November 93 - WAMADA Notes
WAMADA Notes
John MacVeigh
WAMADA's August meeting followed Boston's MacWorld and the introduction of the
Newton. So the natural topic was the Newton and its development environment. Our
host, Dave Buell of Advanced Laser Graphics, gave us a tour of the Newton Tool kit. He
also offered up his newly purchased MessagePad (in guest mode, of course) for the
group's "experiments" in hand writing recognition. The Newton Tool kit presented a
fairly familiar interface to those who have been working with MacApp and its various
view editors. The biggest improvement (and most difficult to do, of course) would be
the addition of an emulator which allowed you to try out your work without
transferring it to the Newton. Maybe next year. In the meantime, we hope the idea of
using objects and frameworks in development tools will diffuse across the corporate
boundaries from PIE to whatever the Mac division is called these days.
And speaking of object development environments: the authors of SmallTalkAgents,
Quasar Knowledge Systems, made use of the ALG training room during August to
present three tutorials on SmallTalk to local developers, WAMADA members included.
I expect our members will have similar opportunities in the future.
September and OOPSLA
The September WAMADA meeting was timed to coincide with the OOPSLA conference
which took place this year at the Washington Hilton. Four speakers gave talks on a wide
range of object technologies. Rock Howard of Tower Technologies started the meeting
with an overview of Eiffel. He said that Tower would be moving an Eiffel compiler to
the Mac. He did not know, however, whether it would be made to work with MPW or
Think. Presumably the announced combination of MPW tools with the Think Project
Manager makes this a moot point, but the lack of solid information from Apple on
"how?" and "when?" are made evident by Tower's uncertainty. Existing compilers
generate C code, but native compilers are on the way. Howard also announced that
Tower, in an alliance with Rational, will develop Eiffel implementations of the Booch
components.
Rational itself was represented by the next speaker, Doug Hill, who gave a talk on the
basics of Grady Booch's design notation and discussed how Rational's tools give the
programmer access to that notation. Rational Rose is the name of their CASE tool. The
name "rose" arises from the view of the development cycle as a circular (iterative)
series of steps, each step making up a petal on a circle. Their view of the development
cycle begins with analysis, which leads to the creation of analysis classes. In the design
stage these are combined with implementation classes. During development changes are
invariably introduced into the analysis, which leads to a second iteration: cook until
done. Rational Rose currently provides a GUI for the design notation. In the first
quarter of next year version 2 will be introduced which will add a code generator (this
on Unix and Windows boxes). Following that, Rational intends to complete the circle by
providing a tool (Code Cycle) which will reverse engineer C++ back into design
diagrams.
Our third speaker, Ole Madsen, of both Aarhus University and Mjølner Informatics in
Norway, discussed the BETA language. In contrast to Rational's view of stepping from a
design notation to C++ and then back again (reminiscent of the circular staircases in
an Escher sketch), BETA is intended to provide a single language for analysis, design,
and implementation. Ole sees modeling and design as the main benefits of object
oriented languages, with reusability as a side effect. BETA helps simplify things by
using a single abstraction mechanism for classes, procedures, functions, exceptions
and processes. Rather than describe BETA here, I'll refer you to the just completed
three part FrameWorks series on BETA by Steve Mann. It's worth a look, particularly
if C++ is the only object oriented language you've used.
Our final speaker was Bo Klintberg who presented his OSL Scripting Components for
MacApp. This product provides C++ source code for MacApp 3.0, three demos (with
source), 300 pages of documentation, and 411 files, all in a package which provides
your MacApp application with generic scripting capabilities. Sending, receiving, and
recording are all supported. And you don't have to change the original MacApp source!
Bo estimates that 95% of the core suite descriptors are provided, with support for the
data base suite in the works. Once again, a detailed FrameWorks article (written by
Bo) is available with all the details on how these components were designed and
implemented.
While perusing the latest FrameWorks you may notice that, not coincidentally, many
of these products may be purchased through MADA, usually at a worthwhile discount.
The plans to expand the range of information and products available from MADA seem
to be taking hold, and just in time to buffer the increasingly haphazard support for
object technologies from Apple. One veteran participant of OOPSLA pointed out that
Apple's previous effort to tout the use of object technologies was noticeably absent this
year. On the one hand the alpha shipment of MacApp 3.1 is very welcome news; on the
other hand it seems that Bedrock's support for Apple Events (something Apple keeps
insisting is vital to their future) won't be much different than MacApp's. Perhaps
Apple's internal development plans suffer from the same qualms as purchasers of
their hardware: no one wants to invest in the current product because an even better
one is just around the corner. MADA can help reduce the pressure to constantly move
up to the latest version by providing continued support for those of us on the "trailing
edge". At the same time, we are sure to get reports from the pioneers as they begin to
explore new frameworks and languages. All in all, not a bad mix.
If you're in the D.C. area, and interested in object oriented programming, give
WAMADA a visit. We meet the third Wednesday of every month, beginning around 7:15
p.m. For information on the next meeting, and directions, send a message to
JEFFRIES.L on AppleLink, or call Leslie at (301) 340-5126 during business hours
(EDT). If you leave her an e-mail address, she can place you on her mail list for
WAMADA meeting announcements.