Category: Tools

Minding Your Business With Smalltalk (part 2 of 4)

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…)

13 March, 2007
Smalltalk Considered Unfriendly

Is it true that Smalltalk is too isolated and suffers from extreme shyness? Do we need to learn to play, reach out and integrate better with other languages and tools? Check out Alan Lovejoy‘s article: Smalltalk Considered Unfriendly

28 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
New Seaside Blog

Lukas starts his blog with a nice screencast of how to install the pier blog plugin.

30 January, 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
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
MousePhone

How do you get the mouse to talk?
Davide Varvello recently
announced success using
Skype Voip with Squeak.

(more…)

11 January, 2007
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…)

31 December, 2006