thread The most serious outcome error beats fail beats pass is added to the main thread result My implementation names test spawned processes to track which ones need their errors trapped Michael suggested holding the processes in a collection it s less intrusive and WithStyle also names processes My waitTillSubThreadsComplete implementation could doubtless be improved It would be easier if Semaphore supported a thread safe procrastinate method inverse to signal that decreased the signal count and so let one semap
58. indexes in RAM which instances use anyway to find their classes A shallow copy of the class in RAM can hold pointers to all the ROM methods and have a new method added to it Q Colin Do you keep a reference to the ROM version of class i e not just to the ROM methods so if you unload your code changes you can revert to referring to the old class We have still a reference so could and should revert but do not do so today Q Donald Put changes into ROM You can capture changes to apply Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 35 them all at start up but the ROM once flashed never changes Q Donald Use They have projects with small devices Where people have the resources they stick with Java OSVM gets used where Java is too large Example a device with an antennae to network GSM connection It is a simple thing but you need enough logic to handle the telephone statics Q Colin Any changes since OSVM acquired by Esmertec We re focusing on where esmertec has not already got solutions e g they already have Java VMs on phones so are not looking to redo them See http www esmertec com solutions M2M OSVM for more info Smalltalk JVM Allen Davis KSC The first version of Smalltalk JVM was done in 2000 when 50 of corporate expenditures were on IT That paradise is lost and unlikely to return They are now releasing it to the community In Java libraries and VMs are split The idea is that you can u
59. isualAge Sadly Andrei couldn t attend the conference so Michael Blaine and Kevin squared off for the second round In four hours on Sunday evening before the conference they had to write an app that played a game posting moves via servlets that Alan provided Players start with an equal set of coins so many quarters dimes cents A player s move is to discard one coin from their hand into a central pool then pick up as many coins as they like from those available in the pool to a total value that must be less than that of the coin they discarded The winner is the last player with any coins left On Wednesday lunchtime Alan switched on a projector displaying the Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 53 programs running against each other As only Michael s program ran all the way through out of the box Alan changed the rules to say that if a program raised a walkback during play its creator was allowed one minute to fix and resume before forfeiting that game Michael consulted beforehand very decently agreed so as to make it a better contest As Alan remarked it also made it a more Smalltalky contest if people could fix and resume while running so this rule will probably be the norm in future years but I recommend an addition so that people like Michael whose programs don t need this get a minute to tweak their code between games or some similar compensating advantage So with bated breath w
60. it was defined not where it was invoked Hence you can t do Seaside in Smalltalk JVM just as you can t do it in VA Testing Cooking with SUnit or How to Burn Water in One Easy Lesson Sames Shuster Cincom Sames only found out a month ago that he was giving this talk It all started with Kent Beck s article in the Smalltalk Report of October 1984 about three classes TestCase TestResult TestSuite Kent did not have the philosophy all at once Sames was lucky enough to work on the second ever XP project Ford VCAP project and could see this but it was very Kent Beck ish to create a three class framework A test is your bodyguard the last rampart between you and your customer The should aBlock methods were because it was thought the error handling might be on what you were executing not on the framework so a block guaranteed late binding Sames changed that Now we have should raise to support that idea and assert deny for the rest Because the framework was presented as an academic manufacturing idea people did not get what a unit test was By the first Camp Smalltalk in 2000 there were many styles and several dialect specific implementations plus a simple UI TestRunner Sames had then used it for two years His bosses had a hard time understanding that there was no point capturing his unit test result ratios as he never delivered code until it passes 100 that was a Strange idea in those days Sames and Ro
61. l wafer location ionised gas etc Open one wrong valve and the machine will literally explode Every mechanism has a finite state machine logic They started with typical Smalltalk code doing Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 9 synchronous control and thread management but this caused much effort on thread management how do I clean this up and move on so for the last few years they have moved to FSM and alarm handling that saves state The priorities are don t hurt people don t hurt wafers don t hurt the machine A 300 mm silicon wafer costs only a few hundred dollars drawn as a crystal out of a molten bath of pure silicon But the total processing cost investment in a wafer is huge That drives bigger and bigger wafers the machine costs are much the same whatever size wafer they handle recently they moved from 200mm to 300mm wafers Their FSM framework nests state machines and allows for interruptible behaviour Time in each state s action method must be short as that is uninterruptible Whenever an action method gets long they rewrite it as an FSM As each FSM can be in its own thread they can no longer just wrap a high level call with an exception handler Instead alarms are passed to the FSM that started the FSM that raised the error it knows what to do Adventa provided a policy framework as they used FSMs more This abstracts much shared behaviour from the many slightly differing FSMs Policies
62. lltalk systems literally manage the making of money even more than if they controlled the presses that print the stuff The coding contest was fun I don t know if we will have one every year but we should certain have more from time to time The tasks were well chosen this will be the hard part of any future contest Written by Niall Ross of eXtremeMetaProgrammers End of Document
63. look at newer things such as security e include any Synchrony contributed migration tools In Version 8 0 they are thinking of supporting Longhorn enhancing web services perhaps namespace support and 64 bit VM support They will be including migration readiness demos from Synchrony so you can see what they can do As John remarked they have done Smalltalk to Smalltalk conversions in the past and their tools are powerful These tools can help you restructure your applications so don t ignore them as only relevant if you were going to port Eric listed costs for new and upgrade licences see his slide and or website He mentioned the competitive upgrade for 1995 you can upgrade from any commercial Smalltalk dialect With my UK Smalltalk User Group hat on I will add that if you are in the UK David Pennington of Totally Objects is a good reseller to talk to for anyone seeking to upgrade with local support etc Eric demoed the VASmalltalk tools that will be in 7 0 You have customisable menus history helpers dynamic colour syntax highlighting Bruce from back Can you also control text size If so please increase it Eric could and did context sensitive menus e g click on a selector to get implementors senders menu for it corrected spelling choices for unknown selector etc icons in navigator shortcuts e g select line and comment it out and many other accelerators MultiBrowser synchronisation is now th
64. middle of some HTML Mozilla had this concept but does not implement it He showed the window and an inspector He typed and showed that the inspected Smalltalk object saw the change Q Eliot Validation XSLT does not do validation is such It only lets you do the things its schema says you may so there is no validation need in the UL All real validation will be done in Smalltalk The next demo was the VW Welcome Window Mark Roberts wanted a welcome window that says Look how modern this environment is Michael showed embedded workspaces dolt embedded transcripts styled XML being constructed and displayed better than transcript Lastly he showed running code to popup a window As soon as the code browser is rewritten in Pollock you ll be able to embed it in any WithStyle window or pop it up EzyXM L is Wizard s product They use it to edit their client s websites 8 Australian government websites He brought up the road transport site brief flicker in demo due to a bug Michael introduced 2 days ago These have been in production for a long time and not one production bug They just keep expanding their use of it Michael used context sensitive menus 4 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 and popups to add another resource for users to download in the download location He then showed domain specific menus contacts info service info what procedure to follow to get this service from the dep
