Monday 27

Registration

8:30 am - 9:30 am

Welcome

9:30 am - 10:00 am

Exploratory Modelling - Why Smalltalk projects are so successful

10:30 am - 11:30 am

By: Andreas Tönne. Andreas Tönne is vice president of Georg Heeg eK. He holds a diploma degree in computer science (Univ. Dortmund). Andreas is responsible for consulting services, project management and product development at Georg Heeg.

Smalltalk projects show a stunning success rate, close to 100% from the author's personal experience, while the industry average is around 40% or worse. Experienced Smalltalk developers usually do not even consider failure as a possible project outcome. Yet it is hard to communicate the reasons for this unique success rate to the non-Smalltalk market. Technical qualities of Smalltalk systems and its combination of a pure-OO system with strong, dynamic typing are used to explain the power of Smalltalk. But this is hardly a satisfactory reason for the huge difference in project success between say Java and Smalltalk. And it is a technical explanation which non-Smalltalkers do not listen to.

In this talk, we present an explanation of the success rate that is founded on one unique quality of Smalltalk: Smalltalk inspires to good modelling. Smalltalk models capture more precisely, deeper and closer to the thinking of the customer the customer's requirements. Many aspects of why this is made possible by Smalltalk (both the language and its development system take a role here) have inspired the industry over two decades but Smalltalks modelling powers stand unchallenged.

We present exploratory modelling as an agile modelling process that summarizes these modelling powers to build high quality models and achieve customer satisfaction very early in a project. The process is founded in an identification of modelling and programming language and its steps are built on iterative modelling and continuous experimentation. We show one exploratory modelling project at SAP as a brief example.

SqueakBot: a pedagogical platform for educational robotics

11:30 am - 12:00 pm

By: Julien Bourdon. Julien Bourdon is a member of Planète Sciences since 2003 where he contributes to several educational projects geared toward education to robotics and information technologies and will start a PhD in social informatics at the university of Kyoto (Japan) from 2008. This presentation will be given in collaboration with Séverin Lemaignan, in charge of pedagogical tools at the robotics department of Planète Sciences and Serge Stinckwich, researcher at the university of Caen.

SqueakBot is a project developed by Planète Sciences (a French non-profit organisation aiming to develop scientific and technical practices amongst youth) in the scope of a new educational platform, containing both hardware and software to make youth discover robotics in a stimulating environment leaving a large space for autonomy. SqueakBot aims at the same time to control small size hardware devices, with limited resources, and to simulate them in a virtual environment based on eToys. This is a running project which has already been presented in the C5 conference (Serge Stinckwich, Severin Lemaignan, Samir Saidani, "SqueakBot : a Pedagogical Robotic Platform," c5, pp. 137-144, Fifth International Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through Computing (C5 '07), 2007) and during the ESUG Awards 2006.

Dynamic Language Conference

13h30 pm - 18h30

Change

  • Change-Oriented Software Engineering Peter Ebraert
  • Encapsulating and Exploiting Change with Changeboxes Marcus Denker
  • Redesigning with Traits: the Nile Stream trait-based Library Damien Cassou

Development Tools

  • Feature Driven Browsing David Roethlisberger
  • Bridging the Gap Between Morphic Visual Programming and Smalltalk Code Noury Bouraqadi
  • Object Flow Analysis -- Taking an Object-Centric View on Dynamic Analysis Adrian Lienhard

Language Features

  • Context-Oriented Programming: Beyond Layers Martin v. Loewis
  • Forward Chaining as an Implementation Strategy for the History-based Logic Pointcut Language HALO Charlotte Herzeel
  • Practical, Pluggable Types Marcus Denker

Concurrency

  • Transactional Memory for Smalltalk Lukas Renggli
  • Linguistic Symbiosis between Actors and Threads Tom Van Cutsem

Award Competitor Presentation

18:30 pm - 21:30 pm

The competitors for the ESUG award will show their projects