ESUG Innovation Technology Awards – sneak preview
26 August, 2010
This year’s ESUG conference will host the 6th annual Innovation Technology Awards. The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, €500, €300 and €200 during an awards ceremony at the conference. Developers of any Smalltalk-based software are welcome to compete, and, for the first time, this year entrants are asked to provide a 3-5min video explaining each entry.
There are lots of interesting projects up for the competition, based on Squeak, Pharo, VisualWorks, and Smalltalk/X. You can find out more about the competition at http://www.esug.org/Conferences/2010/Innovation+Technology+Awards, and of course, you’ll be able to see them for yourself at the conference. See you there!
Squeak 4.1 in production use
19 August, 2010
Andreas Raab noted on the Squeak-dev mailing list and on his blog that Teleplace have decided that Squeak 4.1 is sufficiently stable to use as the basis for their commercial software. They made the massive leap from 3.8 all the way to Squeak 4.1 in this release of their Teleplace Enterprise Server 3.5, which is used to host online collaboration environments.
It appears to have been a painless and successful activity, and is a massive vote of confidence in the ongoing changes to Squeak. If you want to see the new product in action, there’s a free trial version available at http://www.teleplace.com/trial/signup.php.
Google buys (part of) Instantiations
6 August, 2010
Instantiations, the company who took over IBM’s Visual Age for Smalltalk business, have now had the Java part of their operation snapped up by Google, who were reportedly interested in Instantiation’s Java and Ajax team, especially their GWT Designer product, which is slated to become part of the Google Web Toolkit infrastructure.
In many cases in the past, innovative companies using Smalltalk have attracted the attentions of the big players, who have then bought them and dropped all Smalltalk development in favour of Java or other enterprise environments. In this case however, Instantiations’ Smalltalk business is being spun off, and will remain in business as a separate entity focusing on development and support of Smalltalk products including VA Smalltalk, as their new homepage makes clear.
Seaside 3.0rc – One Click Image
23 July, 2010
Following on from the recent release of the Seaside release candidate for 3.0, a Squeak “One-Click” image has been put together to allow you to try out the new version with—er—one click!
The new image is based on Squeak 4.1, and launches fully configured with Seaside running with Comanche on port 8080, so you can immediately see the new improved Seaside welcome page at http://localhost:8080/, with links to documentation and the Seaside book.
Seaside’s 3.0 release is faster, cleaner, better tested and has many other changes and improvements over previous releases, so it’s well worth checking out this release candidate now.
Smalltalk: the past, the present, and the future?
15 July, 2010
Anyone with an interest in the continuing role and development of Smalltalk has had lots to chew on over the past few days.
As part of a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages, Computerworld Australia has published a conversation with Alan Kay about his role in the development of the “foundation of much of modern programming today: Smalltalk-80″, Object-Oriented Programming, and modern software development.
InfoQ is running a series of interviews recorded at QCon London. One of these is a session with Ralph Johnson and Joe Armstrong discussing the Future of OOP, including their take on what Smalltalk got wrong and right.
Finally, Gilad Bracha continues to lay out his vision for what he sees as Smalltalk’s successor, Newspeak. His latest post contains encouragement and advice for those interested in porting existing libraries and applications to Newspeak.
A newer, faster computer – for free!
8 July, 2010
Eliot Miranda has announced that his new Cog VM is now available for download, bringing Just-In-Time compilation and massive speed-ups to Squeak and Pharo.
If you’ve been following Eliot’s blog, you’ll know that he’s been working on this new VM for quite a few months now; well, it’s now ready for public consumption, and it’s blisteringly fast: up to three times faster than the existing VMs.
The VM selectively re-compiles code to native (Intel) machine-code, based on the size and complexity of the methods, and how often they’re called. This means that the benefits of the new VM vary from task to task, but Andreas Raab estimates that you should expect a 2-3x performance improvement generally, “more towards 2x when running primitive and I/O-bound stuff; more towards 3x when running ‘pure’ Smalltalk code”.
Eliot is interested in hearing from developers on other platforms who want to port the new VM to those platforms. In the meantime, he has also released the “Stack VM”, a cross-platform interpreter that uses context-to-stack mapping to achieve more modest performance gains.
See Eliot’s original post and the following discussion for more details of the new VM, some notes of caution, and how to get your hands on it and use it.
