Squeak by Example has been a hugely successful introduction to Squeak since its publication last year, and it has now been made available to a wider audience, following the publication of a French edition Squeak par l’exemple. As with the English edition, the book has been made available in print from print-on-demand specialists lulu.com for around €17/$20/£11, or can be downloaded from the site as a pdf.

Squeak par l’exemple was produced thanks to the hard work of the team of translators: Martial Boniou, Mathieu Chappuis, Luc Fabresse, René Mages, Nicolas Petton, Alain Plantec, Benoît Tuduri and Serge Stinckwich.

The Software Architecture Group at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut (who have produced a great online Seaside tutorial and associated book) have recently been involved in using Etoys in the classroom. They kindly sent us this report about the experience of two of their members when introducing Squeak and Etoys to high school students.

Pupils of the “Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Gymnasium” (high school) in Potsdam, Germany learned about Etoys and the basic principles of programming in a four-day workshop. Under the supervision of two student tutors of the Software Architecture Group at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut (Robert Krahn and Michael Perscheid), the 14- to 16-year-old pupils have implemented their own ideas and games in very short time using Etoys. All of them had no or little prior experience with computers and programming.

On March 25, the workshop started with an introduction to the subject matter. The tutors introduced themselves and provided a first look at Squeak and Etoys. Afterwards, Robert and Michael presented brief tutorials in which the pupils participated. The first tutorial involved drawing a car and letting it drive along a road according to some small scripts. The second tutorial dealt with implementing the Lunar Lander game. For increased fun, the pupils were encouraged to be creative, resulting in a wide variety of car and rocket designs. In the course of implementing the car and lunar lander games, the pupils also faced the problems of adequately modelling physical phenomena, such as gravity, in which process they were guided by the tutors. At the end of the first day, all workshop participants had grown accustomed to the development environment and were well prepared for their own projects.

The second day started with a brief introduction to object orientation, which put the knowledge and experience gathered during the first day in a broader and theoretically founded context. Over the following two days, the pupils worked on their own Etoys projects. The tutors had given some hints as to what kinds of games could be implemented, but the pupils came up with ideas of their own as well. Many beautiful and creative results were produced. Robert and Michael were always available for individually attending to the pupils.

On the final day, participants were asked to present their projects in 10-minute short presentations. Michael gave a brief introduction to presentation techniques, so that the pupils were well prepared for this. Everyone proudly presented their achievements. Although none of the participants had prior knowledge in computer science, they achieved astounding results in short time. As a gift, all participants were given a CD containing all projects and the Etoys environment.

Michael Perscheid, Michael Haupt

A team of undergraduates at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have just released “Algernon”, a new keyboard-based launcher to help you navigate around your Squeak environment.

Algernon was developed by Erik Hinterbichler and Joey Hagedorn with their CS598 classmates, working with Professor Ralph Johnson of the Software Architecture Group at UIUC. The developers say that Algernon provides lightning quick access to categories, classes, morphs, and global variables in your image, and is inspired by tools such as Quicksilver and LaunchBar for Mac OS X. Like Quicksilver, it learns from your behaviours, and will prioritise options that you use most often. It is triggered by pressing Control-Space Shift-Return, though this can be changed by editing Algernon>>activationString.

Algernon can be downloaded from SqueakMap using the SqueakMap package loader or from Squeaksource using Monticello, and requires KeyBinder to be installed as a prerequisite.

[Edited in light of Erik's comments below.]

Randal L. Schwartz had a “standing-room only” audience at BarCampPortland for his presentation on why web developers should consider using the Seaside web application framework. BarCampPortland is described as an “unconference for the Portland [Oregon] tech community”, and aims to offer the attendees interesting topics, cool people and great networking opportunities.

Randal was offered a 45-minute slot, and took the opportunity to explain what makes Seaside such a powerful framework for professional web developers. His material, which incorporated feedback from colleagues on the Seaside mailing list, was very well received, and will form the basis for future presentations by Randal to raise the awareness of Seaside in the web development community.

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.

