Office Memo - Squirrel Cycles

Steve Mann

I have a theory that human beings have behavior patterns that are closely tied to nature's cycles. It seems (at least here at the office) that we conduct less MADA business in the summer months, and much more in the fall. As the days grow short, everyone seems to have this urgent, inexplicable need to run around like squirrels storing food, in whatever fashion they think makes sense, to ensure survival through the winter. The amount of activity here at MADA has been remarkable since the last issue of FrameWorks was printed.

MADACON '93

First of all, we're pleased to include in this issue of FrameWorks details of MADACON '93, our fourth annual developers conference being held at the San Diego Hilton Beach and Tennis Resort, February 15-19, 1993. This year, in keeping with MADA's expanded charter of providing our members with the latest information on all object-oriented technologies, the conference agenda covers a wide range of topics: C++ , Bedrock, MacApp, OODLs, Windows development, object-oriented database technology, and a series of tutorials, case studies, and detailed technical sessions covering a broad range of topics.

We've assembled one of the strongest group of speakers in the industry from a variety of companies including Apple, MicroSoft, Symantec, Taligent, Component Software, and Sierra Software Innovations. Some of our featured speakers include Mike Potel, Taligent's Vice President of Technology Development, Kurt Schmucker from Apple's Advanced Technology Group, Curtis Faith, President of Sierra Software Innovations, Stoney Ballard, Chief Technical Officer of Component Software, and Martin Hess, Symantec's Principal Bedrock Architect. The program has something for all serious OO developers. Conference space is limited, so we would urge you to register as soon as possible. You can save substantially on registration fees if you sign up before December 18, 1992.

OOPSLA

We also went to OOPSLA in Vancouver, British Columbia during October, to find out what the rest of the OO world is doing. There were a variety of excellent exhibits and presentations. One of the most interesting was the session cohosted by Karl May, Apple's FrameWorks Marketing Manager, and Steve Levine, Symantec's Marketing Manager for Core Technologies. After a brief introduction by Karl, Steve launched into what appeared to be a fairly canned Bedrock presentation, a rehash of what's already been stated publicly.

About 20 minutes into the presentation, however, the focus shifted a bit. Steve started showing slides with hierarchy diagrams of some of Bedrock's framework structure. The nature of the presentation indicates that Apple and Symantec are really trying to provide the developer community with as much detail as possible, as soon as possible.

Here's a few highlights from the session:

• the Bedrock development environment and applications produced with it will run on both Mac and Windows machines;
• the Bedrock Class Library (BCL) will have about 150 pretested components, largely based on MacApp with additions;
• the event dispatching model is loosely based on the concepts of Supervisors and Bureaucrats as used in the Think Class Library that's included with the Think C compiler from Symantec;
• Bedrock will include a utility manager, a lower level API providing access to operating system level managers (memory, file, string, date / time managers, for instance);
• no decision has yet been made about providing source code-one option being considered is providing source at an extra cost;
• Apple will continue to support MacApp until it's no longer needed.

An aside-Symantec is looking for a product manager, technical writer, and a senior software engineer for the Bedrock project. Interested persons should contact their Human Resources Department at 408/253-4593.

NEW PRODUCTS

We're pleased to announce distribution agreements for two new products-P•O•E•T, and MicroGA. P•O•E•T is a cross-platform object-oriented database for C++. Available for MPW, Borland, MicroSoft, Zortech, LPI, SUN, and NeXT C++ compilers, P•O•E•T is both source and binary file format compatible on all platforms. This product just recently became available on the Macintosh. See page seven for details.

MicroGA is a C++ class library, with full source code, for implementing Genetic Algorithms (GAs). GAs can be applied to a wide variety of problems in business and finance, scheduling, AI, operations research, and engineering. MicroGA, which is available in both Mac and IBM versions, includes a prototyper/code generator that relieves the user from writing any C++ code at all. See page 33 for details.

MADA is constantly looking for new object-oriented products of all types. If you have an OO tool or framework, either new or already on the market, we would like to talk to you about distribution. One of our objectives is to provide all the premier OO software to our members at discounted prices.

MADA BUSINESS

Finally, some MADA business. The bottom of this page includes a Call for Nominations for the next Board of Directors. The Board is really the guiding body of this organization and is critical to our success. The next Board election takes place in January; the new Board takes over MADA's reins at the conference in February. I would encourage all of you to submit the names of interested MADA members (you can submit your own name).

I would personally like to apologize to all our Canadian members. We used a new mail carrier for the September issue of FrameWorks to speed delivery and simplify our preparation requirements. The new carrier worked great-European issues arrived before domestic US issues-everywhere except Canada. The carrier is investigating the problem and has assured us that it won't happen again.

FrameWorks is now on a regular mailing schedule. Everyone should receive their issues no later than the end of the month of publication (November 30 for this issue). If your issue is delivered late, please let us know. If you don't tell us about the problem, we can't fix it.

That's it for this issue-see you in San Diego.