This past July, Instantiations continued its proud tradition of supporting the Smalltalk community at this year's ESUG Conference in Lille, France! Moreover, Instantiations had a big presence this year: 6 members of the company attended (even members from the new Fintech business line!) and we gave a total of 4 presentations!
The conference itself was great, and it's always nice to meet other (and new) Smalltalkers. Like previous ESUGs, we had so much fun while enjoying good foods and drinks together. (After all, France is a great place world class cuisine!) For me personally, it was also a bit special because I lived near Lille more than a decade ago, so it was nice to go back there.
As always, ESUG talks are recorded, and this year you can watch them here. If you are interested in Instantiations' talks, they are here:
Most Smalltalk dialects now include string classes that can represent Unicode codepoints. However, the way in which different dialects provide this can differ quite a bit. This presentation will give a general overview of the implementations in VAST, Pharo, GemStone, and Cuis, with an extra focus on Unicode string hashing, comparing the design choices and tradeoffs involved.
The VAST Platform's extensive Unicode support enables the creation of applications that cater to global audiences with diverse language requirements. In this presentation, we'll walk you through the creation of a full-stack demo application that seamlessly integrates and reliably manages Unicode strings across its various layers. Starting from the user interface on the web, we will demonstrate how Unicode strings are handled on the Seaside server. Then, we'll show how these strings are manipulated within the development tools. Finally, we'll explore how Unicode text is stored and retrieved in the database storage layer.
Instantiations is committed to continuing investment in the VAST Platform and ongoing involvement with the Smalltalk community. Get an update on our progress, and see where we’re headed in the near future. Plus, get an overview of the features coming to VAST Platform 2025!
You've probably already heard much about how organizations develop and deploy Smalltalk applications, but how is a complete Smalltalk platform made? In this talk, get a behind-the-scenes look at how Instantiations creates the VAST Platform. We'll discuss how we successfully develop, test, benchmark, and build a commercial Smalltalk platform like VAST.
