David Long - SecureCell, SageTea and the Road Back to Pharo - 26 August 2026
Much of today's software is locked inside large, evolving code bases where the original design has gradually been lost. What if we could automatically recover that design, represent it using a language-independent application model, and then allow a modern runtime to render, evolve and maintain the application independently of its original implementation language?
This talk presents that vision through SecureCell, a secure communications appliance developed by XTC Mobile for organizations that require privacy, security and local control.
I'll demonstrate how Graphify analyzes existing applications to recover their architectural structure, how this information is transformed into the SageTea Canonical Application Model, and how the runtime can automatically generate user interfaces, navigation and application behavior from that model. Rather than treating software as language-specific source code, the emphasis is on recovering and preserving the application's semantic design.
Finally, I'll discuss why this architectural approach naturally leads back to Pharo Smalltalk, and why we believe Smalltalk remains an ideal environment for building the next generation of language-independent development tools and self-hosting runtime systems.
The session will include a live demonstration of SecureCell and an overview of the current work on the Eclipse SageTea Runtime.
David Long is the creator of the Eclipse SageTea project and CEO of XTC Mobile, where he leads the development of secure mobile communications solutions for government, defence, telecommunications carriers and regulated enterprises.
A Smalltalk developer for more than thirty years, David is currently developing the next generation of the Eclipse SageTea Runtime—an open-source platform for language-independent application modeling, AI-assisted software modernization and long-term software evolution. His current work focuses on Graphify, canonical application models, runtime architecture and bringing the SageTea Runtime to Pharo Smalltalk.
This will be an online meeting.
If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page to receive the meeting details.
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