A Seaside for every size
12 August, 2011
There have been a couple of interesting pieces of news about Seaside in the last few days.
Sebastiane Sastre and colleagues at flowingconcept.com have brought their new airflowing.com application out of private beta, and are now accepting new commercial subscriptions. Airflowing is an online tool for managing your creative business, including contacts, tasks and finances. It’s designed to be a quick-start tool aimed at people “who need to get things done and get paid” and is already in use in 35 companies. Under the skin it’s based on Smalltalk and Seaside so scaling the application up to meet new customer demand should be no challenge for the team! Find out more about this release and the hard work behind it at the flowingconcept blog, and try a trial subscription at airflowing.com.
At the other end of the scale, Lukas Renggli highlighted a post by Pavel Krivanek to the Seaside mailing list. Pavel has managed to build a working Seaside image weighing in at under 5MB. The image includes the Zinc web server, and is based on a stripped-down Pharo-kernel image. As well as build instructions, Pavel has made a pre-built image available, so check it out!
SqueakSource 3 beta available
28 April, 2011
Although we all work with SqueakSource every day, it has been in need of some care and attention for some time now. Fortunately, Tobias Pape and colleagues have been working on a total re-work of the SqueakSource code, and have now announced the availability of their first beta of SqueakSource3, named “Easter Fire”.
SqueakSource3 is a port of the original SqueakSource to Seaside 3 and Magritte 2. It is based on the original SqueakSource by Lukas Renggli, Adrian Lienhard, and Avi Bryant.
The developers’ plan for SqueakSource3 is:
• Have it running on GemStone, esp. GemStone 3 beta
• Provide a cleaner external API (may be REST or XMLRPC)
• Provide a more clear modularization and extension api
• Stability
• You name it! Suggestions are welcome.
SqueakSource3 is expected to run on GemStone/GLASS as well as on squeakish Smalltalks, ie, Pharo and Squeak. This beta has been tested on GemStone 2.4.4.x/GLASS 1.0-beta.8 and Squeak4.2 both with Seaside 3.0.4. Pharo tests are pending.
SqueakSource3 incorporates work done in several SqueakSource forks such as access to diffs in a browser as done by Bert Freudenberg for source.squeak.org and a basic issue tracker contributed by Dale Henrichs. Other key contributors to the project include Philippe Marschal, Dale Henrichs, and Gerhard Obermann have contributed much to SqueakSource3.
See the release announcement for more information, and for instructions on how to install the new code
Magma 1.2 released
21 April, 2011
Chris Muller wrote to the squeak-dev mailing list announcing that Magma 1.2 is now released for Squeak 4.2, Pharo 1.1 and Pharo 1.2.
Magma is a high-performance, fault-tolerant, multi-user object database that provides transparent access to a large-scale shared persistent object model, supports multiple users concurrently via optimistic locking, and uses a simple transaction protocol.
This new release offers bug fixes, new features and improved performance thanks to minimising problems associated with finalisation. In addition, Chris has reviewed and updated the Magma documentation. More information and support is always available from the Magma mailing list.
Chris writes that “this release is, exactly, one year since Magma 1.1, thank you for your patience”. Surely it’s us who should be saying thank you to Chris, for his continued work on this valuable project!
Welcome to the Real World – Kinect in Squeak
21 January, 2011
The newly-launched Microsoft Kinect has been causing a lot of excitement in hacker circles since its recent launch, due to its open interfaces, and the Smalltalk community has already got some great uses of this device.
The Kinect is a device, intended to be used as an accessory for the X-Box, which interprets 3D scene information from a continuously-projected infrared structured light, allowing live controller-less interaction by interpretation of movement and posture. This makes it a great complement to existing project teams working in Smalltalk.
