Subject: REVIEW: IPISA '95 (conference)
From: [email-masked] (Manuel Lemos)
Date: 15 Dec 1995 21:19:19 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

WHAT?

	IPISA is an annual meeting of Amiga developers.  In Italian,
IPISA means 'Incontro dei Programmatori Italiani per lo Sviluppo su
Amiga.'  In English, this means exactly, meeting of Italian
programmers for development under the Amiga.

WHERE?

	IPISA 95 took place in Milan that is a large city the north of
Italy with around 5 million inhabitants.

WHEN?

	This year, IPISA took the morning and the afternoon of
Saturday, 18 of November.

WHO?

	A group of Italian enthusiasts of Amiga programming organised
IPISA. Many of them are students at Milan's university.  They worked
hard on their free time for many months before the meeting day to
organise this event.

	Almost 400 Amiga developers and enthusiasts attended the
meeting this year.  Some of them bothered to travel during all night
from the south of Italy, just to arrive in time to the meeting day
morning.

	Italian developers held most of the talks and presentations,
but the main guest star was definitely Dr. Peter Kittel. Dr. Peter
Kittel came from Germany to bring several good news to all the
amigans.

	Angela Schmidt came also from Germany to talk about the story
and the latest release of Meeting Pearls, and Haage and Partner came
to talk about Storm C/C++ development environment.

	Oh, and I (Manuel Lemos) came from Portugal to talk about
Objection that is a portable Object Oriented programming support
system.

HOW?

	As a non-Italian speaker, everybody kindly treated me as a
guest.  I arrived in the morning of the day before the meeting day.
Many thanks to Fabrizio and his mother (I hope I have spelt the name
right) that bothered to pick me up at the Milan-Linate airport.

	I stayed all the afternoon at the home of Paolo Silvera where
I meet the well-known Amiga E language Dutch developer Wouter van
Oortmerssen.  It was with a great pleasure that I got the news that
such a qualified software engineer as Wouter will most likely to join
the Amiga Technologies engineering team.

	Depending on Wouter, the incoming version of AmigaDOS will
feature a co-operative system of protected memory and the executable
binary files stored in portable CPU independent format like for
instance under TAOS.

	By night I met with everybody of the IPISA organisation for
dinner. The dinner took at an internationally award winning
'pizzeria.'  There, I could confirm that what I heard about Italy
being the worst place on earth to eat pizza could only be a joke. The
pizza's that I tried were very tasty. They are thin but so large that
you can make a whole meal just with one pizza. Anyway, I think I would
get sick very quickly if keep eating pizza every day just as I ate in
all the three days that I stayed in Milan.  Well, let's just get back
to IPISA.

	The meeting day was very long for everybody that participated.
Although the meeting started at 10 in the morning many people, mostly
of organisation, arrived much sooner to make sure that everything will
start on schedule.

	The conference hall was quite large and seemed to be almost
full by the time the conference started.  Sergio Ruocco welcomed
everybody present.  A short but smooth ray-traced IPISA logo animation
was projected on a large screen of maybe around 4x3 meters.

	An Amiga 4000 connected to a professional video system that
fed the images to a large RGB projector. The persons that had anything
to show to support their presentations used this A4000.

	Like most of the persons that were going to present their
work, I had to arrive sooner to install the stuff I brought to the
show.  Unfortunately I had been very busy in the weeks before the
conference day and I was not able to prepare a better presentation as
I wished.

	I had to carry my hard-disk to the conference and plug it in
another Amiga 4000 supplied by the organisation to install some stuff
that remained to the last hour.  This took me quite some time to work
out and so I was not able to pay proper attention to all the morning
presentations.

	I am not going to describe in detail all the talks because
they were too many and I was not able to pay proper attention to
everyone.  This is mostly because I do not understand enough Italian
worthy to mention, although my mother language (Portuguese) is quite
similar to Italian.

