Development of an XML framework for VisualAge and VisualWorks Smalltalk: For the 8th ranked IT company in Boston - http://boston.internet.com/views/article/0,,2011_+552841,00.html - and the 1st ranked web personal interest site by revenue (Internet Week, Dec 4, 2000, p. 101) an XML framework was developed to distribute XML-RPC transactions to services running on common off-the-shelf hardware and software. Features include dynamic load balancing, failover, real-time software updates and the use of raw socket communications that resulted in the ability to scale to well over 100 hits/sec on very inexpensive hardware. The framework is being augmented to include system management features, SOAP, WSDL. Also participated in developing procedures for packaging the system and delivery via InstallShield images. This framework was accepted for listing in the IBM PartnerWorld for Developers, Global Solutions Directory.

IBM WebSphere Environment | UML - Rational Rose | XML, XSL | Visual Works Smalltalk v. 5i.2 | Visual Age Smalltalk v. 5.52 | DB2 v. 7.2

Development of an XML framework for VisualAge and VisualWorks Smalltalk: For the 8th ranked IT company in Boston - http://boston.internet.com/views/article/0,,2011_+552841,00.html - and the 1st ranked web personal interest site by revenue (Internet Week, Dec 4, 2000, p. 101) an XML framework was developed to distribute XML-RPC transactions to services running on common off-the-shelf hardware and software. Features include dynamic load balancing, failover, real-time software updates and the use of raw socket communications that resulted in the ability to scale to well over 100 hits/sec on very inexpensive hardware. The framework is being augmented to include system management features, SOAP, WSDL. Also participated in developing procedures for packaging the system and delivery via InstallShield images. This framework was accepted for listing in the IBM PartnerWorld for Developers, Global Solutions Directory.

UML - Rational Rose | XML, XSL, XML-RPC | Visual Works Smalltalk | Visual Age Smalltalk | XP

Port of Cincom’s VisualWorks XML framework to VisualAge, Squeak, Smalltalk X: Led a group of senior cross-vendor Smalltalkers in porting Cincom’s well-designed XML parser framework along with a test suite based on Jim Clark’s regression tests for XML. The design of the parser was diagrammed in UML via Rational Rose and included a special layer to handle ANSI standard representations of various dialect-specific Smalltalk constructs. This project founded the Open-X organization to manage the codebase of open-source Smalltalk XML frameworks (to appear on the web site o-x.org)

Proof of Concept System to Deliver Customer Communications Streams: For the nation’s 4^th largest auto insurance company, a highly dereferenced framework was coded permitting content module selection and data merging from mainframe legacy systems. The system duplicated the functionality of some 2000 pages of COBOL code with less than 2000 lines of Smalltalk code. Changes to content modules which used to require COBOL program modifications can now be specified totally outside of the running Smalltalk image by simple modifications to specifications kept in XML DOM level 2 format. The architecture was closely modeled after IBM’s Insurance Application Architecture (IAA), but specifications were mplemented in XML

UML | XML/XSL | Rational Rose | Visual Age Smalltalk |  IBM IAA

Requirements Gathering and Analysis for a multi-million dollar redesign of Customer Communications System: For the nation’s 4^th largest auto insurance company, a total redesign of customer communications delivery that emphasizes user friendliness and modularity permitting highly flexible channeling of communication flow to print, internet browsers, EDI, XML-EDI and alternative receptors, such as automobile smart panels and wireless hand-held PDAs. Deliverables included: requirements document, high-level object-oriented analysis diagrams and initial high-level object-oriented design diagrams, implementation recommendations, milestone charts and high-level test plan.