Torsten Bergmann has an interesting post which introduces JavaConnect, a project by Johan Brichau, a postdoctoral researcher at the Université catholique de Louvain. JavaConnect is a library (developed using Visualworks Smalltalk and released under the MIT licence) that allows a seamless interaction between Smalltalk and Java. Johan describes it as allowing a Smalltalk application to “access any Java object and send messages to it, just as if it were a Smalltalk object. Its implementation relies on a connection between the Smalltalk environment and a standard Java VM environment using Visualworks’ DLLCC and Java’s JNI. The Java application thus executes on a regular Java VM and the Smalltalk application executes on the regular Smalltalk VM.”

Joachim Geidel posted a comment giving a detailed comparison of JavaConnect to JNIPort, a similar tool developed by Chris Uppal for Dolphin Smalltalk, and ported by to VisualWorks by Joachim, a consultant for blueCarat Consulting GmbH. JNIPort (available under a bespoke, liberal licence) invokes a Java VM using the Invocation Interface functions of the Java Native Interface (JNI). It can automatically generate wrapper classes for Java classes.

Joachim and Johan developed the two projects in parallel, and have discussed whether they could merge in the future, although there are a number of differences in the designs at present. In particular, Joachim believes that JNIPort as currently implemented could be more readily ported to Squeak.

Avi Bryant writes at the Dabble DB blog that the team has produced a new 8-minute demo of their product in action. This new video replaces their 2006 video which was linked to so frequently that it still shows up as #4 in the google results for “the demo“.

Dabble DB is a tool to help you create, manage, interpret and present data via your browser. Written in Squeak using the Seaside web application framework, it has received glowing reviews since its launch in 2005.

Hilaire Fernandes is writing a series of blog posts intended to introduce Squeak to teachers and to developers of educational software. The articles—available in both English and French—are intended to be a gentle introduction to Squeak’s features, and to highlight the ways in which it can be used in education. In each post Hilaire introduces a new topic, and explains its relevance to educational users.

In writing this series of posts, Hilaire is able to draw on many years involvement in developing Free software in education (including Dr Geo II for the OLPC XO), and working with education professionals to incorporate such software into the school curriculum.

The first post gives Squeak’s background and introduces Morphic - English, Français.

The second post is an overview of how images work - English, Français.

The Google Summer of Code team have announced that the Squeak Project is one of 175 Free and Open Source projects that have been accepted into their programme for 2008.

This year’s submission was explicitly under the “Squeak Project” title, to allow for projects from the wider community developing based on the Squeak environment.

The current list of projects with assigned students consists of:

• Safarà: an Extensible Code Editor for Squeak by Luigi Panzeri, mentored by Lukas Renggli
• Squeak IRC bot framework by Francois Stephany, mentored by Ken Causey
• Squeak GTK Support by Gwenaël Casaccio, mentored by Stéphane Ducasse
• freeCAD: 3D CAD with Motion Simulation Port to Croquet by Phua Khai Fong, mentored by Aik-Siong Koh
• OpenNARS port to Squeak using Seaside by Cédrick Beler, mentored by Klaus D. Witzel

Congratulations to Giovanni Corriga and colleagues on the SoC mailing list who put the Squeak Project submission together, and best wishes to the students and mentors for a productive and enjoyable experience. We’re all looking forward to seeing your work!

Michael Perscheid announced in the Seaside mailing list the publication of a new Seaside book An Introduction to Seaside. He says that:

“This book explains the major concepts of Seaside in a clear and intuitive style. A working example of a ToDo List application is developed to illustrate the framework’s important concepts that build upon each other in an orderly progression. Besides the notions of users, tasks, components, forms and deployment, additional topics such as persistence, Ajax and Magritte are also discussed.”

The book is based on the online tutorial developed at the Hasso-Plattner Institut, and the content has been revised and expanded for this edition.

The 212-page book can be previewed and ordered at online publisher lulu.com for about €20/£14/$25.

Congratulations to all involved at the HPI Software Architecture Group for producing this great introduction to Seaside. They are: David Tibbe, Michael Perscheid, Martin Beck, Stefan Berger, Jeff Eastman, Michael Haupt, Robert Hirschfeld and Peter Osburg.