65. n implementation e g the UI must interrogate a memory range in the device long before the device firmware is ready so the UI writes tests mimicking They do refactor He was glad to hear that the latest SUnit supports logging had written some himself They use TestResources to simulate or really connect to the DLL They also support interactive tests on the target platform to check telemetry error handling window formatting text not clipped coloured correctly etc need to check this for the various platforms They do a little pair programming They like the values of agile They intend to upgrade to VASmalltalk 7 0 enhance the UI and refactor the model view separation Making Money with Smalltalk Jeff Hallman Jeff started by explaining that reserves are deposited by commercial banks in Federal Reserve Banks It is a legal requirement that any bank worth over 50 million maintain a 10 deposit The Fed controls absolutely the supply of reserves When the Fed buys something it pays for it by a Federal Reserve Bank check When your commercial bank cashes this cheque it gets a deposit at the Fed The demand is created by the 10 requirement on commercial deposits The Federal Funds Rate the overnight rate that banks charge each other for federal reserves controls this demand In the early 1980s the Fed was explicitly targeting the various monetary values M1 M3 etc Today the Fed controls the FFR thence forecasts the demand for
66. n of Monticello He went for a similar value e Bob felt there were a lot of problems with how things are modelled in Store Although it beats Envy in merge tool support and the like it s schema must be changed He initially suggested 50 for its model but in later discussion we agreed that this was for some aspects of Store s model implementation not for its model which is mostly OK It would also score higher relative to Envy if merging tools were considered Vendors VMs and IDEs VAST Smalltalk Transition Strategy Greg Boniatides IBM Also read Eric Clayberg s talk VA Smalltalk Going Forward below IBM has announced end of service for VA Smalltalk Enterprise in April 2006 They will release version 6 0 3 bugfix and that will be all stabilised is the corporate term They ve been in this technology for 12 years and gathered an impressive list of customers but IBM has chosen to focus investment on its strategic offerings Also talk of where the market is investing its money but see my earlier reports on the disconnect between income earned by VAST and the revenue stream it was allowed to receive Support extensions can be purchased from IBM or you can port over the next 6 to 18 months to Java or similar including Net which Greg says they will support interoperability with clarified by a Bruce Badger question i e they will tolerate it though they are hardly pushing it Java J2EE and Eclipse are rather wha
67. n Jeffries paired to produce a release 2 6 for VA VW VSE Squeak ObjectStudio Smalltalk X Smalltalk MT and Dolphin including a TestRunner that looked exactly the same on all platforms It still used dialect specific idioms 2 7 created SUnitPreload to eliminate these by encapsulating an abstract API This meant that all your tests unless calling 38 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 dialect specific code were themselves dialect neutral The committee for SUnit was Sames Jeff O Dell and Joseph Pelrine 2 8 added GemStone no TestRunner GNU Smalltalk and handled VW namespace and Store issues 3 0 added TestResource 3 1 added description etc for better UI and documentation resumable to capture failures but keep executing the test uses ResumableTestFailure It also added failure logging typically one logs to the Transcript 3 1 is the current latest release Sames stressed that users should not touch the basic SUnit implementation Subclass these classes extend them but don t touch them Changes to the SUnit base should be made by or at least in full liaison with the SUnit team Sames philosophy with which he remarked anyone can disagree when it s their turn to give this talk is that SUnit does unit tests It is not a framework for functional tests user acceptance tests or a UI for running tests SUnit is public domain copyright Kent Beck Camp Smalltalk currently Joseph is the
68. n improvement to the basic SUnit code Tests now check not that their resources are available that is still done by suites but that their resource s singleton instances are not nil This protects against the possibility that other tests in a suite while manipulating resources as can sometimes be needed have not accidentally reset them Both patterns are in the Cincom Open Repository as packages within the SUnitUtilities bundle Comments are welcome They will be reviewed and developed further at Camp Smalltalk 10 in Brussels If they win approval I will offer other dialects versions to the SUnit SourceForge site Anyone who wants them earlier by all means port and send me your code Other discussions as I was chairing the BoF my notes on what else was said were brief Three of us knew systems where the Smalllint checks have been called from tests and so made part of the system s overall XP suite I remarked that some people use the rewrite framework to encode their project s design patterns as tests there is an example in the custom refactoring project download customrefactor sourceforge net There was discussion of writing tests to prevent calling obsolete code or patterns Someone mentioned that the debugger can bring up lint rules and you can choose which rules are run Having tests send emails when errors occur is common and someone has arranged for emails to be sent when errors are raised while running tests even if
69. ng further work on the system that Reinout demoed at StS2002 It now looks set to be used for cross border trades in France Belgium and Holland Jay works in Atlanta for IntercontinentalExchange who also have such a system JWARS budget has been cut it is seen as lower priority than paying for the real war It remains the only cross service solution in its domain so Donald McQueen remains hopeful for the future James Foster is now working for GemStone in Testing We will coordinate re SUnit in GemStone 64 bit GemStone will have canonical dates done as specials not reusing the pre allocate oops approach currently used I talked to him about the pattern that exploits GemStone s symbol canonicalisation to provide general canonicalisation of symbol keyed objects Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 55 Follow up Actions Conclusions Tell Dan Poon about Christian Haider s good experience of porting from VSE to VW Pollock written up in my ESUG 2004 report Since my keynote speech was on The Value of Smalltalk it was really pleasant to hear several excellent commercial experience reports each making clear points on exactly why Smalltalk had been valuable to them I particularly enjoyed the unusually literal significance of Jeff Hallman s talk title Making Money with Smalltalk Federal Reserve deposits high powered money control how commercial banks increase the money supply His Sma
70. nuations implemented by interactions in the call stack created an issue he had to solve The normal way of writing tests is to create a component instance put it in the state you want then invoke framework calls on it e g create a calendar instance select a date that suits your test then have Seaside display it The problem is that Seaside components must have the appropriate Seaside framework calls in their call Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 41 stack but your test case as constructed above has not got there yet The solution is to set up your component in a block which you provide to the appropriate call in his framework testMySeasideComponent self newApplicationWithRootClass aComponentClass initializeWith myComponent do set up He provides a fourth halo appropriately named test case to invoke tests Note that this runs a test on its own component instance that it sets up not on the particular instance of the component class that you were viewing when you clicked its fourth halo to invoke a test of that class of component His test runner has some extra features over the Squeak one It keeps a history of the last page downloaded with which you can interact to study what went wrong What you cannot see is what Seaside submitted His talk uses a FormDemo example in which he tags all the input elements then tests The test sets data simulates button presses etc in much the
71. oid building custom telemetry made sense The C production stuff is not designed to be flexible so they would have had to build a system from scratch in any language if they had not reused HF He can count on one hand the platform differences they have to handle window maximisation beeps and bells some low level DLL calls Above all Smalltalk is fun work is not a four letter word The ability to customise the IDE makes them faster They built menus to let them configure between simulated devices They tweaked code printing to list Envy versions for their regulated process They ve enhanced change management analysis and export to feed their change management system Lastly Andy presented a few slides on the fact that agile development works fine in medical device programming A company s high level practices Andy has worked for several it s always a pyramid are so general anything fits The low level is where the challenge is make these items be part of your work Regulations say what but not how a fact that many people on both sides do not realise but you can work with them over this Not much in agile actually contradicts fashionable process and QA So how agile are they Some groups use Scrum The research group is not agile yet but seeks to become so The three UI people are keen but the five 18 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 firmware people are less so They do unit tests They do some test drive
