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!

Magma goes HA!

29 August, 2009

MagmaNode

Chris Muller announced release 42 of Magma to the Squeak-dev mailing list. Magma is a multi-user object database for Squeak and Pharo images and which provides transparent access to a large-scale shared persistent object model. Magma release 42 brings unprecedented scale and availability of persistent domain models to Squeak users.  In particular, a single logical repository can now be served from multiple servers simultaneously, each hosting their own physical copy which are kept constantly up to date automatically.

There’s lots more information, introductory material and documentation at the Magma homepage.

Ramon Leon’s blog, always a great resource for tips on Squeak and Seaside, has a nice post on how to build a simple file-based wiki using Seaside built with only one class and 98 lines of code. It’s intended as a learning tool, so it doesn’t make use of other useful resources such as Magritte or Magma (or even Ramon’s own version of ActiveRecord for Smalltalk). Indeed, if you’re interested in building a production-strength wiki, then as Ramon points out, you should investigate Lukas Renggli’s work on Pier.

Seaside

Cincom recently reiterated their support for Seaside. Not long ago Gemstone announced something similar. What will these two commercial companies lend to Seaside?

It is certainly true that Seaside will benefit from additional resources. Resources devoted to documentation, compatibility, and testing will help the community. Working on new solutions for persistence is a great idea, and having different options to solve your persistence requirements can only help developers. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

magma.jpg

ODBMSJournal did a nice interview with Chris Muller about Magma. Magma is an object database writtne entirely in Smalltalk. Chris discusses smalltalk in general and IDE’s both closed and open source. He also discusses aspects of Magma including commiting and setup, queries, standard SQL support for reporting tools through ODBC, reporting, Morphic persistence, performance optimizations and his expierences in developing Magma.

Thank you Steve Moffitt for pointing out the interview.

In the past week some interesting announcements appeared on the Squeak-dev mailing list:

  • Pavel Krivanek announced support for the Monticello version control system in his KernelImage system. While this version of Monticello lacks some of the options (some tools are missing, and support for some repositories such as SMTP and SuperSwiki has been removed), it’s nonetheless working.
  • Masashi Umezawa released FileMan, a library for manipulating files and directories in an extremely simple way.
  • Karl Ramberg ported the Scamper web browser to the upcoming Squeak 3.9.

Meanwhile, on the Seaside mailing list, Andrea Brühlmann announced Albatross, a Seaside scenario testing framework. This tool lets you write SUnit tests that run a Seaside component in an external web browser and simulate user interactions. It provides access to the running and rendered component and at the same time to the model of your application.

And finally, on the Smallwiki/Pier mailing list, Keith Hodges announce a torrent of new releases: a specialized Pier Control Panel, a Magma-based persistancy system for Pier, and a premade image that includes Seaside, Magma and Pier.