UML | XML/XSL | Rational Rose | Gause & Weinberg Requirements Exploration | DocuMerge OS/390

Pilot to Integrate XML into Call Center Client and Public Ecommerce Site: For the nation’s 4^th largest auto insurance company, the "corporate jewels" (metadata and metabehavior describing how rates are computed for each state, county and time-frame) are streamed from a Gemstone object-oriented database into XML and fed to various independent systems to dynamically alter the interface for a mission-critical "fat client" used by 5000 call center operators as well as the public web site which allows customers to buy, and alter their insurance coverages in real-time on-line. Evaluation of IBM Alphaworks XML tools, Microsoft DNA XML tools, Smalltalk XML tools, Bluestone, InDelv and other vendors’ resources for working with WC3’s DOM, XSLT, Xpath and related emergent technologies.

Performance Analysis and Tuning of Public E-Commerce Web Farm: For the nation’s 4^th largest auto insurance company, the production consumer e-commerce web farm (consisting of 12 NT Servers, each running multiple CPUs) was analyzed and tuned for performance. Analysis included the production of various UML Class, Interaction and Deployment diagrams, documenting the interaction between the core Smalltalk web engines and the IIS and ASP public interface layers, as well as taking baseline measurements with Mercury Interactive LoadRunner and Smalltalk web performance tools. Experiments were conducted with single, dual and quad CPU IBM Netfinity servers, with RAM varying between 256MB and 1GB. Tuning involved allocation of virtual memory, ASP caching, allocation of thread counts to IIS web servers and adjustments of the memory allocated to the Smalltalk web engines. Multiple Smalltalk web engines were also launched on multiple CPU machines and parceled out with a load balancer. Tuning achieved a 100% increase in performance without the need to add additional hardware (CPUs, RAM or servers), insuring that the public web site (which the Wall Street Journal hailed as the best in the industry) would be able to scale to meet the projected demands for the next few years without major architectural changes.

Port of major production web server to MVS OS/390: For the nation’s 4^th largest auto insurance company, the production consumer e-commerce web server was ported from VisualAgeSmalltalk on WindowsNT to MVS Smalltalk running on OS/390. The project was started with an in-depth OO analysis and generation of a series of UML Sequence Diagrams to identify platform incompatibilities. Set up infrastructure to allow remote interactive debugging of MVS running image on an NT workstation. Developed methodology for sub-application partitioning in Envy to allow application to deploy either on NT servers or on MVS OS/390. Developed packaging techniques to strip out all Windows dependent code and package runtime executables for OS/390. Worked on transferring major object tables (over 10mb) from a Windows common file system environment to MVS Q-SAM. Developed methodology for incremental development in SST distributed environment with active and passive images.

Spearheaded integration of telephony functionality into large call center client: For the nation’s 4^th largest auto insurance company, performed analysis, design and laboratory testing of integration between for GeoTel’s telephony ActiveX architecture and 10000+ function point mission-critical Smalltalk client used by some 5000 call center operators. Conducted knowledge transfer to regular employee team members so that the telephony functionality could be incorporated into the full lifecycle of the application. The screen pop functionality added to the client is estimated to save the business between $3 and $4 million dollars over the next 2-3 years based on studies of operator response times before and after telephony integration.

Mentor and Advisor to Core Architecture Team: For the nation’s 4^th largest auto insurance company, mentoring a team of 45 VisualAge Smalltalk developers and assiting in documenting and recommending changes to framework designs. Also implemented performance improvments in application used by 5000 call center reps using persistence and instantiaton proxies as well as asynchronous futures (meta-object programming). Introduced the team to model-driven-development with UML and set up mechanisms to forward and reverse engineer smalltalk code from Rational Rose and IBM’s UML Designer. Wrote cost-benefit analysis for lightweight UML and use-case driven process. Set up Envy/QA and Envy/Stats to improve the quality of code produced by the team.

OLE-Driven Reporting: For a billion-dollar plus company in the field of merchandising, a three-tier client server project was accomplished from requirements gathering to completion. Highlights included a sophisticated OLE interface to Business Objects 4.1 in a Win32 environment. Business Objects was controlled from within a smalltalk application that drove the viewing, saving, and refreshing of reports on the OLE automation server.

