Squeak Apps help push App Store over 50,000
8 June, 2009
Phil Schiller led the keynote presentation today at Apple’s Worldwide Developers’ Conference. One of the many causes for celebration he had was the phenomonal success of the iPhone App Store, which now has 50,000 applications available for download.
Although he was careful to be even-handed in giving credit to all iPhone developers for helping Apple achieve this success, he must have secretly been thanking John McIntosh, who is turning into a one-man app wave. Without John’s recent batch of new Squeak-based applications, Phil would have been left announcing the much less satisfactory figure of 49,99749,994 applications.
In case you missed it, John’s latest announcement was that his Fraction app is now available for calculations involving unlimited sized fractions and factorials, as it attempts to preserve numerical accuracy to an unprecedented degree. The new app joins the two apps based on his WikiServer that John already has on the App Store.
We look forward to seeing if the notoriously byzantine App Store approval process will be able to keep up with John’s flood of new applications.
The Revenge of Smalltalk
2 June, 2009
Despite recent discussions over what killed Smalltalk, there continues to be lots of interest in the language and in Seaside in particular. Anyone based near London will be able to find out more about both topics at a talk dramatically titled “Seaside: The Revenge of Smalltalk“.
This “Geek Night” is going to cover how Smalltalk makes web development different and how Seaside is being put to use in the “Real World”. Participants will learn about real object-orientated programming rather than class-orientated programming.
The two presenters are Lukas Renggli, who will be talking about Squeak and the world of Open Source Smalltalk; and Michel Bany from Cincom who will be discussing how Seaside and Smalltalk has been used in companies like JP Morgan.
The talk is hosted by Thoughtworks‘ London office on Monday 6th July, 2009 from 7:00pm—10:00pm.
Squeak applications now on the App Store
18 May, 2009
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.
Deploying a Seaside Application
12 May, 2009
Andreas Brodbeck has written an interesting blog post detailing his experiences developing, configuring and deploying a Seaside application. He seems to have found it a positive experience; indeed he writes that “Some months ago I decided myself to work with Seaside, and to develop all my upcoming web applications with it, if possible. If not possible, I will fall back to Rails. So far I am very happy with my decision and the current projects.”
Unfortunately the application is not publicly viewable, but he has had to get to grips with a lot of interesting (and potentially troublesome) technologies, including migration to Gemstone, PDF generation, object serialisation using SIXX, running under a 64-bit virtual session, using Cherokee as front-end server, Magritte for presenting data, and of course his own SeaShell deployment helper application.
Congratulations to Andreas, whose application joins many others being developed in Seaside.
Seashell deployment suite for Seaside
23 March, 2009
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!”
Squeak and Seaside BOFs at OOPSLA ‘08
25 October, 2008
Nicolas Chen has posted a very interesting report on the Squeak and Seaside ‘Birds of a Feather’ sessions at this year’s OOPSLA Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. Speakers included Michael Lucas-Smith of Cincom talking about their WebVelocity development tool for Seaside; Göran Krampe on Blackfoot, his lightweight SCGI-based KomHttpServer replacement for Seaside deployment; Dave Ungar (ex-Sun Labs, now at IBM Research) on his work on multi-core Squeak; and Jecel Assumpcao Jr. on Smalltalk Hardware Design, and his Siliconsqueak project.
As promised, Göran has published videos of the sessions; see his blog for details.
Pier Content Management for Seaside
24 September, 2008
As he demonstrated at ESUG, Tudor Girba has recently been working with Pier, the Web Content Management System built on Seaside, and has announced the release of a new version, with a number of new features. Pier CMS allows users to create and manage their own websites. It supports the development of plug-ins allowing the addition of features such as blogs.
To accompany the new version, he also announced that there is now a new official homepage for Pier (written in Pier of course). The site allows you to download the latest code, and provides much-needed documentation including videos walking you through the set-up and use of Pier.
ESUG ‘08 – Seaside Sprint
30 August, 2008
Following the conclusion of ESUG’s 16th Joint International Smalltalk Conference in Amsterdam, the Seaside developers held a Seaside Sprint. The aim of the sprint was to address a number of outstanding issues in order to move Seaside 2.9 towards release.
The sprint was a great success with 14 developers working on a number of issues. Eighteen key bugs were resolved, and progress was made in a number of other areas. The attendees had a range of levels of knowledge and experience, from the core developers, to those seeing Seaside code for the first time
The Sprint attendees would like to thank Café Kobalt and the Amsterdam Bibliotheek who provided essential facilities including free internet access, and great food and drink.
CMSBox wins top usability awards
13 August, 2008
Avi Bryant alerted the Seaside mailing list to some exciting news: Cmsbox is one of the ten winners of this year’s useit.com 10 Best Application UIs of 2008, a competition intended to identify the 10 best-designed application user interfaces each year.
Cmsbox is a powerful and flexible Content Management System (CMS) which allows users to create, edit and arrange content directly on the web site. It was built by Swiss company netstyle.ch using Squeak Smalltalk, Seaside and Scriptaculous.
In describing the award, which is the latest in a string of awards won by Cmsbox, Jakob Neilsen wrote that Cmsbox made it “particularly easy for direct users to create highly usable designs [...] They have demonstrated that just one extra line of controls is all that is required to turn a website into a Web authoring environment. [...] There are no modes to switch between, no edit windows to keep track of; it is immediately clear to users what effect their actions will have on the final layout because they are always working within that final layout”.
Avi Bryant Interview
28 July, 2008
Werner Schuster from InfoQ.com spent some time talking to Avi Bryant at QCon London 2008, and InfoQ have posted a recording of their conversation. In the interview, Avi talks about the Smalltalk web framework Seaside, DabbleDB, using Smalltalk images for persistence instead of an RDBMs, GemStone and more.