72. olve their problem in surrounding service code the solution will be ill structured and invisible So you have multiple models Once Eric had a project with an Invoice object in the customer billing team and an Invoice object used by the team who paid subcontractors In the interest of code reuse the second team reused the first team s object Suddenly the billing team saw strange errors since two teams were trying to use the same word and code to mean two different things It was the same thing at a very fundamental level much more fundamental than either team s model could handle Each team s Invoice could only be understood in context Eric believes that making the context map explicit is very helpful Know what your contexts are Know what the relationships are if any between terms in different contexts Duplication within a context is bad Apparent duplication across contexts is not bad Eric discussed some possible context relationships He recommends mapping contexts as they are not as you wish them to be VA and GemStone Utilities Angela Martin and Kimberly Anderson Northwater Objects I missed this but Angela and Kimberly kindly re presented it for me later Northwater objects is the in house development team of Northwater capital a financial company of some 90 people in Toronto mostly and NY They use VA and GemStone Kimberley started working for them this year Angela started three years ago Bob Nemec has been th
73. pe to use a stylus as the end users did not a mouse on a desktop where some UI issues would not emerge It was also easier to use the real device to generate sample scenarios than to construct them In 1999 she started a six month project helped by OTI sub contracted to CompuWare Much work was done remotely merging daily over ftp It implemented a representative feature set for a market released implanted device This worked well for human factors but also met the performance needs of real devices Sadly the C C main development group simply ignored this But the research group used it to replace a two year hardware project with a three month Smalltalk project much to the satisfaction of their customers running the clinical trials They use small development teams 2 3 people short project times 3 5 months and projects with a customer of one researcher with the new clinical idea They have 20 25 projects per year for 15 implanted device platforms They have no shortage of work to do These are safety critical systems in regulated environments Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 17 It takes 2 years from a device being built to FDA approval and use so by the time they start learning about a new platform it frequently happens that all its developers whom they d like to talk to have forgotten about it They use VAST 5 5 VAAssist The do as much as they can on Windows the rest on OS 2 then install on the targ
74. r Envy repository will still recognise it instantly when it is sent back to you unlike Store which needs to reconcile and can be fussy Thor Raabe s mention above of his experience Store and Envy sending GemStone mods back to GemStone is an example Occasionally the fact that you cannot reconcile is annoying Store knocks the spots off Envy when it comes to refactoring and this is one example doing things in the image and or in the database and then forcing the two sets of changes to reconcile again can be an excellent way of pulling in your too branching project of forcing comparison of semantically the same but historically different items etc and here Envy gets in the way Another example of this using versus refactoring split is the fact that Envy is always on This is great for capturing all your work and presenting a consistent interface when comparing or reverting Diana Merry Shapiro s utility offers something of the same for Store However you cannot say to Envy Look away for a moment I promise everything will be packaged correctly when you look back This makes refactoring components hard each step must be a valid stand alone change Renaming of components requires destruction and recreation with loss of history as it clashes with how Envy identifies components Related to this is that loading problems can be hard to solve Knowledge of The Browser from Hell Application Editions Browser which is more
75. r than a human hair they etch to make connections etc 8 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 Q Donald McQueen how do you create layers Each cycle creates one layer The wafer is doped you add electrons to remove material You shape one layer then you coat the wafer with an insulating layer then you lay a polymer based material that can be exposed like film Then you etch away material that was not exposed then that which was exposed etc Thus you gradually build up the structure Q Eliot How do you register position That is a science in itself There are marks on each wafer that are optically aligned So where does Smalltalk come in They needed a control system that could run these tools 24 x 7 x 365 it takes billions to start a semiconductor factory they do not stand idle They use the Control WORKS framework in VW 2 5 and completed their first port to VW 7 1 two weeks ago They shipped their first system in 1996 and have shipped 400 systems The software team has 10 developers 6 support engineers and two managers in Liechtenstein and Florida Adventa was spun out of Texas instruments in May 1998 headquartered in Piano Texas They provide Control WORKS the world s first 100 single wafer processing system It provides generic capabilities What they really like is that Adventa give customers all the code They ve worked previously with libraries delivered in C C etc it became a nightma
76. r way Compared to fast for floating point languages Smalltalk is slow but compared to slow languages Smalltalk is fast enough Build it in Smalltalk profile optimise use FORTRAN for irreducible bottlenecks So they recommend the single language approach To sell this to their customers they use an analogy from the domain the chassis body metaphor A car chassis provides torsion rigidity while a car body provides space for passengers to sit in Thus these two requirements have been split although it is not necessary to do so This is a metaphor for a layered architecture since chassis and body are made from different materials But cars also use the monocoque car design in which there is no separate chassis one structure gives torsional rigidity and the passenger space It s stronger and lighter than its rival It s also harder to design and construct but market forces have made it the norm And it uses sheet steel the same material as the passenger space in its rival it s not the material that makes it strong it s how you use it Compare using just Smalltalk Romax began with a traditional team structure that naturally produced a typical layered architecture the programming team gravitated to Smalltalk and the engineering analysts to FORTRAN To produce a global optimum they created a single cross function team using pair programming pairing a programmer with an analyst This let programmers with no domain knowledge and analyst
77. re just trying to keep the system running Control WORKS simulator is a valuable tool The machines cost 5million so you don t have spare ones around to test on still less to break The simulator is also used for training and demos And all the non simulated part is exactly the code the real machine will be running He showed the complex framework architecture slide of some 30 boxes showing VW underneath framework support services underneath All the machines are doing things at once so it s a distributed system Productivity is measured in wafers hour and anything that increases that helps return the machines large cost N UI images talk to a single supervisory control image that talks to N machine control images Each wafer costs more than the operator carrying it around will earn in a lifetime SO it is very easy to justify automation you will never recover financially from one mistake The monitoring UIs sit on the Factory LAN and the machine CPUs sit on the Machine LAN with the control UI CPUs The Supervisory CPU sits on both Each Machine CPU connects to devices either directly or via the module s LAN Bus They are continually trying to improve heat handling clock speeds anything that will speed production They also can send wafers to other buildings or even other countries for further processing and return so there is now talk of Business to Business data passing via XML or whatever In the machine you must contro
