This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: StS 2004 - The Seaside keynote Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

This year's Smalltalk Solutions promises to be a great show with some great presentations - like Avi's keynote on Seaside:

Winning the Application Server Arms Race: Using Smalltalk to Redefine Web Development keynote
Avi Bryant: http://www.beta4.com
Monday 10:30:00 am to 12:00:00 pm

Abstract: It would be hard to imagine a worse model for user interface development than HTTP. Would you use a GUI framework where every event from every widget in your application was handed to you at once, periodically, as a large hashtable full of strings? Where every time a single piece of data changed you had to regenerate a textual description of the entire interface? Where the event-based architecture was so strict that you couldn't ever, under any circumstances, open a modal dialog box and wait for it to return an answer?

Those are the costs of using the web browser as a client platform, and, by and large, we accept them. The dominant paradigms of web development -- CGI, Servlets, Server Pages -- do very little to hide or circumvent the low level realities of HTTP, and as a result, web applications are fragile, verbose, and ill-suited to reuse.

Smalltalk can do better. More than that -- Smalltalk is uniquely suited to do better. To date, we've followed conventional wisdom and built Smalltalk implementations of the same old paradigms, providing familiarity and compatibility. But by throwing these away, Smalltalk can instead provide an overwhelming competitive advantage. By leveraging Smalltalk's particular strengths, we can abstract away the ugliness of browser/server interaction in ways that simply aren't possible in other environments, and profit greatly by it.

For all its limitations, the web is fast becoming the most important deployment platform for many classes of application. The Java, Perl, PHP, and .NET worlds, to name a few, are pursuing it agressively. Many of us are going to have to play their game -- but we don't have to play by their rules.

Bio: Avi Bryant is an independent consultant based in Vancouver, Canada. Much of his work centers around the use of Squeak Smalltalk as a platform for commercial software development. As an actively contributing member of the Squeak community, he maintains its standard version control system, as well as packages for web development and relational and object database access. As a consultant, he has helped companies develop Squeak-based products for the travel and theatre industries, higher education, and mobile devices. Avi previously worked as a developer and research assistant for the University of British Columbia.