Title: Glorp Tutorial
Speaker: Niall Ross
Mon, August 18, 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Abstract:
The target audience for this hands-on tutorial is those with little or no Glorp experience (but more experienced people willing to pair-program with beginners are most welcome).  The tutorial will help them to start using in Glorp in their own applications.

Participants will create a simple Glorp descriptor system for a domain model.  They will generate a database from it, incorporating some existing legacy.  They will write and read between the database and their domain model using Glorp commands.  The issues of transactions, caching and refreshing will be addressed.

The skills taught will generally parallel those taught in Roger Witney's Glorp course (not all of it, of course, for reasons of time).  The intent is that anyone to whom Roger's text merely states what is already known need not attend, unless as a refresher.  This tutorial's exercises will diverge from Roger's in the following ways:

 - use some more modern (more terse) Glorp protocol

 - provide additional context for the example work:  where a particular piece fits into Glorp, how Glorp makes it work, etc.

 - address some items that Roger leaves open ("I have not tried that", "No idea what this does", etc.)

 - use a different (hopefully, slightly more interesting) domain example than the (all too common) Person, Address, etc.

The domain example will help students understand the more complex material in the Glorp talk later in the week.  (One of the tutorial's motives is to make the later talk accessible to the whole ESUG audience, Glorp-experienced and Glorp-newbie alike.)

After the talk, interested students can arrange with the presenter to hold follow-up Glorp 'How to' sessions in lunch-breaks and other out-of-hours times, either one-on-one or in larger groups.

The tutor will be demonstrating Glorp in VisualWorks driving a PostgreSQL 9.3 database.

- The tutor will assist any student who requests it to get this specific set up before the tutorial starts.

- All students will need a Glorp installation and Glorp-capable database, or to be pair-programming with someone who has one.

Bio:
Niall ended his undergraduate career with two intellectual interests: computing and the theory of relativity. A quick check of how much commercial work was available to relativity and gravitation theorists decided him to do academic research in that field and then seek a commercial job in computing, rather than the other way round. Niall started working commercially in IT in 1985. He was at first assigned to designing and implementing software engineering process improvements and only three years later did he begin significant writing and delivering of commercial software. This experience taught him that intelligent people can nevertheless form foolish ideas about software engineering if they have not worked at the coding coalface of real large commercial projects.

Learning from this, Niall spent the nineties working on software to manage complex, rapidly-changing telecoms networks. A side effect of this work was that it taught him much about how scale and rate of change affects software. Early in the nineties he discovered Smalltalk. The more he used it, the more he came to recognize its power in this area. This perception was strengthened when he spent a year delivering a telecoms management system in Java.

At the end of the decade, Niall formed his own software company to offer consultancy in meta-data system design, in Smalltalk and in agile methods. Over the next decade, he worked on a variety of meta-data-driven systems, mostly in the financial domain.

Niall joined the Cincom Smalltalk Engineering team nearly 6 years ago. His first task was to lead the team that does the weekly VisualWorks builds, an experience he likened to doing brain surgery on yourself every Friday (e.g. "prepare new memory for insertion, remove old memory, - uh, I can't remember what I was going to do next ... " :-) ).  Currently, he leads the Glorp and Database team.  He also leads the Custom Refactoring open-source project, which he co-founded, and the SUnit open-source project.

Slides:
	http://www.slideshare.net/esug/glorp-tutorial-talk
	http://www.slideshare.net/esug/glorp-tutorialguide-esug201401
	
Video Part1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPN1A4WQyiA
Video Part2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25S6cSYgh34