78. ree parallel programme tracks plus ad hoc discussions I could not attend half of what happened but managed to report on slightly more than that due to speakers kindness in repeating talks for me at times The talks slides should be reachable from the conference website http www smalltalksolutions com For info on talks I missed and others take on some I caught see the Smalltalk blogs Opening Allen Davis of KSC and STIC and Alan Knight of Cincom Allen described the various facilities and sponsored events This included at the meal on Tuesday night a caricaturist who drew cartoons of anyone rash enough to ask for one which yours truly duly did Exhibitors The Precision systems stand was well stocked with goodies and they were raffling an iPOD as were the Cincom stand With the coding competition that made three chances to win an iPOD but I still don t have one Web and GUI Frameworks Transcend the UI Divide WithStyle Michael Lucas Smith Michael lives in Canberra and works for WithStyle his own company and for Wizard Information Services He has been a Smalltalker for 6 years his WithStyle colleagues for 10 years and for 3 years respectively MacroMedia just fakes a UI inside the browser and similarly for many others WithStyle gives the full power of a real user interface on the web They also have an XML editor for the end user not for XML experts They began with Nyx can it be done Kyx first produ
79. roll bars directly Q Niall put whitebox accessors in test only class extensions I use these with method and or protocol name making their test only nature obvious Sames is not keen His tests are always loaded he d rather use reflection Some people argue to add test methods on the tested class which Sames totally rejects Modifying your class to test itself could distort your class Example rating an insurance policy The rating is executed on a legacy server The data is collected with client Smalltalk Executing a rating changes the state of the legacy server To re execute the same rating you must reset the server a human actioned formal procedure In this case simple tests study domain objects Medium tests look at the UI entering data widget state Hard tests do the rating You could not actually unit test through to the legacy server because that s not automatic or repeatable Hence you test if the data was correct and was would be correctly sent down the wire and if fed with captured data back from a pseudo server has the correct effect When handling this case in a system he worked on Sames wrote a tool that captured the data sent to the server and the data returned He ran a functional test from time to time to capture this data His tool grabbed it and stored it for use in the unit tests There was discussion of TestResources There was general agreement that the key issue is not basic idea people get that
80. s You have the method s ancestry so can see whether it was merged or ignored last time Q How do you record ancestry info Monticello 2 records ancestry with the thing so described so a method s ancestry is stored along with its source code When you load the method you get its ancestry Colin finds this a simpler and more robust solution Now that every method has ancestry it does not matter which package that method is in A package can overlap another or be a subset of another Monticello works with slices of the image where a slice can be a package or a set of methods matched by a rewrite tool expression or a change set or whatever The ancestry of a method can have deletion in it A slice can include a deleted item Overall it is a lot simpler than Monticello 1 but weirder There is a final Smalltalk specific issue how do you update a running system Smalltalk tools are designed for this but can show problems if you Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 25 load a Monticello package that overrides a method used in loading Colin is trying to make Monticello 2 do as close to an atomic load as possible He aims to load while running in a Sandbox then atomically install and migrate all instances This is more interesting to do in Monticello 2 They have instance variables separate from classes so they are forced to do atomic loading to keep performance reasonable otherwise it would be load class migrate inst
81. s to get on screen via Martin s machine Charles connected to AKnight A configuration hiccough maybe warming up firewalls maybe the monitor issue maybe wireless issues slowed things He rediscovered AKnight but it remained bizarrely slow to respond from Alan back to him but worked at normal speed from Charles to Alan He searched for a component and found it He switched to talking directly to Martin but still had problems It became apparent that Type VNC was having some impact that obstructed menu handling and etc Having got the component he would have downloaded and run it It worked when they checked it earlier In the end the demo had to be abandoned OpenTalkMatrix uses p2p to find things including Smalltalk code His demo would have shown finding a parcel in a peer to peer network using keywords and comments downloading it and reconfiguring the environment that the parcel needed to run using config files and suchlike supporting resources The idea is to make it easy to set up private peer to 46 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 peer networks not be connected to some central server Q Michael Similar to BitTorrent Somewhat noting he did not know much about BitTorrent You add components by adding or putting them into your OTM folder Searchers guard against cyclic and back propagating queries He is working on transmission security with an obfuscate ST ST protocol wrapping connec
82. s Seaside testing talk Tweak is Squeak s post Morphic UI John s electronic book project is using Tweak not morphic They have funding so they can influence Tweak They provide testing framework extensions to let you test the widgets in SUnit John mentioned an example of German versus English idiom a German Tweak developer used a beWare annotation meaning be aware of so intended to tell a programmer that a state change will occur as part of invoking certain methods which his English speaking Tweak colleagues read as beware meaning don t use Applications and Experience Reports Commercial Machine Control using Smalltalk An experience report from the Semiconductor Industry Thor Raabe Unaxis Wafer Processing Unaxis is a Swiss semiconductor manufacturer also data storage and other products headquartered in Zurich They were founded in 1906 and now have 6000 employees Thor has worked for them in Florida for 12 years They etch circuits onto thin films 10m thickness adding or removing material It takes hundreds of steps to build up these wafers These steps are done on radial tool clusters in an incredibly clean vacuum environment deep space pressures People in bunny suits sometimes two layers of them add the wafers to the cluster A wafer may then go round the circle many times before all steps are done A cluster can process multiple wafers at once He showed diagrams of the shapes much smalle
83. s were similarly sparse perhaps they d be as good Q Hardware locks Users dislike them and they add to the product cost OpenSkills Bruce Badger OpenSkills is trying to become a frictionless market people for skilled people The SkillsBase is a CV database It s the opposite of Monster in that you the members control what of your CV is visible It is free to search Being a small non profit organisation means that it has approximately no money so it can t afford to build systems in Java Java is an attractive choice for consulting companies because they get to charge for twice as long as Bruce has seen when he worked for such companies 48 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 The Wiki uses WikiWorks it works very well is reliable and is fast All systems run in Linux machines in Docklands on UK 15 month with 64Mb of RAM They make each machine single purpose so any misconfigure loses only one service They run GemStone on these machines and find it works fine The SkillsBase has a complex and changing data model trying to reflect better and better what skills people have and want and they hope that it will need to scale greatly Development is distributed and the scarcest developer resource is time People connect to it through Squid which unbundles https to http a nice simple connection for their system to handle They also cache all hits for ten seconds so if Mr Popular joins and gets scanned tho
84. s with no developer skills get started fast It greatly reduced errors since coding and domain skills were always to hand Dan noted that engineering analysts may not be typical of your usual domain expert since they are all numerate literate people The monocoque idea has proved valuable over time As customers demand complexity the tradition layer system starts duplicating function between layers It also defers integration and testing since you do changes to each layer first and only later integrate and find what fell between the cracks They used Smalltalk originally because they started before Java was known C was not much of a choice but it has proved a lucky choice Smalltalk is malleable and malleability equals customer responsiveness 12 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 Later when Smalltalk was looking unfashionable they revitalised things with pair programming They would like the Smalltalk community to do more in technical computing steal features from Matlab Q Eliot FScript array programming language for Smalltalk There isn t that much array programming Most time is spent in non linear iteration Q Your dialect is VSE VW is not as bad as others in floating point Might you improve your performance in that dialect Noted Q John 3 D extrusion printers They don t interface to CAD CAD is a drawing market whereas they model behaviour Q Customers They current have some 100 lic
