Category: Squeak

OO programmers fall into two categories: Smalltalkers and those who don’t get it

As we previously mentioned Vassili Bykov recently left VisualWorks to join Eliot Miranda and Gilad Bracha at Cadence. Vassili was “the tools guy” at VisualWorks and contributed a huge amount to the current Smalltalk platform, from core frameworks such as Announcements to new or updated tools such as Trippy, a much enhanced inspector, and Parcel Browser–a wonderful tool for finding and browsing contributed packages. He also did much work on improving the appearance of the VisualWorks UI.

Previously Vassili worked for The Object People as an instructor and as a TOPLink developer. TOPLink is an object/RDBMS mapping software that significantly simplifies object persistence. It is similar to Glorp which is an Open Source project written by some of the same people.

I spoke with Vassili about Smalltalk. (more…)

6 February, 2007
Team reports for October – December 2006

In the past months, various Squeak Teams have sent their reports to the Squeak-dev mailing list.

News team: October 2006.
Webteam: October, November and December 2006.
Box-Admins team: October, November and December 2006.
SETools team: October, November and December 2006.
Documentation team: October, November, December 2006.

The News team also sent a report for January 2007.

5 February, 2007
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.
4 February, 2007
Recent VM Releases

John M. McIntosh and Andreas Raab have recently release new versions of the Mac Carbon and Windows VM.

John has bumped the Carbon VM version to 3.8.15b1. Previous releases of this VM have also provided a MacIntel browser plugin in lieu of the old PowerPC-only plugin and many other fixes, thanks to funding by Viewpoints Research, Inc. This latest release includes fixes for bugs discovered by the Scratch support team.

Andreas has released a new VM based on the latest VMMaker (3.9). This are experimental releases, and Andreas is inviting ther Win32 users to test it and report any problems. There aren’t any new features, but this new releases use the new build system that has been put in place between Squeak versions 3.7 and 3.9.

4 February, 2007
Squeak Foundation Board meeting notes – November 2006 to January 2007
In the past months, the Squeak Foundation board has met via IM every fortnight in order to discuss important issues involving the Foundation and involving Squeak development.
Craig Latta has been appointed to speack for the board, and has posted the notes of each meeting:
The next board meeting will tale place on February 7th, 2007.
2 February, 2007
Taking the Beat of 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…)

29 January, 2007
Looking For A Shortcut?

Not all shortcuts in Squeak are Obvious. The Seaside list was just discussing some of them. (more…)

26 January, 2007
Scratching the Surface

It’s out! The MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten group with John Maloney, who most of you know as one of the major contributors to Squeak, have released Scratch. Scratch is a new programming language that lets you create your own interactive stories, games, music, and art. I spoke with John about Scratch.

(more…)

23 January, 2007
A Smalltalk ActiveRecord using Magritte, Seaside, and Glorp

Ramon Leon reciently posted his ActiveRecord code for Seaside.

(more…)

16 January, 2007
Charting Seaside

What do you do when you want to add charts and graphs to your seaside application? Check out the SeaChart web site.

SeaChart is a live demo application that showcases serveral SeaChart components. SeaChart components are standard Seaside components that you can embed into your Seaside application. Each demo includes the rendered component and the sourcecode to crate it.

13 January, 2007