The Weekly Squeak

Category: Applications

  • Minding Your Business With Smalltalk (part 2 of 4)

    Smalltalk window

    In our last article we spoke with Michael Rueger.

    Today we talk with Steve Hunter. Steve started with OO languages way back in 1985 at General Electric. He used Eiffel, C++, and Objective-C which were the “hot” OO languages at the time. Steve says that he was strongly influenced by Bertrand Meyer’s OO Software Construction Book. His educational background in software/systems analysis and design techniques lead Steve to contribute to the work Object Modeling Technique by GE, and have continued to inspire Steve throughout his career.

    Steve’s joined ParcPlace and was impressed by the ease of use and powerful development environment of Smalltalk. Particularly impressive was the VisualWorks debugger, and the cross platform nature of the VM and the dynamic prototyping nature which showed such great potential in market growth.

    Steve believed strongly in the benefits of business modeling and saw the merger between Digitalk and ParcPlace as a mismatch of intention between R&D and commercial engineering. In 1995 Steve started Hunter Object Systems and then in 2000 created Agilense. He created EA WebModeler which is a metadata driven modeling solution for Enterprise Architecture and took it to market. Agilense has many very large customers including Sun Microsystems. The most notable component of EA WebModeler for our community is the Squeak based graphical modeler.

    I spoke with Steve about EA WebModeler, what it is like depending on Open Source software like Squeak, and more. (more…)

  • Minding Your Business With Smalltalk (Part 1 of 4)

    Minding Your Business With Smalltalk
    There has been a lot of talk about the future of Smalltalk. There are number of Object Oriented Languages that are candidates for replacing Smalltalk. Why has Smalltalk lasted so long? Why do business software suppliers still choose Smalltalk? Who are the people that still bet on the future of Smalltalk and how do they manage to succeed. (more…)

  • Future Book, the Sophie Revolution

    Lib of Congress

    Sophie is out!! Sophie is open-source Squeak Smalltalk based software for authoring extreemly creative new eBooks. Sophie is licensed under a version of the new BSD license.

    What is Sophie?

    Sophie is a program for creating digital multimedia books. Sophie will let you make books that are impossible in print, with video and audio tracks, automatic actions, and shared feedback.

    The word book can be widely interpreted: your book can resemble a regular book, with text and pictures, or it can be a book comprised completely of videos, or audio clips and images in a slideshow, or all of the above. Sophie books can even include other books, link out to the web, and allow reader interaction.

    Sounds great! Get the Sophie Early Release Candidate 1 Now!

    Check out these other useful links: http://www.futureofthebook.org/content/Mellon.pdf
    https://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com/2006/12/20/oopsla-there-it-is-oopsla-2006/
    The second one is a video that demos Sophie. The demo starts at: 23:32.

    The Sophie Team

    Sophie is a project of the Institute for the Future of the Book. It relies on the talent and collaboration of people around the world.

    • Germany: Impara, under the leadership of Michael Rueger and Bernd Eckardt
    • US: Nick Matelan, Steve Riggins, Bob Stein, Dan Visel, Jesse Wilbur
    • Canada: John McIntosh, Tim Rowledge
    • Bulgaria: Astea

    Principal funding for Sophie is provided by Research in Information Technology Program of the the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional support comes from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.

  • CIO Insight Interview with Alan Kay

    CIO Insight magazine has published an interview with Smalltalk’s and Squeak’s father, Alan Kay. The interview, titled “Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped—Now”, covers many topics such as the past, present and future of computing, Squeak and Croquet, the OLPC project and the other initiatives of ViewPoints Research Institute, and the need to reinvent the PC in order for computing to leap forward.

  • Recent Squeak packages releases

    Many Squeak packages have been released in the past months. Here’s a quick list:

    • Torsten Bergmann has packaged Joseph Perline’s Toothpick logging framework as a Monticello package and made it available on both Squeak Map and Squeaksource.
    • Elod Kironsky has released SmallDEVS, a Squeak-based, lightweight implementation of the DEVS (Discrete event systems specification) formalism.
    • Damien Cassou is continuing working on his Squeak-dev and Squeak-web images.
    • Pavel Krivanek announced the final 3.9 release of his KernelImage minimal image.
    • Lex Spoon has released the stable package universe for Squeak 3.9.
    • Bryce Kampjes released version 0.10 of Exupery.
    • Goran Krampe released version 0.3 of the Gjallar issue tracker.
    • Brian Rice provided new looks and functionalities to the SqueakMap Package Loader.
    • Keith Hodges is continuing his work on Installer, with new features every release.
    • Chris Muller has released a new stable version of the Magma OODB, available on Squeak Map.
    • A new version of the Chronos library by Alan Lovejoy has been published on Squeaksource.
    • Stéphane Rollandin has published a new development snapshot of muO, an experimental environment for music composition.
    • Masashi Umezawa has announced version 0.2 of the SIXX XML object serializer.
    • David T. Lewis has published SlangBrowser, an interactive Slang code browser.

  • Taking the Beat of Cadence

    Cadence

    Gilad Bracha is a legend in Object Oriented Programming. He is the Co-Author of the Java Language Specification and one of the major contributors to Strongtalk which has just been released by Sun under an Open Source License.

    Gilad is forming a team at Cadence and is raising eye brows with his latest hires. Eliot Miranda and Vassili Bykov recently left Cincom to join Gilad at Cadence . Eliot is well-known known as a Master of Smalltalk Development. Vassili Bykov was the lead tool builder of VisualWorks. We can’t help wondering about the team of Gilad, Eliot, and Vassili. I spoke with Gilad about Cadence, Smalltalk, and Open Source. (more…)

  • Croquet Edit and Create 3d Objects

    Howard Stearns recently replied to a question from Mathieu. I thought I’d reproduce his response here. Howard gives a lot of very good information about Croquet support for third party tools….

    (more…)

  • Gjallar demo at OOPSLA 2006

    See Göran Krampe’s Gjallar demo at OOPSLA 2006, Tim’s pointer update, board information and a License update.

  • OOPSLA there it is! oopsla 2006

    See Craig’s Spoon update, inforamtion on Sophie and more!

  • Etoys documentation for teachers

    On the Squeakland list there is an ongoing thread about Etoys documentation and how to use it for teaching.

    Guyren Howe started it by writing:

    Hi,

    I am volunteering at a local school, and will be doing squeakland once a week with some fifth graders.

    Squeakland (etoys?) seems ideal for these kids, except that I’m frustrated by the lack of documentation.

    And, among others, Alan Kay answers by pointing to the more complete Japanese and Spanish material. Very interesting for those who want to use Etoys for teaching is the long background he gives:

    Etoys is all about children being able to make fun working versions of interesting ideas from scratch, and learning much more about the ideas than when force-fed with them. Considerable thought on the part of the children’s mentors is often required to set up a curriculum that is a nice balance between the way children think and do, the ideas, and what is most natural to do in Etoys. […]

    Hilaire Fernandes points to the material available in French:

    A lot of these documents are step by step tutorials to produce specific EToys project. Also most of the time the related Etoys .pr projects can be downloaded directly in your plug-in.

    Many thanks to Matthias Berth for submitting this news item.