85. se a VM from from one vendor and libraries from various others Smalltalk JVM produces 100 Java byte code This makes it possible to have different libraries from different vendors coexisting in the appropriate namespaces By 2001 most of what he presented was already there e Compile Smalltalk classes to Java Byte code e Ability to subclasses Smalltalk class from Java class and vice versa e call Smalltalk code from Java code e full support for blocks e servlets applets etc There are many problems in representing Smalltalk in Java Java classes are not first class objects The same code will not run as a static method and as an instance methods polymorphism is completely broken in Java on the class side So they went back to the ST 80 book and studied how the Object subclass Class pattern works there then replicated it in Java A Smalltalk class in Smalltalk JVM is an instance of Class not a Java class Thus they have created the entire Smalltalk class hierarchy as instances He looked at how printString was implemented in Object It calls printOn which subclasses override When an instance of A is sent printString it works the same in Java and ST Suppose we had a printString class method and sent printString to the class object A In Java Object class gt gt printOn would be found not A gt gt printOn since the static method references are hardcoded In Smalltalk JVM Java s new MyClass becomes Smalltalk s MyClass basicN
86. se of master bundles He expects to see compound growth of Smalltalk Free Open Source libraries Seaside Swazoo Glorp etc He expects to see more use of GNU and Squeak too Java and Net got exited about Refactoring Unit tests etc after they had been done in Smalltalk and demonstrated Croquet and similar will be causing the same effect in a while Bruce wants more ANSI standard work more standard library interfaces Files Sockets Dates and Times He also wants easier deployment Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 49 Q Niall Do you use Keyboard Video Mouse sharing Yes they do KVM for our development Their skilled customers include doctors etc but they could reuse their experience for the computing customers Q Contracts and tasks not just skills Some work done on that someone did some Ruby work and has now realised he should be using Smalltalk Q HR XML HR XML is an XML schema defined by the HR XML consortium covering resumes but also lots of other things that an HR department might do They have an XML validator They pull data that interests them from the HR XML into objects where they can work on it and they also populate from other CV formats Q How to manage the glossary of skills a person may have Members enter skills and that is how the skills tree is populated You then search for skills that match your string and then find members with those skills Later members choose skills from t
87. shepherd BTW Joseph has invited me Niall to become an SUnit shepherd I m happy to receive SUnit proposals Kent said a unit test was a predictable reaction of a target object responding to a specific stimulus By representing each predictable situation as an object no two tests will ever interfere Tests should not depend on each other so should not be repeatable Sames therefore advocates TestRunner holding the tests it runs in Sets to avoid order dependent effects This prompted discussion Colin dislikes Sets because they are at once not predictable enough and too predictable Tests should not interfere we all agree on that butif they do you want to rerun in the same order to find and fix the dependence not see an error you then cannot repeat and don t know the order of On the other hand Sets are too predictable They do not in fact offer much guarantee that order is being permuted from run to run I agreed I think the UI should run in the same order and have another user invoked action that explicitly runs all tests in all possible orders or some optimised subset TestSuites quite correctly use OrderedCollections so many ways of running tests do in fact result in fixed orders and the original pre TestRunner framework always would There was much further discussion generally John McIntosh Colin and I all felt that the aim was correct but a Set implementation was the wrong way to get it Sames then discussed test clas
88. sification To Sames e aFunctional Test can combine multiple units of work be defined as not repeatable may have preconditions for success can interact with changing resources and may have explicit test orders e an Acceptance Test is a written script of behaviours leading to a non exact definition of success Here historical testers reappear Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 39 How to use SUnit It s easier to say how not to use it e you don t test accessors mutators that vars are initialized to nil etc e unit tests are white box you can look at internals you can use reflection e g you might explicitly test that a selector is absent e g this model does not respond to value Sames has tests that test the existence of classes and subclasses Pollock is a framework and so the continued existence of the interface classes that programmers are using is part of the contract offered by Pollock An existence test on a class is the best way to assert that this class name is part of the public framework that users code will reference it so it cannot be refactored without imposing documentation and conversion tool costs In Pollock you cannot get your hands on the scroll bar of a window directly only its decoration Sames does not give users accessors but he has tests that walk to it The tests show that it works i e that users can use the interface provided without ever needing to get at the sc
89. sistant He then changed that assistant for a tooltip assistant that showed name and package in a popup None of this is being done by the widget The widget is stupid These assistants handle all This is what has changed since Frankfurt The AutoIndentAssistant just indents text as the previous line was indented A real CodingAssistant needs more complex behaviour auto completing from the names of all instvars in scope or whatever This in turn needs an intelligent partial parser Marker is a utility that will be in Pollock letting you place markers at points in text A marker is like a bookmark that you can query what is next character prior character charactersToEndOfLine You can move the marker reason about two markers etc This lets Vassili avoid writing code with index handling so produces more meaningful code Q next Character should be next Perhaps it is an experiment at the moment Vassili was thinking of it in a list containing next Word etc Splash is Pollock s GUI builder Whenever Sames doesn t know how to do something he says Splash will do that They have created an extra component called Scallops anyone who fixes a bug in Pollock will be told the secret reason for this name as a reward Scallops will handle the UI specifications their XML representation etc It already has 3000 tests There is the UI the specifications and the fluff all the ways you could store the specifications You can dis
90. t controls it This is what Andy works on They are not yet although Andy has thought about it using Smalltalk in the implanted device they use it in the programmer companion The programmer is a PC motherboard with custom telemetry ECG and a chart recorder They still make use of OS 2 because development began in the early nineties and you do not go to a patient whose pacemaker battery will last another 10 years and say Sorry the OS is becoming old we must operate and remove your device and replace it with one whose companion runs on a modern OS They have been changing over for 5 years and may have retired OS 2 in two years The programs must be the same on both OSs people who run the programmer must not have to do different things depending on the age of the patient s implant Andy works in the research arm They download new software into devices to see what happens sometimes on the bench sometimes on animals sometimes in full blown clinical trials Their old system required custom telemetry hardware which did not work with new telemetry protocols Before Smalltalk they would have spent 1 1 5 years designing new telemetry hardware Their customer also did not like having to use one system to interact with device normally and another to download new behaviour Someone in the human factors group started using Smalltalk to show UI prototypes but she also wanted a high fidelity prototype She particularly wanted the prototy
91. t or wrap it with a text holder Should I wrap the Other answer or the overall question Users could select the Other choice then provide text or just provide text thus implying an Other selection Should the text field be visible in the main question view or should I call a new view with a text field when the user chooses other 52 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 Maybe I could show a small text field with the user able to see a large one by clicking an option Maybe my question component could call a new one with a larger text field when the entered text length exceeds some value Maybe I could finish this sometime next month Spending too much time pursuing the perfect answer has always been something I m good at A side effect from hacking the shopping demo was that by reusing the old shopping item component I could also very easily display and select from the set of all questionnaires I again cloned shopping components this time renaming to the new domain immediately and made the demo two level so now I could create a logical group of questionnaires from a list then complete my chosen group in a batch process able to submit or abort the whole batch as a unit if I liked Will this impress the judges as an extra feature or cost time I can t afford As noted I m slow to hone CSS HTML Reworking an existing app seemed like a good idea on the first evening and for model and abstra
