To Traits Or Not To Traits

There is a discussion on the Squeak mailing list about language extensions to Smalltalk for Squeak. Especially about including Traits into the standard image. Click here to get some infos on it. You can also download a prototype.

Squeak Mailing lists

There are some new mailing lists for the new Squeak teams. You can access them from a common site.

Smalltalk Marketing is getting better

Pavel Krivanek has created an awesome Smalltalk Logo for Squeak. Click on the picture below:

Article serie about Seaside (in Czech)

Pavel Krivanek has published first volume of his article serie
dedicated to Seaside at http://www.root.cz. Unfortunately it's in Czech ;)

    

Planet Smalltalk

Thanks to Peter Lount from Smalltalk.org the Planet Smalltalk is now accessible using http://planet.smalltalk.org

More infos on 64Bit Squeak

If you need more informations on the 64bit port of Squeak have a look at this page on the HP Server.

ToolBuilder project for Squeak

The ToolBuilder project for providing a common Squeak UI framework for tools is getting into shape. An initial version is available from Squeaksource. You can also read the discussions online.

Proposed Squeak web site

There is a first proposal for redesigning the squeak homepage from Bruce O'Neel.

Smalltalk Party

There is a Smalltalk Party/SqueakNic/Coding Party on Saturday 12th of March 2005 at the university of Bern (Switzerland). Read more here.

Report from the Castaways

Göran posted a first report about the new direction for Squeak.

Smalltalk coding contest

If you want to take part on the STIC Smalltalk coding contest have a look here.

Japanese Squeak community

If you want to get some infos about the growing community of Squeakers in Japan read this posting from the Squeak mailing list.

Tideland Request Management System

The Tideland Request Management System is a web based application for the management of IT projects. It is currently ported over from Perl to Squeak using the Seaside web framework. PostgreSQL is used for persistency. You can read more about it on the projects wiki.

Tweak mailinglist archive

The tweak mailing list is now also archived on gmane.org. Point you browser to http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.tweak. Tweak is a new UI framework for Squeak.

Digitaal Genootschap voor het Verleden

... is the dutch name of a Smalltalk project aiming to build a peer-to-peer network for exchanging historical knowledge between hobbyists and professional institutions. A preview of the code (written in Squeak) is available on SqueakSource. You can find the projects homepage here.

New Squeak leadership

There is a new leadership in the Squeak community. Looks like some chapters of "The Mysterious Island" by Jules Verne have to be rewritten. Hopefully this will end up with a stable open source Smalltalk that is not only used for E-toys. Read more here.

FolderScavenger Utility

Found another little Windows utility powered by Smalltalk. It is called FolderScavenger and is written in Dolphin Smalltalk. FolderScavenger Pro makes it easy to print folder listings, or copy folder listings to the clipboard and paste them into Word, Excel, or any Windows applications.

James Gosling on .NET

Read an interview with James Gosling today. Again a technical interview with lot's of marketing pro Java and against .NET. He complained that:

"The Microsoft folks made a big deal of being able to support C and C++ on the CLR, and that, to my mind, is one of the stupidest, most offensive things they could have done. What it meant was that they had to have a Virtual Machine model that would allow arbitrary pointer arithmetic, and sort of arbitrary forging of the identity of things.".

So what's his problem? People have to use code and components written in other (maybe insecure) languages if they need in both technologies. Java has JNI and you can interface with insecure code with it as well. .NET makes it just easier than JNI and is able to support more languages. Unfortunately the .NET runtime is not (yet) a friendly environment for dynamic languages like Smalltalk.

Smalltalk/MT

ObjectConnect has created a new version of it's Smalltalk/MT development environment for Windows. So go and download the new Smalltalk/MT 5.2 Release Build 641. The ST/MT environment really rocks - it's compiling native and executables are really small and fast. Since it uses native UI widgets you are able to compete with native C++ applications but with the power of Smalltalk in the background. It's also possible to build DLL's, COM components and Active/X controls! You can also get a copy from Genify.com - distributor and Microsoft certified partner.



