&   
presented

VA Smalltalk™ users joined us on Tuesday, 23 September 2008
in Frankfurt am Main, Germany

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For a follow-up narrative and PDFs of the presentations,
visit Joachim Tuchels' (English-language) blog »

Photos courtesy of Adriaan van Os. More »

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Presentations

Market Perspectives and Strategies, Nicholas Gilman
Nick discussed general trends of the VA Smalltalk marketplace, including growth in the market and verticals driving that growth. He described Instantiations' process for driving product enhancements, new Consulting Services offerings, and the company's strategic relationship with objektfabrik.

Integrating VA Smalltalk into Today's IT Landscapes, Joachim Tuchel
Joachim provided an overview of current trends in IT architectures and discuss how VA Smalltalk can fit into those architectures. He included a demonstration of how SST can be used to build a RESTful web services server and client.

Customer Experience Report — Versicherungskammer Bayern
Martin Elsässer and Steffen Müller gave an overview of the insurance agency information system "VerIA" and its 10-year history. They discussed how VisualAge Smalltalk and VA Smalltalk helped them meet the growing need to integrate with several in-house systems, using different integration features of the IDE.

VA Smalltalk 8.0 and Beyond: Product Updates and Roadmap, John O'Keefe
The Instantiations VA Smalltalk product continues to evolve. This talk focused on the new capabilities that will be included in v8.0, including Seaside support, an updated browser look-and-feel, enhanced tool integration and revamped documentation. The presentation also addressed Instantiations' plans for product direction beyond the 8.0 release.

Building Applications in VA Smalltalk and Seaside, Joachim Tuchel
In this session, Joachim showed parallels between VA Smalltalk's model of building GUIs and the component concept and callback mechanisms in Seaside. He focused on how to build a web server application with VA Smalltalk, turning a fat client into a web server, including typical changes in the application's design and architecture that are necessary to serve multiple users. Joachim also discussed how to integrate a VA Smalltalk-based Seaside application into existing web/intranet infrastructures in the enterprise.

Follow-up questions? Contact jtuchel@objektfabrik.de or nicholas_gilman@instantiations.com

Presenters

	Joachim Tuchel is the founder and Director of objektfabrik, a consulting and development firm located in Ludwigsburg, Germany (near Stuttgart). Joachim has been working in VA Smalltalk projects for over a decade as a developer, architect, project manager and coach. Before founding objektfabrik in 1999, he worked for several consulting firms building mid-sized to enterprise-level systems for companies in the financial and manufacturing industries. Joachim holds a degree in Applied Computer Science and Business Information Systems from the University of Cooperative Education (Berufsakademie) in Stuttgart.
	John O’Keefe, Principal Smalltalk Architect, has been in software development for over 40 years, with the first 25 years spent developing in everything from assembly language to PL/I and SNOBOL. John joined the original IBM Smalltalk prototype team in 1990 and was a founding member of the IBM VisualAge Smalltalk development team. He was Team Lead and Chief Architect of IBM VisualAge Smalltalk from 1997 to 2007. In February 2007, John joined Instantiations to lead the VA Smalltalk development team.
	Nicholas Gilman is Manager of International Sales and Business Development for Instantiations, Inc., a software engineering firm specializing in providing development tools for high productivity and quality improvement. Nick has over 20 years of experience in international business with a strong focus on development of new international markets for technology companies. He co-founded TessComm, a software firm servicing the telecommunication industry, which was later purchased by Deutsche Telekom. Prior to that, Nick worked at GLOBEX for seven years, expanding their presence in the Latin America and European markets. He began his international career with the International Trade Administration, the export promotion arm of the US Department of Commerce. Nick holds a BA in International Studies from Norwich University and an MA in International Affairs from American University.