Seaside 3.0 released
12 September, 2010
Following some last minute work at this year’s second Camp Smalltalk event, the Seaside developers are pleased to announce the release of Seaside 3.0 on the eve of the ESUG 2010 Conference in Barcelona.
Seaside has undergone a total overhaul, with many classes having been refactored to reduce complexity, decrease coupling, and improve flexibility. The packages in Seaside are now cleanly defined with clear relationships and interdependencies, allowing you to load only those pieces you require. There are improvements in testing, in portability and in performance, as well as much better tools for developers including the Seaside Control Panel for Pharo and Squeak, and the web-based administration interface.
For more information, see the Seaside 3.0 release announcement, or the following links:
Seaside 3.0 Detailed Release Notes
http://seaside.st/community/development/seaside30
Seaside One-Click Experience 3.0 (runs with one-click on Mac, Windows and Linux)
http://www.seaside.st/distributions/Seaside-3.0-final.app.zip
Seaside 3.0 Developer Image 3.0 (for Pharo developers)
http://www.seaside.st/distributions/Seaside-3.0-final.zip
SqueakSource Repository for Seaside 3.0
http://www.squeaksource.com/Seaside30.html
Dynamic Web Development with Seaside
28 February, 2010
A print-on-demand, softcover copy of the book “Dynamic Web Development with Seaside” is now available from Lulu.
Seaside is an source framework for developing highly dynamic and interactive web applications, and makes building web applications as simple as building desktop applications. The book gives you all the instruction and support necessary to get up and running in all the popular distributions of Smalltalk, with separate chapters on Pharo and Squeak, Cincom Smalltalk, Gemstone/S, GNU Smalltalk and VASmalltalk.
The printed book is based on the free online version and the purchasable PDF version of the book, and will be updated regularly. The book costs around €28/£24/$40 and will be delivered within 3-5 working days, so order your copy now!
The authors wish to thank the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG), inceptive.be, Cincom Smalltalk, Gemstone Smalltalk, and Instantiations for generously sponsoring this book.
Back to the Future: Programming in Smalltalk
17 June, 2009
More exciting conference news for Smalltalk aficionados: James Foster has announced on his blog that this year’s OOPSLA conference will include several tutorials with a Smalltalk theme including his “Back to the Future: Programming in Smalltalk” in which he will look at the “new” ideas from Smalltalk that are still influencing newer programming languages. He will examine some of these ideas and present a number of tutorial exercises that explore some of Smalltalk’s fundamentally different approach to language design and object orientation, including the following aspects:
- All values are objects, even integers, booleans, and characters (no boxing/unboxing);
- Classes and methods are objects (supporting reflection);
- The language has only five reserved words;
- All control flow (looping and conditional branching) is done through message sends;
- Programming is done by sending messages to existing objects; and
- The base class library can be modified.
James works on Gemstone’s high performance product family based on Smalltalk, but intends the exercises to be relevant across different versions.
This year’s OOPSLA will be held in Orlando, Florida from 25 to 29 October, and will also be co-located with the Dynamic Languages Symposium, which will doubtless have lots to interest Smalltalkers.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for a European break this year, don’t forget that the 2009 International Smalltalk Conference, organised by ESUG, will be held in Brest, France, from 31 August to 4 September, and also has a great set of sessions lined up.
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!”
Smalltalk Solutions 2008 – slides now available
1 July, 2008
Most of the slides from the presentations at this year’s Smalltalk Solutions conference are now on line.
The material available includes Gilad Bracha’s talk on Newspeak, James Foster’s guide to building a Seaside application using GemStone/S, Michael Rueger’s introduction to Sophie, Arden Thomas demonstrating WebVelocity in action, and Randal Schwartz’s double-header keynote: Seaside – Your Next Web Framework and an introduction to persistency solutions for use with Seaside.
There are also slides from a couple of sessions looking at the reasons for the recent resurgence of interest in Smalltalk: Arden Thomas looks at the features of Smalltalk that other languages lack, and Rob Rothwell explains how Smalltalk helps with the development of healthcare applications.
There are many more slide-packs available, and still more to be added, so please check out the conference page for more information. James Robertson is adding video and audio as it becomes available.
Gemstone’s MagLev presented at RubyConf
3 June, 2008
Avi Bryant joined Gemstone’s Bob Walker at RailsConf last week for a presentation (summarised here) describing MagLev, a Ruby VM built on the same technology as Gemstone/S, offering transparent persistence, and so the possibility of massive scalability, to Ruby applications. Despite only being under development for three months, with the initial focus being on scalability rather than speed, MagLev is already able to run Ruby code at speeds comparable or better than established Ruby implementations, with orders of magnitude improvements in some cases.
The presentation caused lots of excitement at the conference, and has sparked lots of heated debate within the Ruby development community with some very different views of MagLev from Charles Nutter, Giles Bowkett, Obie Fernandez, and Antonio Cangiano, as well as an article at Slashdot and posts all over Reddit. Avi has a blog-post addressing some of the discussion, as does Patrick Collison.
For Smalltalkers, one particularly interesting feature of MagLev, from an interview with Bob Walker by InfoQ, is that it retains the ability to execute Smalltalk code as well as Ruby, and should support image-based development.
[Edit: Chad Fowler had access to MagLev well before the presentation, and so offers a more considered assessment of it]
The Weekly Squeak 