From Legacy Database to Domain Layer Using a New Cincom VisualWorks Tool

First Name: Niall
Last Name: Ross
Type: Talk
 
 Abstract: The new tool sits on Glorp, which sits on VisualWorks' external database drivers, including the new Postgres protocol 3.0 drivers. After presenting these new items, Niall Ross of Cincom Systems, Inc. will demonstrate using the tool to kick-start fresh application development from a legacy database application. The talk will end at the starting point for Jerry Kott's talk "Single Page Web Application Development with SiouX and AppeX."
 
 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 made him decide 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. At first, he was assigned to designing and implementing software engineering process improvements, and after only three years, he began significant writing and delivery 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, Smalltalk and 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 seven 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/from-legacy-database-to-domain-layer-using-a-new-cincom-visualworks-tool
 Video1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-lcmF_eVjo
 Video2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS-9faC5ov8