Friday, April 28, 2006

Seaside, ROR and retiring Java from the spotlight of web applications

Seaside got mentioned again in an interview with Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson to retire Java from the spotlight of web applications. To quote:

"Rails is much more traditional and familiar to most programmers. Java programmers with years of experience in J2EE can switch to Rails quickly and all they have to learn is what drudgery not to do any more.

Seaside, on the other hand, is an entirely different paradigm. It's new, fresh thinking. And for certain narrow domains it can definitely offer significant improvements over the traditional request/response model.

But I don't see it as something that's going to catch a ton of mainstream traction the way Rails has. It's simply too different for too many people. And for the "most applications most of the time" sphere, it doesn't offer enough benefits over something like Rails to be worth the mental rewrite for most people.

I certainly encourage you to take a look regardless. It'll broaden your mind."


I would not encourage you to take a look since it is true what Andy Bower once said:


"Smalltalk is dangerous. It is a drug. My advice to you would be don't try it; it could ruin your life. Once you take the time to learn it (to REALLY learn it) you will see that there is nothing out there (yet) to touch it. Of course, like all drugs, how dangerous it is depends on your character. It may be that once you've got to this stage you'll find it difficult (if not impossible) to "go back" to other languages and, if you are forced to, you might become an embittered character constantly muttering ascerbic comments under your breath. Who knows, you may even have to quit the software industry altogether because nothing else lives up to your new expectations."

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Smalltalk free lectures repository

As announced by Stêphane:

The European Smalltalk User Group ESUG (www.esug.org) hosts a new server to collect all your free Smalltalk lectures and videos:

If you want to share with others your lectures, please visit http://smalltalkteaching.esug.org/

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Seaside and Exupery Videos

There are two new videos available:
If you want to learn about the progress of the Exupery project for Squeak
you should definitely download this video.

A short introduction into the Seaside web framework.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Seachart

A new live demo of SeaChart is available at seachart.seasidehosting.st.

SeaChart components are standard Seaside web components that you can easily embed into your Smalltalk web application. Demos include PlotKit
CSS Bar Graph, Numberd List, Star Rater, Fade In and Cross Fade.

You can also download the code from SqueakSource.

Also have a look at scriptaculous.seasidehosting.st for more free Seaside components.

Croquet on Wikipedia

There is a new wikipedia page describing the Croquet System and project.

Also the hedgehog release of the Croquet SDK (Version 1.0) is imminent.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Smalltalk Party in Cagliari, Italy

A new Smalltalk party in Cagliari, Italy will start on July 1st 2006.

Back from New Zealand

After 3 and a half week in New Zealand my wife and I arrived back in germany. It was our second trip to NZ and it was really amazing. I really like the country. This time we concentrated on the North Island and made a trip to White Island. We also saw some Wallabies and a wide range of birdlife.

Our tour in short:
- Auckland (City of Sails)
- Northland with Cape Reinga
- Coromandel
- Bay of Plenty
- Rotorua and Lake Taupo
- Tongariro National Park with its active volcanoes
- New Plymouth with Mt. Taranaki