More ESUG 2009 videos

Göran provides more videos from ESUG 2009.

Raphael goes Seaside

Gerhard Obermann announced a seaside wrapper for Raphael - a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. Code is available at:

http://www.squeaksource.com/Raphael

Its tested with the latest Seaside 2.8 distribution. On request he could also port it to Seaside 3.0.

STicky

Hernán Morales Durand announced "STicky" - a pluggable real-time evaluator and/or translator workspace aimed to learn languages.

You can watch the intro video here and read more here.

Seaside 3.0 for Dolphin

is available now: http://www.infoil.com.ar/seaside/

Read more in the announcement.

Squeak and Nintendo

Old news from 2007 - but I didnt know that it existed:

Squeak VM for Nintendo and running on Nintendo-ES (N-ES is Nintendo operating system).

Here you will find a few screenshots.

Chromeframe

Any web developer knows that it is hard to use new web technologies like the HTML5 canvas tag in Internet Explorer. Even with iecanvas project.

I think this is a problem for webapps these days and especially for Google who really want to people moving from the desktop (mostly Windows) to the web for daily work.

Google now released a plugin for IE to use the Google web browser ("Chrome") technology and their JavaScript engine right from within Internet Explorer.

http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe

Lets see how this affects the future of the web...

Squeak on Dr. Dobb's

Chris Cunningtons Smalltalk TV (I reported already on this) is now mentioned on Dr. Dobbs.

UGP / SecureSqueak 0.1

Michael van der Gulik announced his "Unnamed Grand Project". It is based on Secure Squeak (a custom Squeak with code loadable into a sandbox) and provides an environment similar to a webbrower.

But instead of loading HTML, the user will interact with distributed objects. There is also a video available together with a first snapshot download.

You can read more here.

Snarl

Snarl is a small utility showing messages from different applications in the corner of your windows desktop. Meanwhile there are also interfaces for Smalltalk:

- Squeak/Pharo
- VisualWorks
- VisualAge

Etoys 4 release candidate

Timothy Falconer announced the Etoys 4 release candidate. Beside fixes and small improvements it is now also fully "license clean". Squeak Smalltalk and descendants continues to grow...

GwtSmalltalk

A new Smalltalk is in town: GwtSmalltalk (GST).

It is built using GWT (Google Web Toolkit) and deployed on Googles App engine. By compiling Smalltalk to JavaScript it is able to run in your webbrowser. Read more on the projects blog.

You can directly run it here.

I agree with James that it looks like Peter Fisk is the creator of this Smalltalk-80 derivate according to the announcement post on c.l.s. You may know him from his work on Vista Smalltalk.

Linus and old C++ friends

Funny, read more here (and especially all the comments) and dont miss the original post from Linus.

I especially like this part:
"Have you ever browsed the Boost library? Just building the thing requires a Ph.D. in compiler technology."

Why? Because I know one of the boost developers in person from our former company called "Phaidros" and I cant remember he had a Ph.D. in compiler technology. But one can write "hard to understand" code in any language, even Java, C# and Smalltalk ;)

Dietmar now works in GB and is still a crazy C++ guy. He once wrote an X11 server displaying on a Synaptics cPad while we were in Frankfurt and a minimal C++ Runtime Library. Crazy but cool...

Krestianstvo SDK - Russian Smalltalk

There is a new project by Nikolay Suslov called "Krestianstvo SDK" built on top of OpenCroquet SDK. The project is targeted at native russian speakers and integrates well know packages like Seaside, OMeta, ...

http://www.krestianstvo.ru

More infos also on the following blog post.

The interesting thing is this:
"All new source code will be written on native spoken language (Russian), as possible also."

I typically tend to write my code in english but I worked in "mixed language" projects too. Maybe our object oriented systems should switch to GUID's/UUID's to identify classes like it was possible in Smallscript/S# or in COM. This would allow for internationalization of class names. And allow class versioning too.

Just an idea ;)

Facelifting Smalltalk

The Pharo Smalltalk distribution now includes Polymorph - a UI framework with theming including Vista, Windows, Squeak and Watery look. The default Squeak look is/was not very attractive.

But facelifting of the default Squeak UI in the trunk development stream is now also discussed on the Squeak developer list.

And Cincom Smalltak got a facelift too with a fresh UI for ObjectStudio and VisualWorks.

And VisualAge Smalltalk provides modernized browsers.

Seaside 2.9 for Dolphin

Seaside 2.9 is now also available for Dolphin.

REST in Seaside

Phillipe has some updates on how easy it can be to use
REST together with the seaside web framework:

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/seaside-dev/2009-September/003584.html

AlienOpenGL binding for Smalltalk

Fernando Olivero released a new OpenGL binding framework called "AlienOpenGL" for Pharo and Squeak implemented using Alien.
Alien (IA32ABI plugin for the Squeak virtual machine) is a new foreign function interface framework currently in preparation to extend the existing FFI.

The AlienOpenGL framework provides an interface to the 3D OpenGL graphics system, for producing 3D graphics in Smalltalk using OpenGL functions and extensions.

ESUG continues

You could not make it to ESUG 2009 conference. Dont be sad.

Sure you miss a lot of cool stuff, new ideas around Smalltalk and interesting presentations. (BTW: the presentation material is now also up on slideshare.net)

James also collected pictures and presentions and I'm sure there will soon be some videos from Damien available online.

And there are really exciting news: ESUG 2010 will be held at Barcelona.

Dont ask me where I got this information from but it is a reliable source. It is not yet public so even when you are not there you may be the third who now know about it. :)

MVC - Squeaks Smalltalk 80 roots

Building a custom Squeak Smalltalk image is easy these days. Have a look at Pharo or Cuis.

Interesting enough Sungjin Chun created an MVC only image (yes without Morphic) based on Squeak 3.8 in the style of the original Smalltalk-80. You can download it here.

SmallRuby

Claus Gittinger (creator of Smalltalk/X) was already able to run Java on his unified virtual machine (see this paper). Thats nothing new.

But it looks like Smalltalk/X is now also able to run Ruby. The project is called SmallRuby - an implementation of Ruby programming language for Smalltalk/X virtual machine done at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering Czech Technical University In Prague.

According to the website the results are amazing. For example, in methodCall benchmark, SmallRuby is 40 times faster than Ruby 1.8. SmallRuby exception handling is much slower than in YARV (Ruby 1.9), but still faster than Ruby 1.8 a JRuby.

There is a presentation available and there are already some news about it available from ESUG 2009.

Book: Dynamic web development with Seaside

The new seaside book is online:

http://book.seaside.st/book

Have fun!

ESUG 2009 Media

You want to know how you can use Smalltalk to go by bus?
You want to know how Smalltalk is used in the oil industry?
You want to know how you can boot Smalltalk on netbooks?
You want to know more about the currently running ESUG 2009 conference?

Then you should follow this link.