Presented by Stephan Eggermont and Willem van den Ende

Abstract:

A lot of the things in software engineering we take for granted these days are rooted in Smalltalk. 
But most people do not program in Smalltalk. Do you wonder if there are more pieces of brilliance in Smalltalk waiting to be picked up by the general computing community? Come and experience yourself.

We’ll work with you through a series of exercises showing Seaside – the web framework that handles state, so you can code as if you’re working on a destkop app – and other little known treasures (e.g. Debugger Driven Development, SUnit – the original TDD framework, Seaside fast and scalable data persistence without a line of database mapping code), fully exploiting the ‘objects-all-the-way’ attitude visible in the Pharo open source Smalltalk environment.

Validated learning benefits from fast iteration on ideas. The Smalltalk Integrated development environment is still second to none when it comes to coding at the speed of thought. And you can modify it to taste :)

Bring your laptop to pair through the exercises. Take home a web application, deployed on your laptop.

Format and length:

We start with a short presentation and ‘painting by number’ exercises that grow in degrees of freedom as particicipants progress.

Some knowledge of Object Orientation and TDD in other languages. If you are ‘non-technical’ you can pair up with another participant

Objective(s) of the session:

Get acquainted with the flow of development in smalltalk, experience adding features to an existing web app and learn how you can test-drive your code while running in a debugger.

Benefits for participants and presenter(s):

Learn how TDD was a logical next step after Debugger Driven Development, how a web-application without templates keeps you truly DRY and how no database mapping code is the best code.