I've created several applications with it, for example a VB Script editor, a webmanager and a UML/workflow diagram editor OCX. You can find them on my homepage. Click on the images to see some sample screenshots:

Smalltalk on PS/2

David Ryan, webmaster of www.ps2dev.org wants to create a native port of Squeak for the Playstation 2. He got interested in Squeak after visiting OOPSLA last year.


There was already a squeak port to PS/2 done in 2001 by Andreas Raab.

Past Smalltalk Solutions Presentations

Jason Jones has added presentations from the Smalltalk Solutions 2003 to the STIC site.

Alan Kay on Slashdot

There is again some discussion about Alan Kay, Smalltalk and computer languages on slashdot. One posting is really interesting:

"Smalltalk was okay, but I prefered Eiffel, Java and C# are both by comparison rubbish, but they have better GUI libraries and marketing departments"

That's unfortunately true ...

Shrinking Squeak

Looks like after some discussion on the squeak list on "top down" versus "bottom up" a new contest has started: Building the smallest image to get a maintainable core. There is already a standard minimal image available (585kb). M. Fritsche has created a major shrinked image these days from an old 3.0 Squeak with basic networking. Its a 987kb image. Craig Latta has created much smaller images for flow - unfortunately his image building code is not (yet) available.

Tweak Roadmap

Andreas has posted a new roadmap for Tweak. Tweak is a new graphics architecture for Squeak Smalltalk. You can download a Tweak version from the Impara source repository.

Seaside stuff

More tutorial and exercise material for the Seaside web framework is available. You can find a direct pointer here.

Squeak Mailinglist Report

The BIWEEKLY report 28. Dec - 31. Jan for the Squeak mailing list is available. Thank you Goran for making this available. It's much easier to get an overview now.

Google Calculator

I've used the Google calculator this morning. Just type the following into Google and click search: 123456,12 * 0,001234 * 60. The result it prints is 9 140,69112. That's not precise.



Using Smalltalk I get 9140.6911248. So I better trust my Smalltalk program.
BTW: Oracles PL/SQL is also correct, try to run:

select 123456.12 * 0.001234 * 60 from dual;

Update theme for Squeak 3.8

There is a new version of the "Skylark" theme available for Squeak.



Read the announcement or download it here.

Seaside Tutorial in Korean

If you speak korean fluently than you may walk on the seaside. Otherwise use the original tutorial in english.

News from VisualWorks

There are two new presentations available for VisualWorks Smalltalk:

- XML2ObjectFile.pdf
- WebServiceTutorial.pdf



as well as an article on Extendible Concurrency in Smalltalk from the February 2005 issue of Journal of Object oriented programming. Found on the Cincom weblog.

Squeak VM Sources have moved

The Squeak VM (Virtual Machine) sources have moved from SourceForge to a HP server. You can access the code from the new subversion repository at: http://squeak.hpl.hp.com/svn/squeak/trunk/platforms.



Read the announcement on the Squeak developer mailing list.

Smalltalk Evening in Munich

Visited the OOP 2005 last wednesday here in munich. I've spend the morning in some Oracle presentations on JSF (Java Server Faces) and J2EE. They showed a beta version of their JDeveloper product where you could visually build a JSF webpage. Nothing really new - Microsoft presented this for .NET in VisualStudio 2 years ago. Lot's of file editing in Java source files, JSP pages and XML configurations.

More and more J2EE tool vendors will now support the open source projects from the apache group like Struts or Jakarta Tag Libs. Unfortunately they run like lemmings into a really cumbersome Java technologies and I'm sure most of their customers will have to pay the bill for this later. I may share my own experiences in some of my next postings.



After lunch there was an interesting presentation from Erich Gamma about developing the Eclipse core technology. Maybe I will post some infos on that too in a few days.



As I mentioned in one of my previous posts a Smalltalk evening took place on this day. It started with a talk by Joseph Pelrine from Metaprog.com about Testing. A second presentation by Andreas Tönne (from Georg Heeg e.K.) showed how easy it can be to develop a web application from within Smalltalk. For a Smalltalker migrating to web applications is just building a different view in the MVC triad. ;)

The day ended with some friend in a nice pub in the city of munich.