Object-Oriented Mentoring: For a billion-dollar company in the field of direct marketing, a two-tier client server project was mentored from requirements gathering to completion. Several non-OO developers were trained in IBM Smalltalk, WindowbuilderPro, Universe Persistence Framework, and related tools and coached through several iterative stages of a core business concept project in the field of direct marketing. In addition to mentoring and skills transfer, frameworks were developed for: exception handling, security and persistence. The project went into production with over 1250 function points, and most of the classes were reused in a follow-on application that delivered over 1550 function points.

XP-like methodology led to productivity in the range of 50 function points per developer person month.

Object-Oriented Infrastructure Development: For a billion dollar company in the field of direct marketing with 140+ developers, an infrastructure and persistence framework was developed to go from traditional smalltalk clients running on Windows NT/95 and OS/2 through the Microdecisionware gateway to DB2 running on IBM 390s. Currently working on selecting and integrating tools (ad hoc query, OLAP, and data mining) to exploit a highly parallel DB2 data warehouse that will soon reach a terabyte in size. Participate in strategic meetings with COO, CFO and VPs of IS and Marketing to determine architectures needed to seamlessly integrate OO development environments with statistical analysis engines (SAS) and a generalized CORBA framework. Mentored and supervised delivery of line of business smalltalk applications to integrate merchandising and marketing forecasting and a framework for developing and managing the corporate Internet site. Developed a testing methodology for method-level, class-level, integration and regression testing. Also authored documents for the development center on OOAD Best Practices and a Corporate Framework for OO Development.

Visual Age Enterprise | Gemstone Smalltalk | Envy Developer

OOAD & Smalltalk Mentoring: For a large state agency with 130+ developers a program was constructed to train, mentor and transfer skills to a small team (10 developers) in the areas of: Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (responsibility-driven design, Wirfs-Brock, scenarios, design patterns, CRC cards), Smalltalk programming style, TeamV repository use, and setting up incentives and goals for object reuse. Day-to-day support was given to various developers in the areas of interfacing to IBM DB2 and Oracle databases, drag-drop techniques in GUI design, metrics and writing code to the emerging ANSI standard. Evaluations of IBM Visual Age, various thrid-party tools and package management tools were also conducted.

Future assignments include: developing "thin client" intranet client/server applications with smalltalk servers (e.g., Visual Wave & Gemstone).

ParcPlace Smalltalk | StaticSQL | DB/2 | IBM VisualAge | DNS CORBA Broker

Scholarly Hypertext Reader: several thousand lines of Smalltalk code plus many DLLs in Pascal were combined with several hundred megabytes of scholarly text data to automatically produce a corpus for linguistic research containing over 300M hypertext links to relate passages, alternative translations and lexicon entries. This program has a sophisticated Windows front-end to enable its full use by scholars who are not computer literate.

Digitalk Smalltalk | Pascal Windows 3.11 | Catspaw Spitbol

Automatic SGML Translation. For a Fortune 500 manufacturer: several thousand lines of Spitbol code to perform a three-pass conversion of data from a mainframe-based proprietary markup language to SGML on a PC, all in conformance to a quite complex DTD. This transformation enabled mounting a legacy text base on the web with a time to market measured in weeks.

Catspaw Spitbol | SGML | Dynatext Internet Server

Sower, E.J.S.  "A walk[back] on Smalltalk's  nil side." Software Development,  Vol 8(#9), pp. 47-51. http://www.sdmagazine.com/articles/2000/0009/0009c/0009c.htm

References

[Current references on request – here are some older references]

Mr. Michael Morrone, Sr. Project Manager, Merchandising, Lands' End, Inc., 1 Lands' End Lane, Dodgeville, WI 53595. Phone: (608) 935-6613.

Mr. Tom Andersen, Development Facility Support, Department of Transportation, State of Wisconsin, 4802 Sheyboygan Avenue, Room 201B, PO Box 7982, Madison, WI 53707. Phone: (608) 267-3250

Mr. Jim Vosberg, Technical Publications Manager, John Deere Company, 18600 John Deere Road, Dubuque, IA 52001; Phone: (319) 589-6160.