The Weekly Squeak

Ramon Leon’s blog, always a great resource for tips on Squeak and Seaside, has a nice post on how to build a simple file-based wiki using Seaside built with only one class and 98 lines of code. It’s intended as a learning tool, so it doesn’t make use of other useful resources such as Magritte or Magma (or even Ramon’s own version of ActiveRecord for Smalltalk). Indeed, if you’re interested in building a production-strength wiki, then as Ramon points out, you should investigate Lukas Renggli’s work on Pier.

Cincom recently reiterated their support for Seaside. Not long ago Gemstone announced something similar. What will these two commercial companies lend to Seaside?

It is certainly true that Seaside will benefit from additional resources. Resources devoted to documentation, compatibility, and testing will help the community. Working on new solutions for persistence is a great idea, and having different options to solve your persistence requirements can only help developers. Read the rest of this entry »

Many Squeak packages have been released in the past months. Here’s a quick list:

• Torsten Bergmann has packaged Joseph Perline’s Toothpick logging framework as a Monticello package and made it available on both Squeak Map and Squeaksource.
• Elod Kironsky has released SmallDEVS, a Squeak-based, lightweight implementation of the DEVS (Discrete event systems specification) formalism.
• Damien Cassou is continuing working on his Squeak-dev and Squeak-web images.
• Pavel Krivanek announced the final 3.9 release of his KernelImage minimal image.
• Lex Spoon has released the stable package universe for Squeak 3.9.
• Bryce Kampjes released version 0.10 of Exupery.
• Goran Krampe released version 0.3 of the Gjallar issue tracker.
• Brian Rice provided new looks and functionalities to the SqueakMap Package Loader.
• Keith Hodges is continuing his work on Installer, with new features every release.
• Chris Muller has released a new stable version of the Magma OODB, available on Squeak Map.
• A new version of the Chronos library by Alan Lovejoy has been published on Squeaksource.
• Stéphane Rollandin has published a new development snapshot of muO, an experimental environment for music composition.
• Masashi Umezawa has announced version 0.2 of the SIXX XML object serializer.
• David T. Lewis has published SlangBrowser, an interactive Slang code browser.

ODBMSJournal did a nice interview with Chris Muller about Magma. Magma is an object database writtne entirely in Smalltalk. Chris discusses smalltalk in general and IDE’s both closed and open source. He also discusses aspects of Magma including commiting and setup, queries, standard SQL support for reporting tools through ODBC, reporting, Morphic persistence, performance optimizations and his expierences in developing Magma.

Thank you Steve Moffitt for pointing out the interview.

In the past week some interesting announcements appeared on the Squeak-dev mailing list:

• Pavel Krivanek announced support for the Monticello version control system in his KernelImage system. While this version of Monticello lacks some of the options (some tools are missing, and support for some repositories such as SMTP and SuperSwiki has been removed), it’s nonetheless working.
• Masashi Umezawa released FileMan, a library for manipulating files and directories in an extremely simple way.
• Karl Ramberg ported the Scamper web browser to the upcoming Squeak 3.9.

Meanwhile, on the Seaside mailing list, Andrea Brühlmann announced Albatross, a Seaside scenario testing framework. This tool lets you write SUnit tests that run a Seaside component in an external web browser and simulate user interactions. It provides access to the running and rendered component and at the same time to the model of your application.

And finally, on the Smallwiki/Pier mailing list, Keith Hodges announce a torrent of new releases: a specialized Pier Control Panel, a Magma-based persistancy system for Pier, and a premade image that includes Seaside, Magma and Pier.