	Here follows a summary of the talks by order of appearance. I
hope I have not forgotten any of the presentations.

o	Angela Schmidt talked about the story and the latest release
	of Meeting Pearls.

o	Michele Battilana presented a talk with reflections about the
	future. He made allusions to other systems and trends that he
	believes Amiga should follow. Many thanks for the beta version
	of Cloanto's personal suite that he gave away in a CD to every
	IPISA participant.

o	Paolo Canali presented a PCI 2.0 solution for the current Amiga 
	architecture.

o	Maurizio Ciccione presented the current developments of is Audio Lab
	16 version 2 program. This program is still under development
	but it looked very impressive. It seems to a complete solution
	for professional audio engineers.  A version will available
	later in Aminet.

o	Gabriele Falconi and Stefano Guarnieri presented a visual
	environment to simulate neural networks. The theme is very
	interesting but it is not very well known for the generality
	of the programmers. The program looked simple but very
	effective.  Future developments may turn the application into
	a very useful tool for programmers that want to use the fuzzy
	logic technology in their applications.

o	Vicenzo Gervasi presented an integrated environment to support
	Object Oriented Programming under the language E. The seemed
	to be a very good looking and complete system. It features
	visual support for class browsing, automatic tool building and
	revision control.

o	Giuseppe Ghibo presented a library to support recursive paths
	for TeX. He also described a complete TeX installation that he
	worked out for the IPISA CD.

o	Giuseppe Ligorio presented an improved compression scheme for sound
	and image IFF files based on variant of Huffman
	algorithms. Too bad he had not much time to do more than
	introducing the theme due to time restrictions.

o	Alberto Longo presented a complete analysis on the viability of
	writing smooth texture mapping games under Amiga. He demoed
	Breathless, which is a doom-like game, to show how fluid this
	kind of games can turn out using his technology. In a few
	words: it looked impressive!

o	Michele Puccini presented a library to manage high speed
	animation.  Unfortunately, I was to busy by the time of this
	presentation and I was not able to pay proper attention.

o	Alessandro Tasora made one of the most spectacular
	presentations. He presented several modules for Real 3D that
	support particle based 3D animations. He had some wire frame
	based animations ready to show. The animations looked very
	impressive and Alessandro was very applauded.

o	Federico Zuccollo presented a BOOPSI class based solution for
	improving the AMIGA file system access. This was a very
	technical and detailed presentation.

o	Manuel Lemos (myself) presented an Object Oriented Programming
	support system to develop portable applications named
	Objection. Unfortunately, I was not able to talk much about my
	system due to time restrictions. My system consists of a
	library that implements OOP support in very similar way to
	BOOPSI but in truly a portable fashion.

	Objection was completely developed in ANSI C. About 80% of all
	the code that was developed for all the classes and the system
	kernel is system independent.  This means only about 20% of
	the code need to be rewritten to port the Objection to another
	environment. The system currently supports Amiga under
	Intuition and POSIX (UNIX) compliant platforms under
	X-Windows.

	Many base classes needed to write applications were already
	developed. Some application specific classes are under active
	development, like for instance a PostScript export class and
	RTF (Rich Text Format) export and import classes.

	I demoed an application that was my graduation project. It is
	a visual editor to design Finite State Machines. This is a
	high level tool to model for instance microchip hardware. Both
	AMIGA - Intuition and POSIX - X-Windows where shown running at
	the same time on the AMIGA. The X-Windows version was running
	under DaggeX X-Windows server. I was not able to put a version
	running under AmiWin X-Windows server on time for IPISA.

	Objection will be freely available to non-commercial AMIGA
	software developers. Commercial software developers will have
	to pay licence.

o	Haage and Partner presented the new C/C++ development
	environment. It looked great but it felt as it needs to mature
	a lot to support Amiga specific programming up to the level of
	SAS C. despite this, it features visual automatic tool
	building support. This is an important feature that lacks on
	SAS C.

	The C++ compiler was claimed to be a fast although the
	generated code was not as good as it could be due to the lack
	of a global optimiser. They are considering making the
	compiler full ANSI C++ 3.0 compliant.

	The debugger seemed visually good looking but nothing was said
	about its abilities to debug multi-thread or shared library
	based applications as SAS CPR is able.

AMIGA TECHNOLOGY SPEAKS

	Dr. Peter Kittel was the most wanted speaker in the
afternoon. He divided his talk in three parts: what AT has done so
far, what they are doing now and they plan for the future of the
Amiga.

	The reintroduction of the Amiga in the market was what he
talked about concerning what AT has done so far. So, this is not
worthy to mention it again.

	Now, AT is working on the restart of ADSP planned for 1 of
December (a bit late now). Commercial developers will pay more (300
USD) than non-commercial developers (100 USD) as usual. Commercial
developers will get phone support. I wonder what does this means
exactly because any serious developer uses Internet to communicate.