92. t they would have you use Greg knows some VAST systems will be running long after everyone in this room has retired IBM offer the accelerated transformation path in which you can port in haste and repent at leisure Niall or the staged transformation path in which 30 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 you port more slowly Or you can stay in Smalltalk with Instantiations IBM IntegratedTechnologyServices front end the extended support i e do the paperwork Support will be done by the SWG Lab John O Keefe Synchrony systems does the accelerated transformation CSC Solution Services have a Smalltalk background and focus on managing large transformations Last but very far from least Instantiations Eric Clayberg Mike Taylor is the key player for VAST follow on i e continuance Synchrony claim 40 successful Smalltalk migrations I found myself wondering how many of these were Smalltalk to Smalltalk or non Smalltalk to Smalltalk How many successful ports from Smalltalk to a statically typed language have they done and how large were they Jim told me that only two such are mentioned on their web site the latest in 95 Q What constraints on Instantiations There are indeed constraints they cannot sell some proprietary technology They cannot sell VW Envy because they do not have it only VA Envy They cannot sell their VAST business entirely to MS or to any third company There are no time constrain
93. t things sunset Both spent some of their IBM capital to create the ways forward that now exist VA Smalltalk Going Forward Eric Clayberg of Instantiations and John O Keefe of IBM John has been the IBM VAST team lead for years and has been on the project from before v1 0 He will talk quickly about what happened and Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 31 will happen in IBM so that Eric can get onto the interesting stuff John s initial talk recapitulated Greg s end of service for the enterprise product N B not for the server product Smalltalk s problem is that is doesn t fit with IBM s Rational Eclipse Java strategy Niall IBM strategy problem rather Many other ill fitting products have been sunsetted already and now it is Smalltalk s turn If you want to leave Smalltalk you can go the staged transformation or accelerated transformation route John heard Bruce say last night that accelerated transformation sounds like what happens to crash test dummies when they collide with a wall Staged transformation is offered by Synchrony John mentioned that some of the Synchrony tools are also quite useful if you want to stay in Smalltalk and reengineer your system If you stay in Smalltalk John s recommendation though not IBM s then you can buy extended release 6 support from IBM or you can go to VASmalltalk from Instantiations who will be providing future releases Eric is a Senior Vi
94. tc The Views appears in the VW GUI builder as layouts so their defaults work OK and you can edit them easily An ini file says how to connect to the DB Basic behaviour is to open a connection Standard named methods openMaster etc let you open the view and enter data search for data etc You can add methods to let the domain or the view know what variables they want in the view Search shows a typical view of matched instances in a paging system with the usual buttons Search has good matching features and meta patterns The whole can be configured from the UI or with methods He can browse a tree list of the domain and select items from it to create views search on it etc He can now save his choice with a name and with description etc and reuse it Results can be exported to Excel He can manage really large databases with this Giorgio then opened a real application he has delivered to a customer It stores work agreements between companies Blue fields denote subobjects with their own views within the main view You can drill down into these to see views or to search from a field you can query the subobject on all its fields He has strategies to load just what he needs from the DB storing and wrapping as needed This is all Smalltalk with the power of Smalltalk just waiting to be used If you want checking on data entry just edit the setter method and so onward and upward to a full Smalltalk system if needed He has
95. te users who would use it and general question of corporate non corporate focus Instantiations are readier than IBM to look at that space and to hear ideas Donald McQueen thanked Eric and Mike and John for making this happen Preserving the Reflective Illusion in an Embedded Smalltalk System Christian Hansen Esmertec Esmertec provides software for mobile phones and embedded devices 34 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 often on Java VMs In Denmark a small part of the company is using OSVM Standard embedded device development is stone age insert printf statements and similar Many embedded systems are not supposed to shut down They want to catch errors and fix them while the system is running Smalltalk suits such implementations In traditional Smalltalk systems development and runtime environments are merged They want to fit their runtime in 100k Hence they split these development runs on an IDE machine talking over a serial line or network to the OSVM Runtime on the device The IDE drives all interactions They reduce footprint by leaving out everything that running does not need e g the names of variables by compressing the memory and image contents and by putting some stuff in ROM same space but cheaper than RAM They also omit classes that are not used and methods that are never called They therefore have to work out what is not used and how to give programmers the illusion that it is still
96. terface to the VW system Even in its present state this is entirely feasible Implementation requires certain singleton state objects in the RB and elsewhere to become multiple c f my demo in Bled of it in the RB When users can move code in an image between management systems on an application by application basis taking their time to complete a port then porting between CMs will become more XP like and have less of the big bang style it tends to need today Regrettably as regards porting from Envy to Store the political admin issues of making Envy available in VW7 see Q below mean that VW users with systems still in Envy may not receive mixed CM anytime soon Lastly I mentioned that Dolphin has an Envy clone CM system I believe most Dolphin users find the default cvs like CM system adequate but the Envy like one is used confirmed in audience discussion see James Foster s presentation of it in the Other Discussions section below Monticello Colin learned early that what you re trying to do is capture how you got to where you are Because of this your CM tool will reflect your process Monticello 1 is designed for the Squeak process in which 100 people are working and none of them can be forced to do anything Thus Monticello is good at merging and that s about it Most people in the Squeak world use it and Squeak 3 9 will be developed in it Tweak uses it 28 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005
97. the following answers Another programmer s idea to remind you that you are not a programmer and APIs are to programs as GUIs are to humans Last year in Seattle Vassili noticed the hotel alarm clock Sony dream machine buttons for snooze nap sleep etc But the alarm mode setter took the biscuit for counter intuitive UI blatantly and unguessably showing the binary setting mode it populates Last year Vassili decided to spend an hour pair programming a simple font selector Two days later it only sort of worked It was harder than he expected partly because of odd code in pixe1Size that fails the least surprise principle We have mental models and so we misattribute blame unusable means not corresponding to our mental model What is central to Smalltalk Modelling rather than programming Georg Heeg This principle distinguishes good Smalltalk programmers from bad Framework design is like piling blocks on each other Soon the pile is ready to fall over We can make the blocks very big simplistic solution or make them more even and better arranged simple solution The widgets in Pollock will not be stupid Sames The widgets in Pollock will be intelligently stupid Vassili To explore Pollock Vassili Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 5 does things that he knows are hard in Wrapper sometimes so hard he failed to do them in Wrapper PollockPlayground is a window with menu and
98. the keys are not at all easy to stop The response must be related to the level of threat A 15 item not widely copied is little worth protecting but you may want to be able to step up protection if a product proves hot They were only really looking to stop casual sharing so wanted some hard to guess elements plus transaction information i e the sale loan or whatever and version information Dan uses a sequence of base 36 large primes product and version codes Base 36 has almost three and a half million 5 character prime numbers They cache them in a table and offset into it via the serial number using methods fromTable atOffset randomFromTable etc The second prime number 4 char base 36 is generated on the fly from the serial number as there are only a few thousand of them causes a brief delay Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 47 which is good for guess frustration The product code also gives the acquisition method and release info There is also a minor version number and a masked user and serial alphanumeric Lastly you obfuscate the whole string by rearranging characters via e g String obfuscate 4 max 13 String deObfuscate 4 max 13 The string was build modularly so pieces can be validated modified People who crack things tend to publish as soon as they think they ve cracked so if various validations are spread through your program functions they may get caught You can also let opera
