An early Christmas present from Aida
17 December, 2010
Janko Mivšek is delivering his Christmas presents early this year, with the announcement of the first beta of the “Christmas edition”(6.2) of Aida/Web. Aida/Web is a Smalltalk web application framework with integrated Ajax support, a rich collection of web components, REST-like URLs, and integrated session and security management and much more.
Among the many new features in this version are mobile device detection and rendering, HTML5 support, WebSocket support for bidirectional communication between server and browser, nestable AJAX-enabled forms, and the introduction of a unified JSON-based message format between server and browser.
Aida/Web is supported on six Smalltalk platforms: Squeak, Pharo, Gemstone/S, VisualWorks and ObjectStudio, Dolphin Smalltalk, and Smalltalk/X.
See the Aida/Web download page from more information. Janko has also provided an interesting analysis of the codebases of Aida/Web, Seaside and Iliad.
The Return of the Connectors
10 December, 2010
Chris Muller has recently updated Connectors to work with Squeak 4.2 images. Connectors gives you the ability to turn Morphic into a drawing environment for making connected diagrams. This tool was developed by Ned Konz many years ago and hasn’t been able to load in an up-to-date image for some time.
A Connector is a Morph that looks like a line and has a constraint on either end that keeps the ends attached to some other Morph. You can specify properties such as width, borders, fills, end-decorations for each connector, as well as determining the path the connector takes and what labels it should have. The package also comes with other tools to aid in the creation of smart drawings. See the tutorial for more information.
The updated package is available on SqueakSource.
New tools for Squeak
2 December, 2010
The staff and students at the Hasso Plattner Insitute have set up a new site to share the impressive work they are doing using Squeak. The projects they are showcasing include some gorgeous UI Widgets and a new UI Designer (shown above).
Each project is available at the Institute’s SqueakSource server, and can be loaded using Metacello configurations. All configurations were tested and run in the current Squeak (Trunk) versions (4.1, 4.2). The site is built using Trac project management software, which provides for issue/bug tracking if you do find any problems.
Many thanks to the Software Architecture Group, led by Prof. Dr. Robert Hirschfeld at the Hasso Plattner Insitute (University of Potsdam), for sharing these great projects.
(Note that Firefox currently gives a warning about the site due to an incomplete certificate chain, but this should be fixed soon).
