I was immensely affected by Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA speech where he closed the talk with a story by one of his sources of inspiration E. Power Biggs and his quotation as a response to one of Bigg's student's question about how to play a grand composition on a dinky small pipe organ. This response was "Just play it grand, son, just play it grand!". When you play Squeak grand, you can already do amazing things. But when I look at it not many people dare to play Squeak "grand". My first attempt to show how to play Squeak grander was the SqueakNews e-zine (which the past issues can be downloaded from http://www.squeaknews.com). Essentially whatever I did for the e-zine went out with the e-zine and there is no magic. Since then I still see people are playing with Squeak as a dinky little toy.
So the reason I am standing is to play and show how to play Squeak grander than ever.
Q: Can point some references to your Squeak work of last years?
Here is a brief summary:
Commercial projects:
1. 1998: American Sports History Inc. Sports Ticker: A backend application that filtered sports information that was fed by news sources on dedicated lines with obscure formats to deliver the information to public in a proper web format. It converted the text format to populate various HTML templates and create static web pages which then were served through an ordinary Apache server. No longer in operation.
2. 1998-2000 Code generation for GemStone for CyberAction digital trade card system (A practitioner's report was presented in OOPSLA, see below)
3. 2000: A prototype of a restaurant system for a now defunct company for a handheld Windows CE device with 8MBs memory and 240x320 color screen. (An early version of this software is debranded and
released at http://www.squeakonline.com/downloads/cedemo.zip )
4. 2002-2003: An Ipaq based sports performance system with real time connections to various devices and a Squeak server (1)
5. 2004-2007:
. A Squeak based code generator that generates a complete web based Java system that generates necessary HTML, JavaScript, Java server and middleware code for a very complicated system (1)
. A Management tool to visualize a pipeline on anything (1)(2)
. A Warehouse management system that includes graphical warehouse layout, individual serialized items, fully integrated with barcode and RFID tag support(1)(2)
. A Document management system that includes graphical office layout, individual serialized items, fully integrated with barcode and RFID tag support(1)(2)
Talks, Seminars, Workshops:
OOPSLA 97-TOOLS 98 Squeak and Snowball (A Rapid systems development system developed in Smalltalk and ported to Squeak)
OOPSLA 98-"A Look Behind Internet's First Digital Trading Cards"
http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigplan/oopsla/oopsla98/ap/tech/tpwedpm.htm
OOPSLA- 99 OOSLA Tutorial: Squeak as a Development Platform
http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigplan/oopsla/oopsla99/2_ap/tutorials/tut74.html
Smalltalk Solutions 99-Squeak Tutorial
C5-03 2 Squeak related paper presentations
Kyoto Univ. Japan June 2003-SUmmer seminar: Processing "Ideas" with Squeak
C5-07 Beyond Education: How can Squeak Make a Lasting Impression in Developing Commercial Software
http://www.cm.is.ritsumei.ac.jp/c5-07/program.html
And various talks at other conferences and seminars, at NYSUG, and some private companies
Semi commercial community related activity:
2001: Squeak News Ezine (An E-zine about Squeak and done toally in Squeak) The 5 past issues can still be downloaded from squeaknews.com site.
(1) Can't be released to public due to commercial nature of the software
(2) demonstrated at C5-07 Workshop
Q: Can explain your plans to improve Squeak to do commercial developments?
As you can see from the above list I have been already using Squeak commercially since 1997. Apart from a recent 2 year experience with a Java, SQL, XML and web based system where the selection was out of our control I almost exclusively used Squeak for all my commercial activities. Obviously there are certain apparent shortcomings of Squeak when it comes to developing commercial software a lot of them are actually mental blocks.
There is certain software we plan to release (as a company) as open source that I believe will make Squeak a much more powerful tool then it is now. I will release details of this software later as we are under negotiations as to what we can release and under what conditions.
Another activity is harvesting and documenting enhancements that could be used commercially, documenting and maintaining them.
I believe one of the best ways of promotion is demonstrating succesful examples.
Another activity that I believe will help Squeak overall is to publish more documentation and examples from real world applications. I will work towards this.
About Ron's questions: My firt paragraph should answer them but briefly:
Coming to Ron's questions:
1) Do you support stepping up fundraising? If so what do you propose to do with the money collected?
Yes, and there are several ways but the community should come to a level that there is money earned by Squeak related activities. Then anything up to even commercail sponsorship would be possible.
2) Do you support bounty projects? If so can you lay out how you would like to see a bounty program administered?
Yes and we as company will perhaps offer some bounties. As foundation, this should be further discussed.
3) Do you support incorporation and not for profit tax status for Squeak Foundation?
I believe this is already the case
4) What do you believe is the future of Smalltalk?
It is up to us
5) What do you think the community is doing right, what should be improved?
Too much bickering, too little examples
6) Should the Squeak be represented at more conferences?
Of course
7) Should Tim be given a gazillon dollars for his excellent work on Squeak?
