Saturday, November 22, 2008

Alien - Smalltalk and the world out there

In the year of Smalltalk things really moving forward, especially within the open source family. A lot of VM work is going on and Pharo may become the most interesting descendant of the Squeak image by breaking with old traditions.

But there is also work going on to provide a better FFI (Foreign Function interface). John and Eliot provide first version on the "Alien" SqueakSource project. From the description:

"Alien is a new FFI interface. It supports faster call sequence, return code setting, and callbacks to execute smalltalk code from the FFI routine. Copyright 2008 Cadence Design Systems, Inc. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0"

Monday, November 17, 2008

A Commodore 64 emulator in Smalltalk

A C64 emulator written in VisualWorks Smalltalk by Gabriel Honoré. Nice! Especially since I started my first programming steps on this machine. Read more here.

So we can write the next Smalltalk UI framework using POKE 8192 + offset, ..., control sound using POKE 54296, 15 and use SYS 64738 to reset our machines ;)

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Scaffolding for GemStone

James Foster provides a short video on "Scaffolding for GemStone". It nicely shows how easy it can be to create CRUD web applications with Seaside, Squeak using Gemstone for persistence.

Even Robots understand Smalltalk

The Smalltalk programming language is not only simple but powerful - it is also very close to natural languages.

Thats why also Robots can understand Smalltalk these days. I think you should also start to dive in and learn Smalltalk before robots outperform the human race.

Read more.

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

seaBreeze 4.0

Karsten announced a new version 4.0 of seaBreeze for Seaside.

In addition they now provide a QuickStart image - just download it and run and you are able to play with the software. Since it is a normal VisualWorks image you can just select "Browse" and "System" in the Launcher to browse the classes and find out how it is done. If you need more help just follow the mailinglist.

Compared to typical VisualWorks UI windowSpec the seaBreeze UI Builder now uses XML as storage format for the layouts. I like the XML integration into the VW Smalltalk IDE - they extended the Refactoring Browser with a new tab to browse the XML nodes. Nice.

It's not yet ported to Squeak/Pharo (the original Seaside platform) ... but at least there is some interest.