99. til windows into specifications and build windows from specs You can write specs as fluff and read fluff into specs Lastly you can create windows directly from fluff when the fluff is Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 7 generated code meaning your application need not load Scallops Vassili sent asSpecification to the Playground instance He then mapped this via SpecificationCode Writer to various fluff to text browsed in a workspace to XML He showed some specification test cases that wrote restored and compared a spec for a wide range of specs i e buttons specs menu specs viagenerateRestoreAndAssertSameness He has extended the specs so that they can compare themselves Q Heeg Can we do auto adjust in Pollock Sames preferredExtent should give this Q Who will document this Sames We know this must be documented We also have to train our support people to support it Etc That s why my roadmap includes 7 5 not just 7 4 Pollock Sames Shuster Cincom Systems I missed most of this talk Sames slides have much code plus see my reports of his talk at last year s Smalltalk Solutions and Vassili s talk above Pollock has lots of nice features Sames slides show Roadmaps for 7 4 and 7 5 and for post production refactoring scripts from Wrapper frameworks native widgets Tweak John McIntosh I missed almost all of this talk as I was catching David Schaeffer s repeat of hi
100. tions e g don t offer this feature be driven by what validates and what doesn t More could be done 3 million primes mapped into 1000 customers lets you use many offsetting approaches You can store fields in unusual places e g in the structure elements of a field hard for hacker to know what can be changed safely or in graphic files Delaying between each validation piece frustrates brute force attacks Delaying before revealing that validation failed also helps in fact crackers are most humiliated by publishing that they cracked something and then being proved wrong There are very sophisticated crackers out there Dan has an employee who connects him to this murky world If they want it bad enough that they crack it your product is good it s a badge of honour well sort of Many MS Adobe etc techniques that annoy normal honest users are cracked by these people easily This is worth being aware of you don t want to annoy honest users Dan had a racing game that asked you what the colour was of some random item on a page of the user manual It was great protection people copy games and maybe even photocopy manuals but how many will make a colour photocopy but Dan is partially colour blind this is the only program he ever deliberately cracked Q You use prime numbers Would a table of random numbers be as useful Large prime numbers are sparse in their range and Dan had code for them If your random number
101. tions in Stunnel burying passwords within Smalltalk It is on the web with a windows installer so we can download and try it You can compare this to Java WebStart an HTML thing that lets you find a jar file using Java s ubiquitous VM Every Java shop he has worked at has always had to package the VM so he s sceptical about its ubiquity The demo problems meant he ran out of time His slides note some features of peers in general and in his system specifically Miscellaneous Serial Number Generation Dan Antion American Nuclear Insurers They ve used Smalltalk VA since the mid 90s Recently he had to provide serial number generation He found an approach in the literature and implemented it Their insurance company develops code for their own users and were not much concerned about who copied it They reinsure world wide and sometimes have visitors who ask for copies of the s w One user is a graphic artist developing rich media content around their software However they realised a need to track copies brokers could use their software to replicate analysis Hence they issued serial numbers to users and then generated a registration code not used as an activation code at present it could be which the user receives First task is to decide who you re dealing with e casual sharing is fairly easy to stop e hacking shareware and copying of limited time trials are harder to stop e people who aim to crack and distribute
102. to Long Beach rail to Dallas truck to customer site either model describes this Scenario 2 reroute mid transit customer wants the toys in Seattle not Dallas Software engineers are always trying to make the world simpler and tidier than it is so neglect such scenarios Drop last part of route replace with rail from Long Beach to Seattle Now the two scenarios are distinguishable The reroute requires us to look inside the Long Beach stop object but does not require us to look inside any leg object Scenarios in which the cargo is mis routed cancelled returned to sender etc will all be easier in some models and not in others Eric s rule of thumb is that the model that makes the hardest problem easiest is the one Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 21 to use if a model made routing a new shipment harder but re routing mid transit easier he would use it not its rival Summary a ubiquitous language structured around the domain model and used by the programmers gives your software value Eric then talked about modelling non sequiturs true statements that often get followed by false statements e We need tools that let us express models without getting bogged down in technical detail SO we need tools that let less skilled people develop using parts developed by more skilled people But reconfiguring legs may be much harder than modelling legs so you get unskilled people doing hard programming
103. tolerant than others of opening and changing things while unloaded can be essential Debugging loading problems often lands you deep within huge hidden source methods The good side is that it does not happen often as Envy is a mature product Although Envy is always on its warnings of clash possibilities someone else has a later version of the method you just changed from the same parent are poor Coast improved them by showing weather indicators sunshine means no clashes cloudy or rain for states of increasing possible seriousness Another always on drawback is its very chatty protocol It is intolerably slow over a 128k pipe and pretty bad over any narrow connection Merging along with component refactoring is the area where Store wins over Envy Envy s comparison tools show their age and they are comparison tools not merging tools Every load alternatives decision is manual and if you re not using the Three Way Difference Browser add on then you have four clicks to check instance side public class side public instance side private and class side private whenever you cannot be sure Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 27 that private has not been used Envy s private public distinction was presumably another idea that looked good at the time but is a thorough going pain to users The proprietary data format and unique version identifiers make exporting and importing easy The only
104. ts What they can sell they can sell and maintain forever Mike spoke of their easily having two decades of Smalltalk clearly visible Greg closed by saying that it had been hard for him to come back to the team to do this job but it was what he had been brought in to do he was recruited for this job he did not seek it He has had some colourful emails Bruce sympathised with what he saw as a ghastly job as did the audience John O Keefe is very happy that Instantiations has taken over the code base and will be building follow on products As far as Greg and John are concerned if Instantiations do manage to make more of VAST than IBM s strategic assessment suggests well good for them Greg also mentioned the number of companies IBM is acquiring Rational Lotus and so on and that Smalltalk just does not fit with this portfolio I would agree though I might say it with a slightly different emphasis Q Internal IBM use of Smalltalk There are still pockets of Smalltalk use but generally IBM is moving away from it They wish to consolidate their portfolio no more pockets and one offs the trend is convergence Greg believes that Smalltalk is a very productive environment The Synchrony folks have worked in both environments and they are Smalltalk bigots deep down but Greg must accept where IBM is going Eric Clayberg closed by thanking John and Greg for what they have done It would have been easier for their careers just to le
