Last Thursday, Friday and Saturday, it took place the Second Argentine Conference of Smalltalk: SmallTalks 2008. One of most interesting tracks I attended was the one given by Mariano Martinez Peck, Esteban Lorenzano and German Palacios about their project: SqueakDBX. It is a driver to allow Squeak applications to connect to relational databases, you can get more information in the official website.
Congratulations to the organization team, it was great event!.
If you are not familiar with the .Net Platform, DataSets are objects analogous to a database in memory. A DataSet contains not only a collection of DataTables, but also information about the primary keys and relations between the tables it contains. I ‘ve seen some people using DataSets to move data between the different layers of the application. I don’t like it, but that is part of other post, the big issue is when somebody starts using DataSets to build Web Services to interoperate with other technologies/organizations. This is a sad design decision because the way DataSets are serialized is not always understandable for non .Net consumers. The reason for this is explained very clearly in detail in this post by Paul Ballard.
Yesterday I started a new open source project. It is a framework for developing video games with Java, using the MVC design pattern. My intention with this project is to help Algo3 students to develop their applications concentrating in the Model while the framework takes care of most of the complexities of the View and Controller. The name of the project is Titiritero and it is hosted in Google Code at this location: http://code.google.com/p/titiritero/
These are some articles and posts about the conference
http://blog.salias.com.ar/2008/10/agiles-2008-la-emocin-de-que-las-cosas.html
http://softwareagil.blogspot.com/2008/10/agiles-2008-done.html
http://www.canal-ar.com.ar/noticias/noticiamuestra.asp?Id=6564
As you may know, I ‘m teacher assistant at FIUBA. some weeks ago we asked the students to form groups. According to the number of students and teachers, we needed 6 groups of 8 members each. But…the students presented 7 groups, 3 of them with 8 members each, and other 4 groups of 6 members each. In a first attempt we try to dissolved one group and reorganized its members to have 3 groups, but after a while we decided to call the all the members of these 4 groups and we told them: «we have 3 groups of 8 members each and we can handle only 3 more groups, so we need you to form 3 groups as you like». Some minutes later the had solved the problem.
After a long planning we did it. We are very pleased with the results;more than 400 people attended the conference coming from several countries like Brasil, Chile, Honduras, Costa Rica, Peru, Bolivia, Uruguay, Colombia and Argentina; the quality of the presentations was excellent and all the schedule was followed during the whole conference. I want to thank the sponsors, speakers and the all the people that make conference possible.
I feel this conference will be the foundational milestone of the Latin American Agile Community.
If you are interested in being to part of the community, join our Yahoo! Group at: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/laasd/
During the next few days the conference website will be updated with the material used.
Say no more!
Well, lets’ start by making the distinction between what was the original idea and what is the people doing now.
Originally Web Services were thought to share information between applications. The applications can be develop in different technologies and can also belong to different companies. For two applications to be able to share information they must agreed two things: the format the information will be structured and the way (transport) the information will be sent/arrived.
This problem is not new. As you can imagine before the raised of Web Services there were some attempts to solve this problem (like EDI and CORBA) but none of them were successful (unless in terms of industry adoption).
Web Services result to be a good solution and the development tools started to provide very useful features to work with them. Then developers started to use Web Services for some other scenarios like communication between the presentation layer and the business layer. But in most cases these two layers belong to the same application and are developed with the same technology, so it could be better to use some other protocols (like REST, netTcp or RMI) to obtain a better performance.
Today we (the organization group) met to define the final arragements most of them related to logistics. We also made a small update to the conference program. The registration is closing this week, so don’t forget to register ASAP if you are planning to atend.
See you there!
Believe it or not, I am writing this post using Live Writer. Yes Microsoft built a software that is capable to work/interact with services that directly compete with his own product (Live Spaces).
After moving my blog to WordPress, I was looking for a tool that allow me to write posts being offline. After reviewing several tools I read an article that mentioned that it was possible to use Live Writer to post on WordPress. I didn’t beleive it at once, so I had to check it myself. And you see, that article was rigth!.
Yesterday I attended to this event organized by Microsoft at Buenos Aires offices’. It was very interesting, I get some useful tools not only for playing but also to be applied in real world projects. The three main topics were: F#, Boo and IronPython each of witch had its own sponsor (AJLopez, RodolfoF y Martín Salias respectively). After the talk we shared some snacks and beers as usual.
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