Smalltalk Solution's 98 Conference— Keynotes

3. Keynotes

3.1 "Smalltalk Means Business" (Andy Parrish)
3.2 "Quietly Doing the Hard Stuff" (Randy Best)
3.3 "The Reality of Smalltalk in a PDA"

There were two keynote addresses, the first described a real project and the second was a STIC (Smalltalk Industry Council) presentation. I will also mention here the panel discussion on PDA's.


3.1 "Smalltalk Means Business" (Andy Parrish)

Headlined as "American Airlines TeleService Resources", this was in fact a description of a real live telmarketing service organization where their whole system was developed in IBM VisualAge Smalltalk. This type of telemarketing firm has hundreds of operators sitting in front of screens on which they can bring up applications for any number of clients. Someone (a customer) calls to complain, ask for help, order something (e.g. from a TV ad) and the operator takes the call, traverses windows of an application entering data and/or responding to questions from a pre-designed multi-thread script. Orders must then be passed on the client. Reports must be passed to the client, data obtained from the client. New clients may expect their application to be designed and in production within a few days at most. With over 100 million calls a year, this is a large enterprise.

The initial application was up and running in about 6 months (I don't know the size of the development group).

3.2 "Quietly Doing the Hard Stuff" (Randy Best)

For those of you who have not run across Randy Best, he is the Executive director of the Smalltalk Industry Council which is a non-profit organization dedicated to the furthering of Smalltalk in real applications. Randy never seems to stop moving, he is a big man and could probably speak to hundreds without the need of a microphone. You cannot, nor do you find yourself wanting to, ignore him when he is talking.

Randy talked about the STIC web site (www.stic.org) which has quite a wide variety of information on it, including up-to-date descriptions of real Smalltalk projects. He talked about the JWARS project (Joint Warfare System). This is a big project of the U.S. Armed Forces. For a complete description, see the STIC web site.

Another Smalltalk item was the "Network Vehicle" which was a big hit at Comdex. Here Smalltalk was described as "doing the hard stuff" (this is where the title of this talk came from). Again, there is more information on the STIC web site.

Randy ran over a long list of large and small projects being done or already done in Smalltalk. It was a very positive address.

3.3 "The Reality of Smalltalk in a PDA"

This was a panel discussion with three (if I remember correctly) members.

The first talked about Smalltalk and showed a programmed phone done in Smalltalk (a real working phone, although not in production).

The next panelist was from a startup Java company working on Java for PDA's. His argument was that you have to use Java to get funding. He tried to talk about Java already being there, but was not able to make many real points - yet.

The third talked about being a user. He had headed a project for a medical services company (home nurses, home care aides). These people travelled all over the city and had to report back details. Originally done by delivering a time-log sheet to the head office, they now used PDA's to log and then transmit the information, (and also to get the next day's schedule), saving many hours per week. The PDA's were not programmed in Smalltalk, although I gather the host system was. The PDA's were programmed in C. However, this was and interesting discussino of using PDA's with Smalltalk.