A print-on-demand, softcover copy of the book “Dynamic Web Development with Seaside” is now available from Lulu.

Seaside is an source framework for developing highly dynamic and interactive web applications, and makes building web applications as simple as building desktop applications. The book gives you all the instruction and support necessary to get up and running in all the popular distributions of Smalltalk, with separate chapters on Pharo and Squeak, Cincom Smalltalk, Gemstone/S, GNU Smalltalk and VASmalltalk.

The printed book is based on the free online version and the purchasable PDF version of the book, and will be updated regularly. The book costs around €28/£24/$40 and will be delivered within 3-5 working days, so order your copy now!

The authors wish to thank the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG), inceptive.be, Cincom Smalltalk, Gemstone Smalltalk,  and Instantiations for generously sponsoring this book.

Andreas Raab has announced a new home for some work he’s been doing recently to port Squeak to the Android platform:

http://code.google.com/p/squeak-android-vm/

He’s aware that lots of things are still missing that would be required to support a full port (including text input and network support). But he’s still interested to hear if (and how well) it works for other Android-based cell phones. So if you have a Motorola Droid or or a T-Mobile G1 give it a shot and post some benchmark results.

Andreas reports that “performance on the Nexus One is about what one would expect: With roughly 1M sends/sec and 30M bytecodes/sec it’s not exactly rocking but it’s quite usable for most tasks on a mobile device. (Input is *terrible* though; Squeak’s UI is not made for fat-fingered clicks like mine “

If you’d like to be added as developer, please send Andreas your Google Account email address so that he can add you to the project. But, he warns that “unless you know how to deal with both the Android SDK and NDK, Java, JNI, and the Squeak VM it will be a very steep learning curve”.

(Of course, for those of us still using iPhones, there also John McIntosh’s iPhone port of Squeak.)

Chris Muller announced release 42 of Magma to the Squeak-dev mailing list. Magma is a multi-user object database for Squeak and Pharo images and which provides transparent access to a large-scale shared persistent object model. Magma release 42 brings unprecedented scale and availability of persistent domain models to Squeak users.  In particular, a single logical repository can now be served from multiple servers simultaneously, each hosting their own physical copy which are kept constantly up to date automatically.

There’s lots more information, introductory material and documentation at the Magma homepage.

Nicolas Petton recently announced on the squeak-dev mailing list the first public release of Iliad, which is succintly described on the Iliad website as a “a flexible, lightweight but powerful Smalltalk web framework.” Originally developed on GNU Smalltalk, but ported to Squeak/Pharo, Iliad features:

• standalone stateful widgets
• nice urls with a simple routing system
• simple API
• easy to setup and deploy (no complicated configuration step)
• javascript layer to update widgets using AJAX. If javascript is not enabled, the behaviour remains the same by making normal requests
• support for the Magritte meta-description framework, for simple generation of views on data

Iliad combines elements of the other leading Smalltalk web frameworks Seaside, Aida/Web and HttpView2. You can find out more about the installation and use of Iliad by reading the documentation on the Iliad site, and on the GNU Smalltalk site.

More exciting conference news for Smalltalk aficionados: James Foster has announced on his blog that this year’s OOPSLA conference will include several tutorials with a Smalltalk theme including his “Back to the Future: Programming in Smalltalk” in which he will look at the “new” ideas from Smalltalk that are still influencing newer programming languages. He will examine some of these ideas and present a number of tutorial exercises that explore some of Smalltalk’s  fundamentally different approach to language design and object orientation, including the following aspects:

• All values are objects, even integers, booleans, and characters (no boxing/unboxing);
• Classes and methods are objects (supporting reflection);
• The language has only five reserved words;
• All control flow (looping and conditional branching) is done through message sends;
• Programming is done by sending messages to existing objects; and
• The base class library can be modified.

James works on Gemstone’s high performance product family based on Smalltalk, but intends the exercises to be relevant across different versions.

This year’s OOPSLA will be held in Orlando, Florida from 25 to 29 October, and will also be co-located with the Dynamic Languages Symposium, which will doubtless have lots to interest Smalltalkers.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for a European break this year, don’t forget that the 2009 International Smalltalk Conference, organised by ESUG, will be held in Brest, France, from 31 August to 4 September, and also has a great set of sessions lined up.

Following his success in getting Squeak running on the iPhone last year, John M McIntosh has announced on the Squeak-dev mailing list that he has had two applications approved for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch App Store.

The two SqueakDocs electronic books, based on Squeak and Seaside, allow users to explore the code and documentation in two Smalltalk images: a 3.10.x Squeak web developer’s image, and a Pharo web developer’s image of late April 2009. They are now available for purchase on the App Store: Squeak version, Pharo version.

The applications use Seaside to render the content to the built-in Safari browser, so they can also present content to other machines on the local network.

John is still waiting for approval to come through soon for WikiServer, a “much more complex application,” which will allow users to view and maintain wiki content on their iPhones.

Andreas Brodbeck has posted on the Seaside mailing list that he has had a great experience using Seaside (running on Gemstone) in his business, and in order to give something back to the Seaside community, he’s released a new deployment tool that he’s developed for his own use.

The tool, called “Seashell”, is a shell-based deployment tool for Seaside applications running on Gemstone. The goals of SeaShell are:

• Handle multiple concurrent gemstone seaside applications (each with its own stone), running on the same server machine.
• Easy to add tasks for your individual environment and project.
• Easy to run the tasks from the shell.
• Fast execution.

Based on Andreas’ own requirements, the tool currently works with Gemstone as seaside server, lighttpd as frontend server and load balancer, everything running on Ubuntu 8.04.1. Andreas says on his blog post about Seashell that “It’s far from complete or rock solid, but I want to share it as early as possible. There is plenty of room to add more tasks for other tools and environments, of course. And I plan to add more features, as soon as I need them. Contributions welcome, of course!”

Michael Rueger and John MacIntosh are proud to announce that their Squeak iPhone/Touch port is now available for download. The source code, along with installation instructions and other useful resources, is available at a new website: http://isqueak.org.

As had been discussed earlier, Michael notes that due to the legal requirements of the Apple Developer agreement at this time, they cannot distribute a fully functional Squeak VM via the Apple Store. However Licenced iPhone developers can deploy the VM as an Ad Hoc VM for testing to a limited number of devices.

In addition, anyone who has access to the Apple SDK can compile and run the port in the iPhone emulator. 

Michael and John would like to thank ESUG for sponsoring their work.

Rob Gayvert recently announced on the wxSqueak mailing list that he has made a new version of wxSqueak available. wxSqueak is a Squeak interface to the wxWidgets (formerly known as wxWindows) GUI library. The project hasn’t seen much activity recently, but the new version was released following a request on the mailing list. 

Version 0.5.1 includes Unicode support, syntax highlighting and other new features, and looks like a very interesting tool for producing applications with a native look and feel. It can be downloaded from the wxSqueak website as source code, or as a fully runnable demo for Win32.

This revival of wxSqueak comes at an interesting time, as work is proceeding well on SqueakGtk; it looks as though using Squeak to develop native look and feel applications is becoming an increasingly attractive option. No doubt this will fuel the resurgence of interest in Squeak Smalltalk.

Thanks to Torsten Bergmann for spotting this announcement.

Robert Krahn from the Hasso-Plattner Institut announced this weekend on the squeak-dev list that he and his colleagues have created a SVN repository for their extended version of JSqueak - named Potato (like Dan Ingall’s original VM) – which includes a lot of improvements: