Smalltalk Solutions 98 Conference— General Comments

2. General Comments

In contrast to last year (so I am told, I was not there), this years conference was extremely positive. In discussing this difference with various people, two factors appeared:

• The apparent turnaround at Objectshare
  The slowing of the Java wave, and acceptance of Smalltalk by a number of large institutions (e.g. the JWARS project)

The conference had over 250 paying, attendees, and someone estimated around 200 non-paying (e.g. speakers, organizers, exhibitors). Estimates of 1000 exhibit attendees were being tossed around.

Occupying the front-door large exhibit areas were ObjectShare and IBM (not a big surprise). Other exhibitors were mostly recognizable names, I will list them here for general interest, in no particular order:

Applied Reasoning
Cambridge University Press
Cincom Systems, Object Studio (formerly Enfin Smalltalk)
Gemstone
Instantiations
Knowledge Systems
Object Intelligence
Objectivity
Precision
Quasar Knowledge Systems
The Object People
SilverMark Inc.
SIGS Publications
Synchrony Systems
Unity Software Systems

The exhibits were crowded every time I was there, and I gather were well attended even during conference sessions.

IBM announced the latest release of VisualAge Smalltalk (4.5??).

ObjectShare indicated that there would be a 3.5 announcement, I don't know if there was or not, but they have stated there would be an interim release later this year. ObjectShare did announce their now-available free version (which was known about before the conference). People seemed generally positive about where ObjectShare seemed to be headed.

QKS announced there SmalltalkAgents for Win32. "The goal of SmalltalkAgents is to offer rish support for the Windows OS" (their quote, not mine).

Gemstone made commitments to new releases for this year, including support for VW3.0.

ObjectShare and IBM made had some short technical presentations between conference sessions.

Negatives: if there was one real negative is was the announcement that the Smalltalk Report was being dropped by SIGS. This brought forward the question of future Solution's Conferences. The only answer forthcoming from SIGS was that "this one was a money maker", while the Report was not. My feeling was that the SIGS rep could not commit, but that they were happy with the attendance. I suspect this conference was a test after the negative feelings at the last one.