[ANN] VA Smalltalk Forum Europe 2008

[jtuchel]

Instantiations and objektfabrik cordially invite VA Smalltalk Customers
and people interested in VA Smalltalk to the

VA Smalltalk Forum Europe 2008

This event will take place in Frankfurt am Main on September 23rd,
starting at 10:00 am. We ask you to regster for this complimentary
event. More Information and regsitration form can be found either at
http://www.objektfabrik.de (only in German) or on
http://www.instantiations.com/mktg/even ... ope08.html .

A Glimpse of the agenda:

* Market Perspectives and Strategies, Nicholas Gilman
Nick will discuss general trends of the VA Smalltalk marketplace,
including growth in the market and verticals driving that growth. He
will describe Instantiations' process for driving product enhancements,
new Consulting Services offerings, and the company's strategic
relationship with objektfabrik.

* Integrating VA Smalltalk into Today's IT Landscapes, Joachim Tuchel
Joachim will provide an overview of current trends in IT architectures
and discuss how VA Smalltalk can fit into those architectures. He will
include a demonstration of how SST can be used to build a RESTful web
services server and client.

* VA Smalltalk 8.0 and Beyond: Product Updates and Roadmap, John O'Keefe
The Instantiations VA Smalltalk product continues to evolve. This talk
will focus on the new capabilities that will be included in v8.0,
including Seaside support, an updated browser look-and-feel, enhanced
tool integration and revamped documentation. The presentation will also
address Instantiations' plans for product direction beyond the 8.0 release.

* Customer Experience Report --- Versicherungskammer Bayern
Martin Elsässer and Steffen Müller will give an overview of the
insurance agency information system "VerIA" and its 10-year history.
They'll discuss how VisualAge Smalltalk and VA Smalltalk helped them
meet the growing need to integrate with several in-house systems, using
different integration features of the IDE.

* Building GUIs in VA Smalltalk and Seaside, Joachim Tuchel
In this session, Joachim will show parallels between VA Smalltalk's
model of building GUIs and the component concept and callback mechanisms
in Seaside. He will focus on how to build a web server application with
VA Smalltalk, turning a fat client into a web server, including typical
changes in the application's design and architecture that are necessary
to serve multiple users. Joachim will also discuss how to integrate a VA
Smalltalk-based Seaside application into existing web/intranet
infrastructures in the enterprise.

* Ask the Experts: Q & A
John O'Keefe, Joachim Tuchel and Nicholas Gilman will lead a free-form
question and answer session with attendees.

* Networking Opportunities
Don't forget to network! Our attendees provide a wealth of knowledge and
experience about VA Smalltalk development, IT project management and the
industry as a whole.

We look forward to seeing you in Frankfurt!

Joachim

--
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Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de
Fliederweg 1 http://www.objektfabrik.de
D-71640 Ludwigsburg
Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0 Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1

[rjs]

For those of us who cannot make the trip "across the pond", will you post slides and so on after the conference?


Thanks,
Richard

[marten]

For those of us who cannot make the trip "across the pond", will you post slides and so on after the conference?


Thanks,
Richard

"VA Smalltalk 8.0 and Beyond" is already available from this site ....

[marten]

Instantiations and objektfabrik cordially invite VA Smalltalk Customers
and people interested in VA Smalltalk to the

VA Smalltalk Forum Europe 2008

Would it be possible to record (video and audio) these sessions and offer them for download ?

[TriSebastian]

Hi!

VAST 8.0 was annoucend for the 2Q08. Our costumer wishes to update next year. Is there a new release date?
The budget needs to be planned this year. Therefor I would be very grateful knowing, if there might be a posibillity to get a sort of beta package? We'd like to evaluate the complexity of porting.

I'll visit ESUG 08! Please let me know, if there's achange to get more detailed information about VAST 8.0. (core changes,...)

Cheers!
Sebastian

[marten]

Hi!

VAST 8.0 was annoucend for the 2Q08.

"Planned date is 4Q2008" according to the report available from this site .... perhaps something
like a Christmas present

Marten

[jtuchel]

Hi there,

I have been busy over the last few days, so sorry for not answering any earlier.
As for the presentations, I think we will make the presentation material downloadable. I cannot promise this for the customer slides at the moment, but if the customer agrees, we'll surely provide them for download.
I don't think we will record audio or video. The risk of having poor quality and a lot of work to do is huge, and, to be honest, we are way too busy for that.
So if you're not coming, you'll miss the audio - and the networking, of course...

The latest Info on V8 availability is also Q4/2008.

On the topic of migration: we have helped quite a few customers to migrate from older Versions of VisualAge to VA Smalltalk over the last two years. Our experience is that it's not too hard to do and we haven't encountered any show stoppers yet. Most of the problems we found were in poor source code managemement or in Changes that people made in the base code. Migrating from V5.5 and V6.0 is really easy.

At last year's VA Smalltalk Forum I gave a talk on our experiences. You can download the slides (in German) at:
http://www.objektfabrik.de/Downloads/VA ... Tuchel.pdf

I'd guess that moving to V8 isn't much different than moving to V7, because the features added in V8 (as far as they are known to date) are rather additions to the product than substantial changes in the code. Once you have reached a Version after 5.5 and your code management is clean, migration is not much more than importing your code into a new library.

We have also done a Migration from V4.5 and it was almost as smooth as the others. Your mileage may vary, depending on what features your product is using.

I'd be happy to share our findings if you're interested.

Joachim

[marten]

I don't think we will record audio or video. The risk of having poor quality and a lot of work to do is huge, and, to be honest, we are way too busy for that.

Sorry to hear that - it would be a start for something like James Robertson does for VisualWorks - a series of multimedia information about a product, making it more visible to customers. Though I'm doing not VW any more I still visit his site just to read about new pdcasts or videos about Smalltalk. I also like to see all those movies out there (youtube) about VisualStudio showing how to solve small specific problems.

You see - it's the matter of community.

Marten

[jtuchel]

Marten,

I agree, and I must admit I'd love to do more in the field of Smalltalk advocacy. But I need to feed my family and only have a limited time-budget for doing so. Please remember that James is being paid for what he does.

See my blog (http://joachim-tuchel.de/2008/07/22/kei ... -das-denn/) for more info on this topic (in German)

Joachim

[marten]

Marten,

I agree, and I must admit I'd love to do more in the field of Smalltalk advocacy. But I need to feed my family and only have a limited time-budget for doing so. Please remember that James is being paid for what he does.

See my blog (http://joachim-tuchel.de/2008/07/22/kei ... -das-denn/) for more info on this topic (in German)

Joachim

I know, that you do much in this area and due to the fact, that I also have to feed a family I do .NET and not Smalltalk any more (or: just for my fun). Actually if I could I would come to Frankfurt, bring my camera and then just let the camera do the rest.

The quality of the video does not need to be that good - look what others do. If you have a camera, do the recording and I do the rest. Sending some DVDs around here in Germany should be easy to do.

Marten

[a3aan]

Start here: http://www.a3aan.st/Sunrise/Pictures+from+the+VA+Smalltalk+Forum+Europe+2008.

Cheers,
Adriaan.

[jtuchel]

Thanks Adriaan,

I like the pictures, they show how much fun the event was. Thank you for making them accessible. We still need to tease people for the next events to gather even more people next time.
And, yes, I think I was the first to give a public demo of Seaside on VAST

I'm still in process of getting all slides and short summaries of the talks online, but I should get this all up over the next few days. So please fell free to visit my blog at http://www.joachim-tuchel.de to see what you missed.

Joachim