	From now on, the access to the developer program will be
restricted to real AMIGA developers. Non-commercial developers have to
show at least one public domain program for the Amiga and commercial
developers have to show at least one commercial application.

	AT plans small enhancements and bug fixes to the Amiga OS and
the current Amiga models in early 96. There will be no more beta
versions of the operating system circulating around like in the
past. It is to be hoped that this will prevent the OS being pirated in
the BBSes. Dr. Kittel mentioned Windows 95 beta versions as a joke.

	AT is going to introduce a PCMCIA based Quad speed CD-ROM
drive named Q-Drive some time very soon. They are also going to
release an Internet surfer package for the Amiga. No mention on the
WWW browser that will be supplied.

	AT is talking to several companies to discuss strategic
alliances and to bring back new and old AMIGA developers to support
the AMIGA with their products.  Motorola was mentioned regarding the
future Power PC based Amiga.

	In a more distant future, AT will be working on hardware
independent version of the AmigaDOS. Low end and high end Power PC
based Amigas will be the first to run the new version of
AmigaDOS. High end Power AMIGAs will be most likely CHRP compliant.

	Power AMIGAs will feature a proprietary chip set. It will not
be AAA, but will be something that will have many of its
features. This chip set will feature 24 bit video and 16 bit
audio. Power AMIGAs will be definitely PCI based.

	Dr. Kittel then tried to answer almost every question that was
posed by the audience. He apologised for the things that he could not
talk about. Most of the questions are related with topics described
above.

	Dr. Kittel was not able to answer a particular question that
claimed my attention. It was about the differences of prices of the
AMIGA computers in each country. He said that AMIGAs are sold to every
distributor at the same price.

	The answer is simple and it scares me that AT either ignores
or pretends to ignore the real reason for this. The reason is that in
many countries there is only one company that buys all the Amigas that
arrive to that country. That company resells the AMIGA to any other
local distributor but with their own 'tax' added to the original local
distributor price. This is what it seems to be why the AMIGA was so
overpriced in many countries.

	It's a shame if AT will continue to close their eyes to this
situation because this seriously hurts the AMIGA chances of being more
popular in the future.

	In the end Dr. Kittel encouraged developers to write only OS
legal software.  He also encouraged every AMIGA user to advocate for
the AMIGA spreading the good news about the AMIGA that is back for the
future.

	Dr. Kittel was very applauded before and after a question and
answer period.  Almost everybody stood up to applaud him.

LIKES

	In a few words, IPISA was impressively very well organised.

	The number of attendants was very high (almost 400).

DISLIKES

	The arrival of some late hour guests, like for instance
Dr. Peter Kittel, forced the organisation to rearrange the time and
the duration of all the other presentations.  This was a bit
frustrating for many of the speakers like myself as we were not able
to talk about many aspects of our work in such shortened periods of
time as we wished.

	In compensation Dr. Kittel's talk was in my opinion the most
interesting for everybody.  Anyway, I understood that the organisation
will probably split next year IPISA meeting in more days if the number
of speakers keeps increasing like for this year's meeting.

	Milan's weather by mid-November is already too cold.  Probably
it would be a good idea to reschedule IPISA for some time earlier in
the year when the weather is warmer.  Maybe a month earlier would be
warmer enough to encourage more non-Italian's developers to attend to
IPISA and take the chance to visit the beautiful historical side of
Milan.

	Almost all the conferences were in Italian.  Fair enough
because before everything this is an Italian developer meeting held in
Italy.  It would be great if English versions of the papers related
with the talks could be made available to the Amiga community through
the IPISA WWW pages.  I am sure this would encourage many more
non-Italian developers to attend IPISA in the future.

CONCLUSIONS

	IPISA is yet another proof that AMIGA is back for the
future. If there is an international meeting that AMIGA developer
should not miss, IPISA is the one.  Even Dr. Kittel admitted that in
Germany there no developers meeting of this quality. Do not miss IPISA
96 if you are a serious AMIGA developer.  Congratulations to the whole
staff of the IPISA organisation.

Copyright Manuel Lemos 1995
Internet : [email-masked]
FidoNet  : 2:361/9.1
BIX      : mlemos (@bix.com)

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