2024 Spring Smalltalk Meetup @ Zurich

The 2024 spring edition of the Zurich Smalltalk meetup took place on Friday, April 26th. Below, you’ll find a brief summary and links to the three presentations that were on the agenda. I thoroughly enjoyed attending this meetup, which featured engaging presentations and allowed for enriching technical and informal discussions with a welcoming community. Special thanks to Peter Ursprung and Michal Balda for organizing this event. I’ve already marked my calendar for the next Smalltalk meetup in Zurich on October 18th. I’m excited to see what the next meetup has in store. Until then, happy coding!

1. A Practical Application of Meta-Level Programming in Smalltalk

• Speaker: Joseph Pelrine is expert in Agile and Lean software development, and one of Europe’s leading authorities on eXtreme Programming.
• Talk Summary: This talk introduced a solution for text analysis that supports managing very large data sets using Smalltalk. Since large corpora cannot fit into RAM but still need to be analyzed, Joseph proposed loading data in chunks. Using meta-level programming features provided by Smalltalk, he created proxies to text on disk. These lightweight references capture message sends, allowing the appropriate chunks of text to be loaded and processed as needed.

2. Example-Driven Development

• Speaker: Oscar Nierstrasz is Professor emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Bern, where he founded the Software Composition Group in 1994. He is currently working at feenk.com to support onboarding and teaching of moldable development.

• Talk Summary: Oscar demonstrated the benefits of creating functions that return example objects, which serve as both documentation and the basis for developing tests. The presentation included a demonstration using the Glamorous Toolkit (GT) environment, showcasing custom inspector views that help better understand and organize example objects. Oscar showed how examples could be built from existing ones, and how tools help view dependencies, analyze test failures, and guide developers to focus on the most likely sources of failure. For more information, check out Oscar’s blog post and companion video.

3. Preview of WebST Web Components with Smalltalk

• Speaker: Noury Bouraqadi, is Professor of Software Engineering for Multi-Robot Systems at IMT Nord Europe, and the founder of Nootrix the company behind PLC3000 SaaS for teching factory automation.
• Talk Summary: WebST aims to simplify the development of web clients using web components. A web component is created by defining a web DOM (Document Object Model) class that is instantiated by web browsers upon parsing specific custom HTML tags. WebST facilitates the creation and testing of such classes using Pharo Smalltalk. It leverages Seaside for HTML generation, with code for web component classes transpiled from Smalltalk to JavaScript using PharoJS. You can find the slides below.