Smalltalk Solutions 2001

Folks,

For those of you attending Smalltalk Solutions next week in Chicago we will
be holding a Dolphin "Birds of a Feather" session (BOF) on Tuesday
afternoon. Both Blair McGlashsan and I will be there to answer your
questions on all subjects to do with Dolphin Smalltalk. Attendees will also
have the chance to:

1) Take a quick look at David Gorisek's "Source Tracking System" for
Dolphin. This is a team developer source code control package (kind of like
an ENVY clone) that David makes available from his web site
(www.gorisek.com) at an exceptional price. Since David can't be at Smalltalk
Solutions this year, I'll be doing a brief demonstration of the system, so
you can see how STS might help in your own development efforts.

2) Donald MacQueen will also be demonstrating his port of the Refactoring
Browser to Dolphin. For anyone who hasn't yet seen the RB, this is a "must
see". For those of us who have, we can all breathe a sigh of relief and say,
"At Last!".

3) Jeffrey Odell will, hopefully, be showing his SUnit Browser for Dolphin.

4) We've put together a Try-Buy CD for Dolphin Smalltalk Professional. For
those of you who haven't seen Dolphin Pro this will be a chance to try it
out for 45 days free of charge. As a special offer we've also included a
trial edition of David's Source Tracking System pre-loaded into a Dolphin
Pro image and ready to go.

5) Don't miss out! We'll be giving away *free* T-shirts bearing the new
Dolphin "RELAX" logo for 2001. There will only be a fixed number of shirts
available so make sure you get there early.

We're hoping that the BOF will be a fairly informal affair. It's a chance to
meet with other Dolphin developers and to see a few demonstrations of
exciting stuff that's been going on. If anyone has something they'd like to
show that they think others will find interesting, please drop me an e-mail
at [hidden email] or just turn up on the day with a laptop ready to
go. All demonstrations will earn a rather exclusive Object Arts exhibitors
polo shirt!

As far as we know so far, the Dolphin BOF will be on Tuedsay afternoon from
2:30-4:00pm; venue to be announced. Please check the conference noticeboards
for changes.

Best Regards,

Andy Bower
Object Arts Ltd.
http://www.object-arts.com

"Not all addictions are bad for you"
http://www.object-arts.com/Addiction.htm

Folks,

> As far as we know so far, the Dolphin BOF will be on Tuedsay afternoon
from
> 2:30-4:00pm; venue to be announced. Please check the conference
noticeboards
> for changes.

Apparently there have been a few logistical problems in find a suitable room
with a projector etc. As a result the time for the Dolphin BOF has been
changed and is now: 5:00-6:30pm on Tuesday. In any case, please check the
conference notice boards just in case this is altered further.

Best Regards,

Andy Bower
Object Arts Ltd.
http://www.object-arts.com

"Not all addictions are bad for you"
http://www.object-arts.com/Addiction.htm

"Andy Bower" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:9am83g$5qr8j$[hidden email]...
> Apparently there have been a few logistical problems in find a suitable
room
> with a projector etc. As a result the time for the Dolphin BOF has been
> changed and is now: 5:00-6:30pm on Tuesday. In any case, please check the
> conference notice boards just in case this is altered further.

It would be great if someone could do a small summary of Dolphin BOF, for
non present ones like me :)

Davorin Rusevljan

Davorin,

> It would be great if someone could do a small summary of Dolphin BOF, for
> non present ones like me :)

The Dolphin BOF went well (I think) although it was slightly underattended
compared with our original expectations. We had 25-30 people present but our
room having been scheduled at the same time as one of the welcome receptions
(offering free beer and food) probably didn't help our numbers. The format
was as follows:

1) I introduced the features in Dolphin 4 with a few slides comparing it to
earlier versions of the product. I think about 50% of people were already
Dolphin 4 users.

2) I showed the deployment of a Dolphin console application to illustrate
that "Hello World" now comes in at a very reasonable 370K. We also showed
another console "calclulator" application that illustrated the use of stdio
style streams etc.

3) Blair and I then did a collaborative demonstration of David Gorisek's
Source Tracking System (STS) for Dolphin. For those who haven't seen this it
is a multi-developer source repository similar in functionality to ENVY that
David sells as an add-on from his website (www.gorisek.com).

