More Smalltalk shirts

Found one more Smalltalk T-Shirt on the Object-Arts (Dolphin Smalltalk) T-Shirt website:



For those who dont know: Dolphin Smalltalk is a powerfull Smalltalk system for the MS-Windows(TM) platform.

New Refactorings for Smalltalk

David Buck suggests some new refactorings for Smalltalk:



Hopefully these get included into Smalltalk systems like VisualWorks, VisualAge, Squeak, Dolphin, ... soon

Squeak Shirt

At least there is a Squeak shirt available at the Impara fan shop:

Funny Shirts

Found this at getdigital.de:



Looks like our community should have some Smalltalk specific shirts with content like: true become: false or "no comment"

Seaside Testing Framework ported to VisualWorks

Michael Bany ported David Shaffer's Seaside testing framework from Squeak to VisualWorks. The port is available on the public Store repository as the bundle named SeasideTestingBundle.



Read his announcement from the Seaside mailing list.

New Seaside Homepage

The new Seaside homepage is up and running. Point you browser to http://www.seaside.st.



There is also a prebuild squeak image available (10MB). You need the Squeak VM to run it on your platform. Note that Seaside is now released under the MIT license.

Croquet, Everyone?

Forbes Magazine's January 31st issue inludes an article on Croquet - the 3D operating system implemented in Squeak Smalltalk.



The article was written by Quentin Hardy and entitled "Croquet, Everyone?". Read more about it here.

Brett Taylor has written an experience report on using Seaside. It explains some of his selection criteria for choosing Seaside, along with a bit of experience developing his current product in Smalltalk.



I've used Seaside myself for developing applications and I completely agree that Seaside really rocks ...

Eclipse project and censorship

Looks like the Eclipse Foundation Director Mike Milinkovich is trying to prevent negative publicity for the eclipse foundation (found in comp.language.java.softwaretools).

Cincom Smalltalk Press Releases

There are 4 new press releases from the German Smalltalk User Group (GSUG) about the OOP 2005 Smalltalk evening and Cincom Smalltalk.



The GSUG is an organization with free membership for smalltalkers living/working in germany. I reconstituted the GSUG together with other Smalltalkers some years ago and organized events like the Smalltalk evening in the past. Feel free to visit the Smalltalk evening - it may change your life and view on working with computers.

Squeak and Simulation

The Smalltalk language in it's natural and object-oriented style is a nice language to develop simulations. Today Yoshiki Ohshima announced his Kedama project - a parallel particle programming system. Kedama is deeply inspired by StarLogo and StarSqueak.



It requires a special VM plugin which is already provided for the windows version. If you run Squeak on other platforms you can easily build the plugin using the given changeset. Look at his website for the changeset, the plugin and some examples like a gas tank or forest fire simulation.

GLORP Tutorial

There is a new GLORP online tutorial from Roger Whitney available. See the announcement. GLORP is an open source object-relational mapping layer implemented in Smalltalk. The GLORP project is a Camp Smalltalk project led by Alan Knight (former chief architect of the TOPLink family of products).



Check it out - it is a powerfull framework for reading and writing objects from/to relational databases. If you have used Java and TOPLink in the past you should quickly switch to Smalltalk and GLORP and enjoy better and easier coding ...

Super Parts Bin

A parts bin is used in Squeak to hold several morphs. You can open it and drag some morphs on the Squeak desktop.
Takashi Yamamiya san announced an enhanced version today called "super parts bin". This one allows you to share morphs between different images through a local hard disc, a SuperSwiki server (or any regulare FTP server). By making tile scripts with a morph, it is easy to publish morphic animation in the internet.



So open up your Squeak and download the package from SqueakMap. Note that you can add your own server to share morphs. You can read more about Super Parts Bin on the "Squeak everyday" blog or test the provided japanese squeak image.

Swiki Backup

Wrote a little VB script this morning to back up my Wiki server. I typically use a Comanche Swiki which is written in Squeak.



There is a newer swiki implementation for Squeak called SmallWiki - but Comanche is prepackaged and I havent found the time to look deeper into SmallWiki.

