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!
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.
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.
Pier 1.2 now out
14 July, 2009
Lukas Renggli, Tudor Girba and colleagues have been working hard on their Pier web content management system for the past few months, and have now shared the product of their labours with the release of Pier 1.2. Pier is a lightweight web content management system, built on Seaside, and intended to be managed from the browser.
They announced some of the key features of the 1.2 release as:
- An improved system for including dynamic content in pages (see http://www.piercms.com/doc/syntax for more details)
- No need to have the _s and _k Seaside parameters in the url (it uses cookies to record state by default)
- Pier can remember last login information
- Smaller javascript code for faster page loading
- Better default CSS (including a style for events)
- Halos for enhanced editing
- Available as a one-click install (based on Pharo 0.1-10374)
The one-click image is available for download at the Pier web site, where Tudor has also produced a brief video to get you started with Pier. There are plenty more resources including more videos on the documentation section of the site.
Squeak Apps help push App Store over 50,000
8 June, 2009
Phil Schiller led the keynote presentation today at Apple’s Worldwide Developers’ Conference. One of the many causes for celebration he had was the phenomonal success of the iPhone App Store, which now has 50,000 applications available for download.
Although he was careful to be even-handed in giving credit to all iPhone developers for helping Apple achieve this success, he must have secretly been thanking John McIntosh, who is turning into a one-man app wave. Without John’s recent batch of new Squeak-based applications, Phil would have been left announcing the much less satisfactory figure of 49,99749,994 applications.
In case you missed it, John’s latest announcement was that his Fraction app is now available for calculations involving unlimited sized fractions and factorials, as it attempts to preserve numerical accuracy to an unprecedented degree. The new app joins the two apps based on his WikiServer that John already has on the App Store.
We look forward to seeing if the notoriously byzantine App Store approval process will be able to keep up with John’s flood of new applications.
The Revenge of Smalltalk
2 June, 2009
Despite recent discussions over what killed Smalltalk, there continues to be lots of interest in the language and in Seaside in particular. Anyone based near London will be able to find out more about both topics at a talk dramatically titled “Seaside: The Revenge of Smalltalk“.
This “Geek Night” is going to cover how Smalltalk makes web development different and how Seaside is being put to use in the “Real World”. Participants will learn about real object-orientated programming rather than class-orientated programming.
The two presenters are Lukas Renggli, who will be talking about Squeak and the world of Open Source Smalltalk; and Michel Bany from Cincom who will be discussing how Seaside and Smalltalk has been used in companies like JP Morgan.
The talk is hosted by Thoughtworks‘ London office on Monday 6th July, 2009 from 7:00pm—10:00pm.
Squeak applications now on the App Store
18 May, 2009
Following his success in getting Squeak running on the iPhone last year, John M McIntosh has announced on the Squeak-dev mailing list that he has had two applications approved for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch App Store.
The two SqueakDocs electronic books, based on Squeak and Seaside, allow users to explore the code and documentation in two Smalltalk images: a 3.10.x Squeak web developer’s image, and a Pharo web developer’s image of late April 2009. They are now available for purchase on the App Store: Squeak version, Pharo version.
The applications use Seaside to render the content to the built-in Safari browser, so they can also present content to other machines on the local network.
John is still waiting for approval to come through soon for WikiServer, a “much more complex application,” which will allow users to view and maintain wiki content on their iPhones.
Deploying a Seaside Application
12 May, 2009
Andreas Brodbeck has written an interesting blog post detailing his experiences developing, configuring and deploying a Seaside application. He seems to have found it a positive experience; indeed he writes that “Some months ago I decided myself to work with Seaside, and to develop all my upcoming web applications with it, if possible. If not possible, I will fall back to Rails. So far I am very happy with my decision and the current projects.”
Unfortunately the application is not publicly viewable, but he has had to get to grips with a lot of interesting (and potentially troublesome) technologies, including migration to Gemstone, PDF generation, object serialisation using SIXX, running under a 64-bit virtual session, using Cherokee as front-end server, Magritte for presenting data, and of course his own SeaShell deployment helper application.
Congratulations to Andreas, whose application joins many others being developed in Seaside.
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!”
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