For the demo, I brought up a simple stock charting application consisting of
two versioned packages stored in the STS repository. The application
appeared to have become mysteriously broken by some recent changes made by
another developer. By using the change browsers I was able to isolate the
problem as a rogue change that Blair had  "accidentally" introduced into the
project. I was able to isolate the exact method edition that caused the
problem and, with the sample instance of the broken stock chart still
running, I chosen to revert to the known working version of the application.
By means of the magic that is Smalltalk I instantly saw the charting
application start working again.

I then asked Blair to correctly "fix" the method in question and he did this
on his machine which was networked to the same source repository. I
instantly saw the new method editions appear in the my STS browsers and was
able to update my loaded packages to the new versions, again while the demo
application was still running.

It's hard in a short 10 minute demo to convey the full functionality of STS
but I hope at least we were able to give an idea to those present.

4) Following the Object Arts' part of the BOF we invited some Dolphin users
up to show what they had been doing with the system. First up was Donald
MacQueen who has recently built a Dolphin UI for the Refactoring Browser
engine that was ported last year at Camp Smalltalk. He showed the full RB
working (currently in a Dolphin 3.0 appearence browser but this is soon to
be updated) and proceeded to do things like rename method #at: throughout
the image. It's pretty amazing when you see the RB rewrite all the methods
that send #at: to send #dolphinAt: and that it can do this without breaking
the system while doing so. It's even more impressive when you can then just
go and undo the change with a single menu command. You can find the latest
port of the RB for Dolphin 4 at:  http://users.erols.com/dmacq.

5) Joey Gibson gave a quick demonstration of the Pocket Smalltalk 1.6
environment which is written in Dolphin. This has it's own browsers and
class hierarchy that will allow applications to be built for the Palm Pilot
(or anything running Palm OS). The output is a .PRC file that can be
downloaded to the Palm and executed directly (it includes the Pocket ST VM).
For debugging, the PRC file can be run on the PC under control of an
emulator freely available from Palm. You can find the Pocket ST stuff at
www.pocketst.com  Version 1.x is the Dolphin version. A Squeak port is in
progress (2.0?) but we won't mention that!

6) Jeffrey Odell talked about his SUnit browser that has recently been
ported to Dolphin. This is a higher level interface to the standard SUnit
testing framework that gives more flexibility in the way that tests can be
controlled. For more info see: http://www.odellsoft.com/sunitbrowser/.

7) We were also given a sneak (verbal) preview of a forthcoming web
application that will make use of a custom version of the Dolphin plug-in.
This will be used to deliver web-based e-learning content to client machines
by means of a unique MIME type in the web pages. Unfortunately, we can't at
this stage reveal the application name or the company involved in developing
it.

8) Last, but not least, we were able to hand out some 45 day trial Try-Buy
CD copies of  Dolphin Professional. The CDs also included a trial version of
Dolphin pre-loaded with STS for those who want to test out this
ENVY-lookalike. Attendees also managed to walk away with a T-shirt bearing
the new Dolphin RELAX! logo which, surely, will be de rigueur on the beaches
this summer.

Best regards,

Andy Bower
Object Arts Ltd.
http://www.object-arts.com

In article <9b2kth$7m1gr$[hidden email]>, bower@object-
arts.com says...
#
# 5) Joey Gibson gave a quick demonstration of the Pocket Smalltalk 1.6
# environment which is written in Dolphin. This has it's own browsers and
# class hierarchy that will allow applications to be built for the Palm Pilot
# (or anything running Palm OS). The output is a .PRC file that can be
# downloaded to the Palm and executed directly (it includes the Pocket ST VM).
# For debugging, the PRC file can be run on the PC under control of an
# emulator freely available from Palm. You can find the Pocket ST stuff at
# www.pocketst.com  Version 1.x is the Dolphin version. A Squeak port is in
# progress (2.0?) but we won't mention that!

   Thanks for the writeup Andy. The only correction I would make is that
the website for Pocket Smalltalk is www.pocketsmalltalk.com. The latest
version is buried on that site somewhere, but an easier place to find it
(at least right now) is www.joeygibson.com/st selecting the 'Pocket
Smalltalk 1.6 Latest Alpha'.

Joey

--
-- Sun Certified Java2 Programmer
-- Political Rants: www.joeygibson.com
-- My Pocket Smalltalk Stuff: www.joeygibson.com/st
--
-- "We thought about killin' him, but we kinda
--  hated to go that far...."



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