Since the windows version of the Squeak VM is able to run as an NT service my script has to shut down the swiki service first, then make a zip of the swiki files and then start the service again. I use the freeware zip.exe from Info-Zip.
Here is the final script:

'****************************************
'* Backup the Swiki Server
'****************************************
Const pathToSwiki = "ComSwiki\swiki"
Const zipProgram = "C:\tools\zip.exe"
Const serviceName = "Swiki"
Const backupFolder = "C:\backups\"

Set shell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set fileSystem = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

stopServiceCommand = "net stop " & serviceName
startServiceCommand = "net start " & serviceName

currentTime = Time
zipDate = Date()
zipTime = DatePart("h",currentTime) & DatePart("n",currentTime) & DatePart("s",currentTime)
zipFilename = "swikiBackup" & zipDate & "." & zipTime & ".zip"
backupCommand = zipProgram & " -r -9 " & zipFilename & " " & pathToSwiki

'Stop the service, zip and start the service
shell.Run stopServiceCommand,0,true
shell.Run backupCommand,0,true
shell.Run startServiceCommand,0,true

'Move the backup to a common backup folder
If fileSystem.FileExists(zipFilename) Then
fileSystem.CopyFile zipFilename, backupFolder
fileSystem.DeleteFile zipFilename
End If


Using the Task Scheduler I'm able to run the script automatically. I like automating common tasks...

VisualWaf

Georg Heeg eK - a german company with a long tradition in Smalltalk has created a new product called "VisualWaf". They will talk about it on the Smalltalk evening on the OOP 2005 conference. I think they have used Cincoms VisualWorks Smalltalk to build it. The products name sounds like another well known Smalltalk product for VisualWorks called "VisualWave" back from the ParcPlace area.
You should be here in munich on 26.01.2005 to get more news.

Web Applications with Squeak

The swedish company "Bluefish" has written a small tool called "Homepage builder" using Squeak. There is also a description how it is done.



Swedish companies like www.bwell.se, www.halsinge.se or www.garage-equipment.se already use the product on their homepages.

Croquet Roadmap

The roadmap for Croquet was announced on the Croquet Wiki.

Seaside FAQ

There is a new page with FAQ's for the Seaside framework.



Seaside is a really powerfull framework for building web applications. Compared to J2EE which is typically used to build form based web sites Seaside provides easy flow handling and makes it easy to build web based applications. A new website for Seaside is in preparation.

Recursion in Croquet

Looks like a Croquet portal is now able to look into itself
recursively:

Eclipse and CDT

Currently writing a small command line executable as a helper
tool for my project. Want to use C/C++ for that. Installed
Eclipse, CDT and Mingw. After spending some time on
configuring my system to get the compiler working and Eclipse to
run on the correct JRE/JDK, ... I started to write the code.

Eclipse CDT is a nice environment with syntax highlighting, code
browsing, ect. for developing C/C++ projects. Wanted to test
the "write/save/(re)compile/run the whole application" cycle with
a simple C command line application.
As a Smalltalker I find this development style completely old
fashioned - but it was my own decision to choose C/C++ as the
development language here). So I wrote a simple test program
to see if anything was working:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
   printf("Test");
   getchar();
   return 0;
}

If you compile and run the program in Eclipse it shows up in
the console - but I have to hit the ENTER key first and then
I get the "Test" output. So Eclipse is waiting for the key
and then flushed the output to the console. Strange.
If I run the compiled executable on the command line it works
correctly. Question left is: is this behavior intended or a bug?
At least it didnt work in Eclipse as I expected it and this will
always lead to programming errors or confused programmers.
In a Smalltalk IDE I have direct and instant access to the
code to identify the bug but Eclipse/CDT is written in Java and
I was too lazy to download, install and debug the CDT Java
source code...

Lesson learned:
"Dont trust your IDE - always test" and "Return to Smalltalk as
soon as possible!" ;)

ReactOS 0.2.5 released

A new version of ReactOS was released. ReactOS is an Open Source effort to develop an operating system that is compatible with Microsoft Windows(R) applications and drivers. Would be interesting if typical Windows Smalltalk systems will be able to run on it.

brickTalk

Looks like there is yet another Smalltalk implementation called "brickTalk" registered on SourceForge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bricktalk/

RegExThing - watching regular expressions match as you type

Bob Westgaard has created a small utility called "RegExThing". Looks like a nice tool to help you writing Regular Expressions. Just download the VisualWorks Non Commercial Version and install it from the Cincom Public Repository.

MPEG4IP and Squeak

Yoshiki Ohshima san is doing some experiments with MPEG4IP in Squeak. Read his Post from the Squeak Mailinglist.

Gallery Builder for Croquet

Citris (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) has built a Gallery Builder for Croquet (a 3D virtual environment which is based on Squeak Smalltalk)

Click on the images to enlarge:


You can download the code/Squeak image here.

The HotSpot source code is a bad joke

Read http://www.jroller.com/page/slava/ to get some inside knowledge on the Java HotSpot VM.