The Weekly Squeak

Author: Michael Davies

  • Deploying a Seaside Application

    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.

  • The Squeak Oversight Board is now blogging

    As a result of ongoing discussions with the Software Freedom Conservancy, the Squeak Leadership team have now adopted the formal name of the “Squeak Oversight Board”. The members of the new team have made clear and open communications one of their priorities, and to that end, have started up a new blog at board.squeak.org, where they will be publishing agendas and minutes of their monthly meetings.

    In keeping with their mission statement of “Communicating with the Squeak and greater Dynamic Languages Community”, the board will also be using the blog to encourage discussion about the direction and priorities of the Squeak community.

    And yes, the board members are fully aware of the double meaning of “oversight”.

  • Seashell deployment suite for Seaside

    seashell

    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!”

  • Election results

    Göran has announced the election results to the squeak-dev mailing list.

    The new members of the leadership team are (in order of votes received):

    1. Andreas Raab
    2. Bert Freudenberg
    3. Craig Latta
    4. Randal L. Schwartz
    5. Ken Causey
    6. Igor Stasenko
    7. Jecel Assumpcao Jr

    Detailed results can be found at the election site.

    Congratulations to those elected, and commiserations to the other candidates, who were Matthew Fulmer, Edgar J. De Cleene, Brent Pinkney and David Mitchell.

    Thanks are due again to Göran for organising another election so effectively.

  • Don’t forget!

    You’ve only four more days to cast your votes for the Squeak Leadership Team elections—see previous post for details. If you’ve not received any voting details by now, check that you’re still accessing the account you registered with. If you haven’t registered yet, then it’s too late – but as Göran has said, there’s one of these every year!

  • Squeak Foundation Election 2009

    Vote badge

    As Göran posted recently, it is time to consider the membership of the Squeak Leadership Team (the “board”) for the coming year.

    Nominations are currently open for candidates interested in working with colleagues to maintain and co-ordinate the various interest groups and activities that support the Squeak community.

    If you think that you can make a difference to Squeak, put your name forward on the squeak-dev mailing list by 22nd February. All candidates are asked to make themselves available on the list for questions and discussion with the community until the end of February.

    Voting begins on 1st March for one week. If you’ve voted in previous elections, your name should already be registered. If not, then contact Göran explaining why you’re interested in voting (see the election page for more details).

    The list of candidates, and more details of the process to be followed can be found on the Election 2009 page.

  • Soup for Squeak

    squeaksoup

    Zulq Alam has been working on Soup, a Squeak port of Beautiful Soup, the tolerant HTML/XML parser written in Python, which is extremely useful when you need to scrape data from a web page. He has recently announced a working release and gave some example of its usage.

    Zulq notes that there’s still plenty of work to do on this port:

    • No attempt is made to deal with different character sets and encodings.
    • The parser will not convert entity or char references.
    • The parser will not accept options such as whether to convert entities, which entities to convert, what to parse, etc.
    • The parser will only do HTML; there are no configurations for other XML flavours yet.

    He adds that the project repository is globally writable, and he looks forward to your feedback and contributions.

  • Squeak goes to Mars

    mars

    Esteban Lorenzano gave Squeakers on Mac OS X a nice little Christmas present to see out 2008, with the release of Mars, an MVC framework for Squeak built using Cocoa. Mars is a plugin, and will run in any fork of Squeak, and as you can see above, is integrated with OmniBrowser.

    Esteban notes that one of his main objectives in developing Mars is to keep it small and simple, in order to allow it to be executed in small environments such as the iPhone, (using John McIntosh’s new VM and Edgar de Cleene’s SqueakLightII minimal images).

    Mars is MIT licensed, and can be downloaded from the Mars homepage, which also has posts following the progress of Esteban’s work. Esteban adds that Mars is still in the pre-alpha stage, and he looks forward to bug reports, feature requests, comments, and of course, code.

  • Building user interfaces in Squeak

    maui

    Chris Muller has released a thoroughly updated and documented version of his user interface framework Maui. Chris has described Maui as a “naked objects” Morphic-based UI builder that allows rapid UI creation based on object-message composition.

    Maui includes a number of light satellite frameworks that supply various application services like documents, object-search, background process management with progress monitoring. It also provides a number of tools which allow applications to be synthesized quickly, without the need to write any user-interface code.

    Chris has written a fifty page document describing Maui and giving examples of how to use it to build user interfaces for complex applications. In this document he also discusses future work for Maui, including the tantalising possibility of extending it to support the development of web applications.

  • Aliens coming to Squeak

    Aliens approaching Squeak

    John McIntosh has ported Newspeak‘s Aliens FFI implementation to Squeak. John notes that the port is in its early days, and more work and support will be needed to implement Aliens support across the full range of Squeak platforms.

    As a result of this interest in Aliens, Gilad Bracha has written a post giving an overview of Aliens, the thinking that went into it, and how it works. FFI allows a programming language to make use of services written in another language, and Gilad suggests that the lack of a standard, fully-featured FFI has been an ongoing problem for Smalltalk developers. In particular, John writes that “Squeak VM’S existing FFI has been found to be buggy bloated and slow” (though see Andreas’ comments on this below).

    John’s code, under the Apache licence, is available at http://www.squeaksource.com/Alien.html, and more information on his implementation can be found at the Alien swiki page.