105. ty so it can be hard to find developers with all the right skills ST OOAD RT control experience Marketing wise Smalltalk is perceived as not mainstream Connecting to external s w in VW2 5 has been cumbersome many active X controls they ve had to connect to The non native 2 5 widgets now look old Why can t you 10 Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 make it look like this Hopefully VW7 will help in both these areas Why use Smalltalk Of their many reasons debugging is the most important It can take him two hours to configuring machines resources and state to reproduce a problem to the point of seeing the bad line of code If he then had to restart after changing it instead of carrying on he would waste days tracking down problems He simply cannot do without it Hence Unaxis is committed to going on with Cincom s VW and with Adventa s ControlWORKS for the foreseeable future Unaxis is at the bottom of the foodchain e g slow Christmas sales of machines or cellphones can feed back to an absolute stop on any purchases from their point of view and must be productive when orders arrive Georg Heeg asked him about the ADM company and was told that Their Smalltalk is talking to my Smalltalk see Other Discussions section Number Crunching Smalltalk Daniel Poon Romax Technology Ltd Dan has worked at Romax for 10 years Smalltalk is not always seen as useful in numerically intensiv
106. ubmission html I treated the competition as a chance to learn more about Seaside in VW I started by typing up some irreverent stereotype specs for questionnaires to check if programmers thinking of moving to countries like Australia or Switzerland have the right skills and the right attitudes to fit in to their new societies I created domain classes then put my questionnaire spec files under VersionedDirectory management from FileRepository utility and started trying to parse them with SmaCC I wasted time wondering how to match start of line in SmaCC before realising that pushing a cr on the start of the file stream when handing it to SmaCC makes the issue go away BTW how do you match just start of line in SmaCC if you don t know whether there s a preceding cr The parse was then simple needing just a few iterations in SmaCC s UI to catch obvious mistake after obvious mistake I wrote tests post hoc to verify the parse not quite test first design but SmaCC s UL is so interactive that using it is like TDD Now I had pretty simple questionnaire domain objects over to Seaside David Schaeffer s Seaside test framework was a godsend He s solved problems that might have kept me puzzled till the bell rang The main gotcha is that you can t just new some component in your test setUp assign it values and then carry on The stuff Seaside does inside David s establishSession call has to be in the context stack abo
107. uration with it is their heart s output BIS EEG asymmetry are the brains hemispheres behaving differently All these relate to situations that can occur for example a patient s metabolism may suddenly make them too hot expiring too much CO2 etc If there s a history anaesthesiology may be planned for it If there is not a sudden response may be needed He showed pictures of people recording this data on tablets People used to clipboards adapt well to tablets He then showed a picture of an operating theatre at its calmest and least cluttered i e not very So where do you put the machine And what does it need to do You need a central server tablets to record etc Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 15 He calls his system MEDirect all the better names were already taken It knows the patient index James Bond patient number 007 It has the user authentication the schedules N B it is not a scheduling system and it can retrieve the patient s encounter documents I think we ve seen Mr Bond before It has pluggable resources publish encounters to MEDirect find records etc His clients talk to a web server Apache but he has written his own web server which he will soon release Apache s complication scares him he thinks his server will be safer and more secure His server gets resources and provides them as requested His terminal and hub fits on the back of the 80 0
108. usands of times then Squid gets hammered which is fine that s what its designed for but their Smalltalk application only sees a load it can handle Bruce showed the SkillsBase code They develop and test in VW and then move the app to GemStone with no code changes Bruce looked at the DB scripts starting and stopping the systems He then destroyed the database and started again from a completely empty GemStone database The VW generates a single huge string of GemStone code for portability thus it s versioned in Store GemStone exceptions are pre ANSI and unusual Thus they have a buffer layer to make exceptions portable OSKExceptionContext gt gt for aBlock on do This is implemented simply in VW less simply in GemStone For the rest you just use GBSM publish to get the VW classes and methods created in GemStone The membership system uses the same architecture but stays in VW because it needs to get to lots of places and has lots of external interfaces which Bruce has to monitor as he s getting them working The reaction to Smalltalk of the free open source community is very interesting Bruce is starting to see more and more people going along Avi s route getting into Smalltalk having already done Ruby Python etc work Bruce talked about the quiz of seeing something good in the Open Repository then trying to work out which versions of dependent packages you should also get He recommended more u
109. using the skilfully developed leg part e We need tools that help bring to bear deep domain knowledge SO we need tools that let non technical domain experts to write programs But domain experts are not experts in writing software you need to find ways of working with them not of getting them to do your work e We need to raise the level of abstraction SO we need visual programming such as UML In mid 90 s Smalltalk vendors got distracted building visual programming tools which hurt Smalltalk I also experienced this e g in GemStone s GeODE visual programming product which must have cost them resource better used elsewhere Eric s example shows that the challenge was not to draw boxes and lines of legs and itineraries and stops but on the contrary to see which were easier to take apart e We should drive the design from a model SO we need an upfront analysis phase Upfront analysis means basing your model on the greatest level of ignorance your team will ever have It comes from the idea that things are hard to change so you must get the model right first time While well crafted Java code can be changed Smalltalk shines here it s easy to change As for tools Eric thinks the whiteboard plus digital camera beats trying to make Rational Rose produce the diagram you want He also thinks the Smalltalk browser is a great modelling tool Unit tests are a good modelling tool Lastly he thinks that mouths and ears beat most mo
110. ve where you Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Orlando 27 29 June 2005 51 assign those values The solution is easy once you understand the problem pass the assign code to the block in initializeWith aBlock and it will be called within the right methods in the context stack I tried to depart from his example style at one point hit the problem and had an Aha moment That s why he does it that way I knew that with programmers who build web apps as their day job competing I could not spend too much time on CSS and HTML choices Watching me craft CSS is like watching paint dry I m just not that familiar with the various idioms So I worked out the obvious analogy between choosing items to add to a shopping cart and choosing answers to add to a completed questionnaire then starting hacking the Seaside shopping demo which had styles already fitted to its components I then wasted an absurd amount of time looking for the Seaside component that would display a batched list of components instead of a batched adaption of a list of components It s not there or I m missing the obvious let s not ignore that alternative explanation It was easy to write when I accepted that I was never going to find it but there was no getting back the time I spent looking for it Later than I should have I took time to finalise my analogy into a map between all terms in the shopping and the questionnaire applications I then use
111. wed the code at the protocol level SocketAccessor family SocketAccessor AF_INET type group IPSocketAddress hostAddress sender sendTo group buffer Hello asWriteArray Receiving is where multicast differs SocketAccessor family type soReuseAddress true bindTo join IPMulticastAddress The rest is as usual OpenTalk makes this easier by offering object groups Brokers running on the same port can join the same multicast address Receivers are exported under the same OID You get a group proxy mcast address port OID i e a standard OpenTalk proxy using the obvious values A remote group a request is an STSTOnewayRequest You could use a call back and you could send a block noting that there are limits you can only send clean blocks or passed by reference so you could still send value to it mcastAddress 224 5 6 7 so if the brokers export under same OID then if Martin does group broker groupBylId group group show Hello World Hello World should now be seen on every image in the room If the sender does not wish to participate in the group you use a different API groupAt id Martin then started the demo image invoking OpenChat a unicast utility He told it where the server was running started a client and sent a message That was trivial He then started a multicast example same chat but two clients no server an

Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Report

Contents

Download Pdf Manuals

Related Search

Related Contents