Overview

James Foster of GemStone will be in town to give his talk about MagLev and GLASS[1] for our October meeting.

From his website you can read about, and view videos, of his Road Show. He’s visited the Midwest and he’s in our area for a while before heading to OOPSLA.

Presentation

In this presentation, James Foster will give a brief demo of MagLev, then introduce Smalltalk, GemStone/S (a Smalltalk implementation that has built-in persistence and multi-user, multi-machine scalability), and the web framework Seaside. We will see how Seaside handles the “Back button problem” and provides a rich, component-based approach to OO web development.

James’ Bio

While in junior high in 1971, James Foster discovered computers at the local university and has delighted in building things and sharing his discoveries ever since. He learned Smalltalk in the mid-1990s, and became a passionate advocate for object technologies and agile methods. James is on the Smalltalk Engineering team at GemStone Systems, Inc., and regularly presents on technical topics (last month at ESUG in Amsterdam and next month at OOPSLA in Nashville).

I pulled the presentation and bio details from James’ website. The full article can be found here: http://programminggems.wordpress.com/2008/09/05/september-road-show/ I encourage you to read the entire post if you’ve not heard of Seaside, Smalltalk, GemStone or MagLev.

¹ ”GLASS” is an acronym for GemStone, Linux, Apache, Seaside, and Smalltalk.

Coming up September 30th, Rich Kilmer, Marcel Molina and Mark Gardner from InfoEhter will be the main speakers. The meeting is in Harrisonburg. Head out to meetup to signup or for more information http://ruby.meetup.com/128/

Come meet us at the Strategy Cafe offices (2421 Westwood Ave Suite C) and around 6pm we’ll be headed down to the Triple (pool/beer/bar food).

Hope to see you there.

It’s time for a social!

Join us on Tuesday at Capital Ale House in Richmond’s West End for light banter about Ruby, Rails and Related topics.

Let us know you’ll be there

Show up @ 5:30 to meet and chat. Presentations should start around 6.

This month Jon Maddox will be presenting and introduction to Git.

Also, Matt Overstreet will be discussing the prototype.js library “Ruby on Javascript”.

Presentation will be follow by an Open mic and Jam time.

Head out to upcoming to let us know you’ll be there

Join us on Tuesday for a code jam! Bring your projects or questions. Let us know your showing up: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/428759

I would like to, again, thank James Robertson for coming down to Richmond to talk about Smalltalk. I was very happy with the talk - everyone seemed really interested - questions were even asked!

James covered some basic Smalltalk stuff: syntax, reserved words, operators, image-based environment, browsers. He then pulled out a Seaside demo, complete with some in-web-browser debugging. [I'm thinking I should have taken some notes during the talk so that I can write a better review.]

It was nice seeing Smalltalk in action, one of the Grand daddies of dynamic languages. Remember, though Smalltalk is roughly 30 years old, from it came: Refactoring support, SUnit - which spawned JUnit, Edit & Continue - the ability to work with live code in a debugger, and, of course, MVC. I'm sure there are more items.

James brought and left a few CDs with VisualWorks 7.5, non-commercial version, preloaded. Contact either Mel Riffe or Matt Overstreet for information on obtaining a copy; he also sent a few with the visiting Charlottesville crew (thanks for coming out guys - excellent questions)

Feel free to add your review in the comments. Cheers!

Our January 8th Meeting will be Smalltalk Night.

James Robertson has been involved with Smalltalk, in one role or another, for quite some time. He's coming down to show off Cincom's VisualWorks Smalltalk offering, including a little bit of Seaside.

On the Cincom Smalltalk site you will also find links to Podcasts and daily Smalltalk screencasts; there's a wealth of information ready for consumption. Helpful Links:

• One Page Syntax Primer
• Cincom Smalltalk
• Cincom Smalltalk Downloads
• Getting started in Seaside and Visual Works
• Squeak
• Avi Bryant on TWiT; creator of Seaside
• Google Search on Smalltalk

Smalltalk has influenced many programming languages, Ruby in particular. In my opinion it is the premier language for Dynamic languages. Many of the ideas and concepts in Ruby were first implemented in Smalltalk. Come join us for what hopes to be a fantastic trip down memory lane and a glimpse into the future.

Head on over to the Upcoming.org Event and let us know you'll be joining us: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/379603.

February 12th Meeting Preview...

To be announced.