Ttile: Round Trip in GLORP
Speaker: Niall Ross
Thu, August 21, 11:30am – 12:00pm

Abstract:
This talk refactors the application of the earlier tutorial to use more advanced Glorp techniques. These refactorings are shown in the context of Modelling/Mapping tools (from Cincom ObjectStudio), database drivers and web techniques, to demo end-to-end development.


Bio:
Niall Ross 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/round-trip-in-glorp
	
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXUvGNQ9_Ro