As this year concludes, we've been reflecting on the past 300+ days... and it's been a whirlwind. In-person conferences have resumed. New versions of VAST with robust features and new technology continue to be released. And, even more exciting opportunities for VAST are on the horizon. While it was challenging to make enough time for all these activities, we're extraordinarily thankful to be a part of them.
Truthfully, none of this awesome past year would have been possible without our loyal customers and the Smalltalk community. "Thank You!" We look forward to many more years of serving you!
Speaking of in-person events, it was great to see many of our customers and the enormous Argentinian Smalltalk community at the recent Smalltalk community event: Smalltalks 2022. It was held at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, in Buenos Aires, Argentina from November 8th through 11th. Like Camp Smalltalk Toronto, Smalltalks 2022 celebrated the 50th anniversary of the creation of Smalltalk at Xerox PARC in 1972, and with that came some excellent keynote speakers like Dan Ingalls and Gilad Bracha. As expected, F.A.S.T. organized a great 'Smalltalks' conference and we're already looking forward to the next one!
Instantiations gave 4 presentations at Smalltalks, all of which were recorded (see below). For those interested in the other presentations, check out FAST's Youtube Channel Playlist.
Company Update & VAST 2023 Preview
Instantiations is committed to continuing investment in the VAST Platform and ongoing involvement with the Smalltalk community. Get an update on our progress over the past year towards those ends, and see where we’re headed in the near future. Plus, get an overview of the upcoming features coming to VAST Platform 2023!
An MQTT Client for the Enterprise
MQTT is a lightweight communication protocol that’s a close relative of IBM MQSeries. With many Instantiations customers already using MQSeries, it was a logical choice to bring the power of MQTT to VAST Platform 2023. Our new enterprise-grade and extensible MQTT client, written in pure Smalltalk, has support for version 3.1, 3.1.1, and 5 protocols. All protocol details are handled internally by the software and run over traditional TLS or non-TLS native sockets. Use MQTT with existing VAST frameworks to compress and/or encrypt payloads to enable end-to-end encryption over untrusted networks or brokers. Even VAST's new asynchronous streams are already integrated for easy consumption of publish/subscription updates.
Join us for live demos and a Q&A session about the VAST MQTT client implementation and learn how to get started when it releases early next year.
Let’s deploy that Smalltalk project!
You’ve spent a lot of time developing your cool Smalltalk project, and now you’re finally happy with it. What’s next? It’s time for deployment.
Join us to learn how to generate a deployment-friendly Smalltalk runtime image for your project and how to tailor that runtime image for your own needs. You may be thinking: How small can the runtime image be? Can you deploy to a different OS or CPU architecture than what you’re developing on? How can the deployed image be debugged if there’s an error?
In this presentation, you’ll see how VAST addresses all of these topics, plus see some live deployment demos featuring some of the new technology coming to VAST Platform 2023!
VAST’s Unicode Transition: Developer Notes
With the release of VAST Platform 2022, the required building blocks for world-class Unicode support (similar to Rust and Swift) were in place, but that wasn’t the end of the story. Even when designed as a drop-in replacement for existing String classes, transitioning existing systems to have full Unicode support has its caveats and should be carefully considered.
In this talk, we’ll share lessons learned while we were migrating some of our frameworks to be "Unicode-ready". Get useful tips and tricks (and ways to avoid some pitfalls) when working on your future Unicode-related projects.
