We are proud to have Mr. JAMES A. ROBERTSON (Cincom) as our guest speaker for our BSUG meeting. James was so kind to make a short stop in Brussels during his short visit to Europe, especially for the BSUG members.

Free drinks and snacks will be served and you get another opportunity to meet up with your Smalltalk friends. Please send a confirmation of your attendance to info@bsug.org (or fax to 016/35.38.93). Just your name, company name, e-mail address and/or phone number will do.

Work History

September 1999-Present: Cincom Systems, Inc.

Mr. Robertson came to Cincom with the acquisition of VisualWorks. Since the acquisition, Mr. Robertson has continued his role as a lead pre-sales, post sales, and consulting resource for the ATG (Advanced Technology Group) at Cincom. More recently, Mr. Robertson has joined the product management team and is helping guide the evolution of Cincom Smalltalk.

October 1993-August 1999: ObjectShare, Inc.

Mr. Robertson has been a Senior Sales Engineer since May of 1995. Mr. Robertson's technical skills include object-oriented programming and design, GUI design and programming, open systems and distributed computing, as well as software training and consulting. As a senior sales engineer, Mr. Robertson has been responsible for the support of most of ObjectShare's key customers North America. This has included extensive customer interaction in order to generate new sales with key customers in the region. Since joining the sales team, Mr. Robertson has become the lead sales engineer on most of the company's key accounts.

Mr. Robertson has also created large software frameworks as part of his job. These frameworks shipped with the 3.0 and 5i releases of VisualWorks, becoming a part of the professional development environment sold by ObjectShare. These frameworks have been integrated into many applications (both in development and in production) built by ObjectShare's customers. Mr. Robertson has also been a speaker at official ObjectShare user conferences, and has extensive public speaking experience.

Mr. Robertson's previous position was in Professional Services. Mr. Robertson trained customers of ObjectShare in the VisualWorks Smalltalk-80 environment, both in the classroom (as a certified Smalltalk instructor), and as a consultant. In particular, Mr. Robertson has experience building Object Oriented client/server/web software with VisualWorks Smalltalk-80 and Relational Database technology (such as Sybase and Oracle). Mr. Robertson specialized in deployment, performance tuning, and headless server deployment. Mr. Robertson also developed and taught a new Professional Services class on the "C" Connect package.

1. Cincom Product Directions, more information on http://www.cincom.com/smalltalk

2. StORE vs. Envy. Envy will no longer be further developed. Only VisualAge Smalltalk will keep Envy as its primary source code management system. Support for existing users of Envy will be continued for at least 2 years. StORE will become the new source code management system for VisualWorks. Mr Robertson gave a demonstration of StORE. He mentioned that working with StORE is very different from working with Envy, it uses a different process model.

3. Audience input - where do you need Cincom Smalltalk to go? Questions about the future of VisualWorks, VisualSmalltalk and Objectstudio. All three continue to exist and will be supported by Cincom.

The Refactoring Browser will be included in a next version of VisualWorks. Cincom expects that cross-fertilization between their different Smalltalk environments will continue to improve all 3 products. Mr Robertson stressed that Cincom is ready to make VisualWorks into an even better environment. A non-commercial fully functioning (parcels identical with commercial version) VisualWorks 5i.2 is now available from Cincom.

Mr Robertson is still favors Smalltalk above Java. He said that projects have shown that porting Smalltalk systems to Java has been a very costly and non profitable undertaking and he insists that Smalltalk is still much better to do new development as opposed to Java simply because,

1. Expertise in the Smalltalk world is much higher.
2. Smalltalk development is 3 to 5 times faster then Java development.
3. The STIC benchmarks proves that the Smalltalk VM is much more efficient (faster) then any Java VM.

There were 15 attendees. We would like to thank Cincom for their marvelous hospitality, the food and the drinks that were offered free of charge to all attendees.

Danny Van Welden and David Grietens