Thanks to Eliot for this great piece of work, and to Teleplace who have funded this work (and have been using it for the past year), and have agreed to release the new VM’s under the MIT Licence.
Calling all Smalltalkers!
2 July, 2010
Luc Fabresse invites all Smalltalkers to submit your Smalltalk based software to the 7th ESUG Innovation Technology Awards. The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, €500, €300 and €200 during an awards ceremony at the 18th International Smalltalk Joint Conference 2010 in Barcelona, Spain.
No constraints are put on the software except that it should be Smalltalk-based or Smalltalk-related and all flavours of Smalltalk are accepted. Last year’s entries included student projects, one-man labours of love, and full commercial applications.
Don’t forget that early registrations for the conference are only open for another month. You can register at http://registration.esug.org/ (running on Seaside). This server comes with new features: you can now do a group registration and make a single payment; it also allows you to book and pay for reduction tickets (typically for Golden and Platinum sponsors).
The ESUG 2010 conference preliminary schedule is available at http://www.esug.org/Conferences/2010
Squeak running on iPad
17 June, 2010
Bert Freudenberg has recently got Squeak working on the iPad, and has the video to prove it!
Bert’s work is based on John McIntosh‘s original port of the Squeak Virtual Machine to Apple’s touch-based OS, modified slightly to enable multi-touch and keyboard input. Bert also added multi-touch handling to Morphic. Interestingly, he notes that “Morphic was designed to handle multiple ‘hands’ (pointing devices) from the beginning”, so Squeak has always been multi-touch capable, and just let down by operating systems until now!
Bert’s work will help the Etoys team prepare their application for the next machine from OLPC, the XO-3, which will also be a touch device. The new version of the Sugar OS for the new device is still being developed, so it looks as though Etoys is well ahead of the curve.
Given the recent changes to Apple’s licence terms for iOS developers, it’s looking increasingly likely that we will see Squeak-based applications appearing for the iPad in the future. After a forty year wait, the Dynabook is nearly here!
JNIPort: Running Java from Squeak
11 June, 2010
Joachim Geidel has published a preview release of JNIPort, a Smalltalk library which allows Java code to be invoked from Smalltalk. It acts as a bridge between the world of Smalltalk objects and a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) where Java code is executing.
The port to Pharo and Squeak is not yet finished: it lacks support for callbacks from Java to Smalltalk, and is a work in progress. Joachim is particularly interested in feedback from Squeak 4.1 users.
JNIPort was originally written by Chris Uppal for Dolphin Smalltalk and published under a liberal licence which permits its use in commercial and non-commercial software. Joachim Geidel originally ported JNIPort to VisualWorks in 2006 and is now building on that work to make it available to Pharo and Squeak. The goal is to publish a stable release for VisualWorks, Pharo and Squeak in Q3/2010.
In addition to giving Smalltalk programs access to Java libraries and services, the interactivity of Smalltalk makes it an ideal environment to experiment and prototype new Java functionality.
Once it’s installed, calling some Java can be as simple as three lines in your workspace:
jvm := JVM current.
class := jvm findClass: #’java.lang.System’.
class currentTimeMillis_null
Installation instructions documentation and much more information are on the JNIPort Wiki.
Juan Vuletich has been working for some time on Morphic 3, a research and development project aimed at building the next standard in 2D user interfaces. One of his aims is to do mathematically proved alias-free rendering. In order to achieve these objectives, he has been experimenting with several techniques and design features, some which are new and others are not, but have never been consistently applied to a 2D GUI.
Juan’s contention is that, although the theory behind sampling is about 80 years old, existing graphics software completely ignore the theory and that his quest for higher quality results has resulted in the idea of applying the Sampling Theory which allows for mathematically proved alias free rendering. He informed the squeak-dev mailing list of his latest post which makes the startling claim that “I developed new drawing algorithms that give better results than those in Cairo, AGG, etc.” and he has created some examples showing some of the problems with existing algorithms, and how his approach improves these issues.
Juan is preparing the algorithms for release, which will involve him publishing it in a journal or as a Ph.D. thesis, and securing it for free use by either putting the code in the public domain or releasing it under the MIT licence.
Juan’s work on Morphic 3 is supported by ESUG’s Support Your Project programme.
