The Weekly Squeak

Author: gcorriga

  • Seaside announcements: SeasideTesting and RSRSS

    In the past week, there have been two announcements on the Seaside mailing list:

    • David Shaffer released version 1.4 of SeasideTeasing, an extension to the SUnit testing framework which allows seamless testing of Seaside components.
    • Philippe Marshall announced a preview version of RSRSS (Really Simple RSS), a library for creating RSS feed using Seaside ‘s Canvas API.

  • Squeak Documentation Team forming

    Matthew Fulmer has announced the creation of a Documentation Team. The purpose of this new team will be the production and mantainance of Squeak releated documentation: tutorials, references and the like.
    The team will start by compiling an index of the existing documentation, and by starting a Squeak developer tutorial.

    We’d like to wish Matthew and the other team members a good work!

  • Squeak 3.9 enters RC stage

    Stephane Ducasse has released update 7061 of the 3.9g release, and proposed calling it final. Following the discussion on the proposal, it was agreed that to call it a release candidate and look for showstopping bugs which may have escaped release team’s attention.
    Also, Pavel Krivanek has prepared another version of his Kernel image based on this 7061 update.

  • Profiling Squeak

    Andreas Raab has sent on the Croquet mailing list a short tutorial on how to use the MessageTally tool to measure the performance of your application or part of it. A little part of Andreas’ advices are related to the modifications introduced in the Croquet version of MessageTally, but most of the article may be used in a standard Squeak image too.

    Thanks to James Robertson for pointing to this article.

  • Squeak.org is down

    Since yesterday, the servers hosting the various *.squeak.org and *.squeakfoundation.org service are offline. They soon will be online again, but unfortunately this may take a couple of days.

    Update 09/29: The servers should get back online in two or three days. Meanwhile, you can get the latest 3.9g image from here (courtesy of Goran Krampe) and the VM for your operating system from Squeakvm.org.

  • Squeak Foundation Board meeting notes – September 20th, 2006

    Craig Latta posted to the Squeak-dev mailing list the notes for the Squeak Foundation Board meeting which occurred on September 20th. The Squeak Foundation Board meets twice a month via IM on the first and third wednesday, and Craig has been appointed to speak for the board.

    During the last meeting the following topics were discussed:

    1. Stephane Ducasse’s resignment from the board: the board, after having sought the counsel of the Election team, decided to leave Stephane’s place vacant until the next elections (which will on February 2007)
    2. Open sourcing of Squeak: now that Apple has re-released version 1.1 of Squeak under the
      APSL 2.0 License, work is underway to change the license for all the others Squeak releases. In order to do so, all the contributors in the past ten years have to be contacted. The board decide to start working on this task by compiling a list of all the contributors, taken from the authors’ initials.

  • Recent Squeak packages releases

    In the past days, some developers have released new versions of their packages:

    • Ruben Bakker has recently released version 3.0 of eCompletion, the autocompletion package for Squeak.
    • Milan Zimmerman, Edgar J De Cleene and Serge Stinckwich have announced the first version for Squeak 3.9 of MathMorphsRevival, a project to collect MathMorphs and related projects and make them run in Squeak 3.9.
    • Damien Cassou has released version 36 of his Dynamic Protocols package. A dynamic protocol is a category (displayed in the 3rd pane of your browser) whose content is computed dynamically based on the currently
      selected class.
    • Damien also released version 27 of the Squeak-dev image, a custom 3.9 image that comes with many developer tools already installed.
    • Stephane Rollandin announced LispKit v4, a kit for building custom Lisp interpreters. This release features an usable implementation of Scheme, almost fully R4RS compliant.

  • Exupery News

    Looks like Exupery’s development is going full steam: Bryce Kampjes, Exupery’s developer, recently released version 0.09, which includes bug fixes and dynamically inlined primitives.
    Patrick Mauritz announced a port of the Exupery VM to Solaris, while Andrew Tween ported the VM to Windows. And just today John M McIntosh, mantainer of the Mac Squeak VM, produced an experimental Exupery VM for Apple systems.

  • ESUG 2006 – Friday’s presentations

    Since I had to catch a plane to get back home, I couldn’t attend the session on Friday morning.

    The last day of the conference saw three presentations. The first was delivered by Norm Green of Gemstone, who talked about the state of Gemstone 64, the 64-bit version of their database system. After that, Mathieu Van Echelt presented Cosmocows‘ development and modelling enviroment used to create database-backed web-applications. The last presentation of the conference was delivered by Rob Vens, on “Packaging freeware and shareware applications in VisualWorks”.

  • Niall Ross – Testing for Real

    As the last presentation for Thursday, Niall Ross paused his incessant (and absolutely useful) note-taking to deliver a talk on how to use real domain objects in your tests. This objects can be created by leveraging the rewrite engine of the Refactoring Browser in order to create readable and easily-modifiable tests which nonetheless manipulate complex objects.