New blog address

Hello World,
   I'm Alan Knight, the engineering manager for Cincom Smalltalk and principal developer of the GLORP object-relational mapping framework for Smalltalk. I did have a blog on the Cincom Smalltalk site for a while, which I posted to, um, occasionally, but without Jim Robertson around to maintain that infrastructure I've decided to use a more conventional service. And since Blogger seems to have at least the potential for automatic Smalltalk syntax highlighting that seemed like as good a reason as any to choose it.

  Once, many years ago, when I was a columnist for The Smalltalk Report someone asked me at a conference if I was "the" Alan Knight. And I really wasn't sure if I was or not. But now I know - I'm not "the" Alan Knight, but rather this is - LEGEND! I, on the other hand, am just a computer guy, live in Ottawa, play and referee soccer, and am married to Kirsten Carlson, a flute player and teacher.

  Before I worked at Cincom I was with The Object People, a training and consulting company in Ottawa, Canada. They ended up best known for developing TOPLink first in Smalltalk and then in Java, and for a while I was the chief architect. TOPLink eventually ended up owned by Oracle, but TOPLink/Smalltalk is still interesting as an early example of O/R mapping software that is clearly prior art to any number of patents. For that matter, so is the ObjectLens software (which patent lawyers seem to mostly know by its very early and short-lived name of Infobase) that my employer Cincom inherited from ObjectShare/ParcPlace-Digitalk/Parcplace and still sell today.

  In this space I hope to blog about Smalltalk and programming in general, Cincom Smalltalk in particular, Glorp and other O/R mapping issues, and anything else that seems interesting enough to post. And hopefully post things with more actual content and not quite so many links. Wish me luck.