Ricardo Moran was a member of the team from the Grupo de Investigación en Robótica Autónoma at CAETI in Argentina who won the 2010 ESUG Innovation Technology Awards with Physical Etoys, their Arduino-based interface to Squeak which allowed them to monitor and control robots as they drove round the conference hall. They spent their prize money wisely, buying a Kinect! Building on the work done by Stephen Howell in getting the Kinect working with Scratch (a visual programming environment developed at MIT), they have now shown how to use the Kinect to control activities in Etoys, using the existing OSCeleton framework to provide the skeleton interpretation interface. Their approach is documented in more detail on their blog.
Another approach to integrating data from the Kinect is that taken in Nikolay Suslov’s separate and equally impressive implementation which uses the lower-level OpenKinect driver to access the raw colour and depth information and pass this into his bespoke Krestianstvo images, where he then does the detailed video processing and interpretation in Smalltalk, which reduces his reliance on external, platform-specific code. His blog gives more details of his implementation as well as source code, and pre-built images.
The Return of the Connectors
10 December, 2010
Chris Muller has recently updated Connectors to work with Squeak 4.2 images. Connectors gives you the ability to turn Morphic into a drawing environment for making connected diagrams. This tool was developed by Ned Konz many years ago and hasn’t been able to load in an up-to-date image for some time.
A Connector is a Morph that looks like a line and has a constraint on either end that keeps the ends attached to some other Morph. You can specify properties such as width, borders, fills, end-decorations for each connector, as well as determining the path the connector takes and what labels it should have. The package also comes with other tools to aid in the creation of smart drawings. See the tutorial for more information.
The updated package is available on SqueakSource.
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
Seaside 3.0rc – One Click Image
23 July, 2010
Following on from the recent release of the Seaside release candidate for 3.0, a Squeak “One-Click” image has been put together to allow you to try out the new version with—er—one click!
The new image is based on Squeak 4.1, and launches fully configured with Seaside running with Comanche on port 8080, so you can immediately see the new improved Seaside welcome page at http://localhost:8080/, with links to documentation and the Seaside book.
Seaside’s 3.0 release is faster, cleaner, better tested and has many other changes and improvements over previous releases, so it’s well worth checking out this release candidate now.
JNIPort: Running Java from Squeak
11 June, 2010
Joachim Geidel has published a preview release of JNIPort, a Smalltalk library which allows Java code to be invoked from Smalltalk. It acts as a bridge between the world of Smalltalk objects and a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) where Java code is executing.
The port to Pharo and Squeak is not yet finished: it lacks support for callbacks from Java to Smalltalk, and is a work in progress. Joachim is particularly interested in feedback from Squeak 4.1 users.
JNIPort was originally written by Chris Uppal for Dolphin Smalltalk and published under a liberal licence which permits its use in commercial and non-commercial software. Joachim Geidel originally ported JNIPort to VisualWorks in 2006 and is now building on that work to make it available to Pharo and Squeak. The goal is to publish a stable release for VisualWorks, Pharo and Squeak in Q3/2010.
In addition to giving Smalltalk programs access to Java libraries and services, the interactivity of Smalltalk makes it an ideal environment to experiment and prototype new Java functionality.
Once it’s installed, calling some Java can be as simple as three lines in your workspace:
jvm := JVM current.
class := jvm findClass: #’java.lang.System’.
class currentTimeMillis_null
Installation instructions documentation and much more information are on the JNIPort Wiki.
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.
SqueakDBX news
7 October, 2009
The SqueakDBX team have been very busy recently working on their OpenDBX plugin which allows Squeak users to perform relational database operations (including DDL and DML as well as SQL) through an open source library.
Their new release, Version 1.1, now supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, Sqlite3, Oracle and MSSQL on Windows, Linux and Mac, as well as incorporating a number of performance refactorings.
They’ve also found time to build a new website for SqueakDBX, which contains lots of documentation and links to useful resources.
To get a better idea of the features of SqueakDBX, and of the work that the team have been doing, have a look at their ESUG 2009 presentation. You can also follow their work at http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakdbx
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