The Weekly Squeak

One of the stumbling blocks for experienced developers looking at Squeak for the first time is the concept of the “image”. Many developers, especially from the UNIX world are used to managing their source code and other resources with a host of file-based utilities, including editors, archivers and change-management tools.

The Squeak philosophy that everything happens within the image can make the transition to Squeak painful for such developers, but there are tools out there to help with the transition. Two such tools were discussed recently on the #squeak irc channel.

Johan Björk announced the release of SqueakFS, which allows you to browse and search all objects contained in your squeak image from your local file system. SqueakFS is currently read-only, but the developers are interested in adding editing capabilities. The file system functionality is provided by a socket client built on top of FusePython. This client translates file system paths into squeak objects and queries a server running in the squeak image for details on these objects. In order to do this, SqueakFS uses FusePython for file system support and is dependent on both FUSE and Python and will only work on UNIX systems. SqueakFS has been developed and tested on Linux 2.6 and MacOS Leopard running on Intel systems.

Brian Rice pointed to another recent project, Stave, which mounts sources on a webDAV share, and so provides an editable WebDAV interface to Squeak’s class system. With the use of a WebDAV filesystem or a webDAV-enabled editor, this enables a file-based view on Squeak. Stave is intended primarily for use with external editors, and hasn’t been tested with search tools.

Squeak has just been ported to Syllable Desktop OS by Kelly Wilson. The Syllable project has an active community which aims to develop easy-to-use Free Software operating systems for the home and small office user. Syllable Desktop OS is a continuation of work on AtheOS operating system, which has been around for a few years, being originally inspired by the AmigaOS.

There are no video and sound drivers available yet, but headless Squeak programs run happily - the site has a screenshot showing the Seaside web application framework running in the ABrowser web browser. Kelly’s now looking for advice to get video working.

Well I couldn’t resist. Aaron E. Walsh sent out an invitation to the Squeak - Croquet communities for an ad-hoc Immersive Education Meeting. The Boston Digital Summit held in January covered the Education Grid, this meeting was a chance to review this information for those that were not able to make it to the summit.

Second Life was quite an experience. I had to sign up and go through some training, figure out how to get to Sun’s virtual auditorium and sit down. It was quite amusing to see some people show up on stage and not know how to sit down either, so I didn’t feel so bad. Maybe I should have spent more time in the training.

Aaron, reviewed the details of the Education Grid. The Grid is an education content virtual repository focused on interoperability, standards, and quality educational content. The goal is to provide standards that allow content to be developed to operate in different virtual worlds. These standards must be open source to ensure that content can be made freely available.

Content is just a piece of the puzzle in education. Educators also need tools to be able to evaluate the progress of students. There are a number of general tools that should be developed and made available in a consistent way for each offering. Aaron mentioned, “While it is possible to record everything that happens in a virtual world there is no way an educator could watch everything a student did in an activity that might take 2 hours.” Tools that allow educators to evaluate raw data, to assess progress and to track grades, and to create content are essential.

Quality content will be assured by having a Peer Review of offerings before the become part of the grid. The peers will be selected from the community and people with special expertise will be sought to make sure that the education goals are met, the content is accurate, standards are followed, and licensing is compatible to be a part of the grid.

Licensing and interoperability were the major concerns once Aaron opened the floor to questions. Ownership of the content was also discussed. Aaron mentioned that a not-for-profit organization would own the grid, but that the grid would be virtual and would be hosted by multiple organizations. I’m not sure there was a full answer about the ownership of the content. I would have suggested that copyright stay with the author or developing organization, and that the grid would receive unlimited rights to distribute the content, much in the same way were are trying to organize the Squeak community.

Well I ran out of time but Aaron did a very nice job of wrapping it up just a few minutes over. Thank you! The concept is really a terrific idea. I hope that our communities will join together and support developing freely available virtual world educational materials. Aaron mentioned that other meetings will be held in Croquet, I look forward to that. I hope to see you there. Hopefully that meeting will be just as well attended as the SL meeting.

Call For Papers

*** Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) 2008 ***

July 8, 2008 (Tuesday)

Co-located with ECOOP 2008, Paphos, Cyprus

Sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN

http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/dls/dls08/

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IMPORTANT DATES
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Submission deadline: April 25, 2008 (hard deadline) Author notification: May 23, 2008 Camera-ready copy due: June 6, 2008 DLS 2008: July 8, 2008

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ABOUT DLS
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The Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) at ECOOP 2008 in Paphos, Cyprus, is a forum for discussion of dynamic languages, their implementation and application. While mature dynamic languages including Smalltalk, Lisp, Scheme, Self, Prolog, and APL continue to grow and inspire new converts, a new generation of dynamic scripting languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, Tcl, and JavaScript are successful in a wide range of applications.

DLS provides a place for researchers and practitioners to come together and share their knowledge, experience, and ideas for future research and development.

DLS 2008 invites high quality papers reporting original research, innovative contributions or experience related to dynamic languages, their implementation and application. Accepted Papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

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TOPICS OF INTEREST
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Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

- Innovative language features and implementation techniques
- Development and platform support, tools
- Interesting applications
- Domain-oriented programming
- Very late binding, dynamic composition, and runtime adaptation
- Reflection and meta-programming
- Software evolution
- Language symbiosis and multi-paradigm languages
- Dynamic optimization
- Hardware support
- Experience reports and case studies
- Educational approaches and perspectives
- Object-oriented, aspect-oriented, and context-oriented programming

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SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
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We invite original contributions that neither have been published previously nor are under review by other refereed events or publications. Research papers should describe work that advances the current state of the art. Experience papers should be of broad interest and should describe insights gained from substantive practical applications. The program committee will evaluate each contributed paper based on its relevance, significance, clarity, and originality.

Papers are to be submitted electronically at http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/dls/dls08/ in PDF format. Submissions must not exceed 12 pages and need to use the ACM format, templates for which can be found at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.

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PROCEEDINGS
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Accepted Papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

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PROGRAM COMMITTEE
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Chair: Johan Brichau (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium)

Joe Armstrong (Ericsson AB, Sweden) Pierre Cointe (École des Mines de Nantes, France)William R. Cook (University of Texas at Austin, USA) Pascal Costanza (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) Wolfgang De Meuter (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) Maja D’Hondt (IMEC, Belgium) Robert Hirschfeld (Hasso-Plattner Institüt, Germany) Roberto Ierusalimschy (PUC-Rio, Brazil) Andy Kellens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) Michele Lanza (University of Lugano, Switzerland) Michael Leuschel (University of Düsseldorf, Germany) Oscar Nierstrasz (University of Berne, Switzerland) Kent Pitman (PTC, USA) Lynne Shaw (CheckFree Investment Services, USA) David Ungar (Sun Microsystems, USA) Peter Van Roy (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium) Martin von Löwis (Hasso-Plattner Institüt, Germany) Daniel Weinreb (ITA Software, USA)

The European Smalltalk Users Group - ESUG has generously agreed to support international smalltalk presentations.

From Prof. Stéphane DUCASSE :

Hi all

as announced at Lugano ESUG is putting in place new action to promote the use of smalltalk http://www.esug.org/promotionactions/publicationpromotion/

PublicationPromotion
ESUG offers 150 Euros for each international conference paper whose concepts involves an implementation in Smalltalk

Rules
• After notification of acceptance, one of the authors sends to the ESUG board the article, a CV, and a brief explanation of how Smalltalk was used
• In case the ESUG board decides to support the promotion, the author has to send to ESUG after the camera-ready deadline a PDF of the article, where ESUG is referenced in the acknowledgment section, including a link to esug.org
• During the presentation at the conference, the author must mention ESUG support
• After the presentation at the conference the author sends to ESUG a PDF version of the slides, where there is a visible reference to ESUG (e.g. theESUG Logo). ESUG will put the slides on the ESUG website
• The author can then trigger the payment by sending an e-Mail to the ESUG board
• A maximum of 3 supported articles per year per institution is allowed

Prof. Stéphane DUCASSE [ | ]
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr

Open Source Smalltalks: http://www.squeak.org, http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/smalltalk.html
Free books for Universities at http://www.esug.org/sponsoring/promotionProgram.html
Online Free Books at http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html

Derek O’Connell reports that he has Squeak up and running on the new Nokia N810. Having compiled a Unix VM for the platform, he was then able to run a standard Squeak image without tweaking! Performance is acceptable, and it works well with the new keyboard on the N810, but it doesn’t pick up on some of the system events, so a little work is needed for Squeak to work seamlessly.

Derek received his N810 as one of the 500 lucky developers given access to the device through the maemo.org “Nokia N810 maemo device program”, based on his proposal to port Squeak to the device.

Philippe Marschall announced the Seaside - One Click Experience!

There has been a lot of talk recently about improving the Smalltalk, Squeak and Seaside experience for new users. Especially to make it easier and faster to get started. The two vendors that support Seaside are working in this area. That does not mean Squeak can not lead the way. Today we present you the Seaside One-Click Experience [1] for OS X, Windows and Linux based on the work done by the Sophie Project [2].

Just download the zip-archive, extract it and double click on the executable for your platform and you have Seaside 2.8 final running.

Cheers
The Squeak Seaside Team

[1] http://www.seaside.st/download/squeak#167943699
[2] http://www.sophieproject.org/

After a beta phase of two months we release the final version of Seaside 2.8. Most bugs fixed during this period were either long standing (already in 2.7), minor or portability related, Together with the dozens of Seaside 2.8 applications already in production today this gives a pretty good feeling about this version. A special mention goes to Roger Whitney, thanks to him we went from 99 commented classes to 144.

This release brings major performance and memory improvements:

• The rendering speed of an average page is up to twice as fast as with previous versions, because of the new character encoding architecture.
• An average application requires up to four times less memory than with previous versions. The reason for this is the optimized object backtracking and the reduction of stored continuations.

We have a list of new features [1] and a migration guide [2] on our homepage.

Squeak users can get it either from SqueakMap, Universes or directly via Monticello (Seaside2.8a1-lr.518). A special note for Squeak users, do not load Seaside 2.8 into an image that has already Seaside 2.7 in it. If you use Squeak 3.7 you will have to load SeasideSqueak37 as well.

VisualWorks users can get it form Store (2.8a1-lr.518,tkogan).

GemStone/S users can load Seaside2.8g1-dkh.522.

[1] http://www.seaside.st/community/development/seaside28
[2] http://www.seaside.st/documentation/migration

Cheers
The Seaside Team

Dan Ingalls working at Sun Labs has just released their first version of Morphic implemented completely with JavaScript which they are calling the Lively Kernel. There is no plugin required, but your browser currently must support SVG. You should use your Safari browser for best results. It will work with Firefox but you should expect bugs. It does not work with Internet Explorer yet.

Point your supported browser here to see this exciting work! Great Job to the team at Sun, Dan Ingalls, Tommi Mikkonen, Krzysztof Palacz, and Antero Taivalsaari.

David Pogue at NYTimes reviews the One Laptop Per Child computer.  Don’t miss the video clip, it’s very cool.