More VM news

Looks like Ian Piumarta's new Pepsi and Coke Meta-VM might lift off with the OLPC project. A quote from the OLPC news:

"2. Alan Kay, Kim Rose, and the eToys team spent the week in Cambridge at the OLPC offices. They continue to make rapid progress towards the integration of eToys into the laptop software environment (they also provided useful feedback) and have eToys running on the laptop. IanPiumarta gave the OLPC team an update on his dynamically reconfigurable virtual machine, which may be in the longer term the basis of programming environment for the Laptop, in that it is simple, fast, extremely flexibleand quite eloquent."

Comet Screencasts - new web possibilities

Diego shows some examples for Comet use as screencasts:

- a Cooperative shopping cart
- a colaborative spreadsheet

Full info is available here and here - spanish only.

So there are more and more arguments for using Seaside as THE web development framework. If you dont know about Comet you should have a look at one of my ealier posts about it.

News from Squeak and OLPC

Another step for the "One Laptop per Child" (OLPC) project: Squeak Etoys is running on a first prototype display. See the pictures on Ians homepage:

    http://piumarta.com/photos/olpc/

Sun release Strongtalk VM into OpenSource

Sun has released the Strongtalk VM as Open Source in September 2006. The Strongtalk VM executes Smalltalk much faster than any other Smalltalk implementation (at the time of its release), using an advanced inlining compiler based on type-feedback technology. See

http://www.strongtalk.org/

for more info.

The current system was developed in secret at a small startup company, Animorphic Systems (officially LongView Technologies, Inc.), that was started in 1994. Unfortunately for Strongtalk, the rapid and unexpected rise of Sun Microsystem's Java forced Animorphic to halt work on the Strongtalk system before it was ever released. Animorphic was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1997, and parts of the Animorphic virtual machine technology became the core of what is currently Sun's production Java virtual machine implementation (it made it into the Hotspot Java Jitter/dynamic optimizer).

The VM is a mixed-mode system, with a fast interpreter as well as dynamic
compiler that was invoked based on dynamic profiling info. The only previous application of similar technology was Self, which was entirely compiled and had a huge footprint.

The Strongtalk VM did not make use of the type system at all; typing was strictly optional. Method dispatch was based on inline caches, including PICs. All code was represented internally as mixins, and any class could be used as a mixin as well.

Benchmarks showed that we were 2.5-4 times faster than commercial Smalltalks at that time (Digitalk, ParcPlace (now Cincom) and IBM).

Squeak Developer Workspace (including Seaside)

A new release of DeveloperWorkspace for Squeak 3.9 is available. It creates a predefined image and may help developers as well as beginners. It now also includes all packages for Seaside development.

Some of its features:

• assembles usefull packages and developer tools (AST, FFI, RefactoringBrowser, RoelTyper, TestBrowser, Techo, ScriptManager, MemoryUsage, ...)
  
• syntax highlighting using Shout
  
• autocompletion using eCompletion package
  
• includes seaside and a seaside workspace to easily start web development (no external webserver required)
  
• window switching using ALT+W (thanks to keybinder)
  
• provides an beginners workspace (uncomplete, help appreciated)
  

Unfortunately I was not able to register a new package version on SqueakMap today, so here is a short howto:

Download the latest 3.9 release of Squeak (actually Squeak3.9g-7055.zip) from http://ftp.squeak.org/3.9

Open a new workspace and evaluate the following code:


| repository version |
repository := MCHttpRepository location: 'http://www.squeaksource.com/DeveloperWorkspace' user: '' password: ''.
version := repository versionFromFileNamed: 'DEVImageInstaller-tbn.4.mcz'.
version load.


A workspace will appear with

DEVImageInstaller install

Just select this text and evaluate it.

Answer all following questions with "yes" or "ok". Note that you have to provide a username and password during the install. They are used to secure the seaside webserver configuration console.

When the installation finishes just save the image. You can now use the tools or follow the instructions in one of the workspaces.

Have fun

Pictures from ESUG 2006

Here are the first pictures from the 14th European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG) conference in Prague.

You can also have a look at the presentations from Monday.

and some first impressions from James:
- Meta Driven Browsers (about the OmniBrowser framework)
- Modularizing the ObjectLens

Some news from DabbleDB

Andrew created a new screencast on DabbleDB showing how to create an application from imported digg.com data. If you want you can help digging.

DabbleDB is also mentioned on the Dan & David Show as being used by Ismael Ghalimi, the co-founder and CEO of Intalio.

For those who dont know: DabbleDB is a new web application written Smalltalk using Squeak and the seaside web framework (both open source). It's focus is on easy application development based on structured data.

Rethinking the typing

There were some thoughts from an outsider about Smalltalk on the Squeak-dev mailinglist, I can only agree to his point of view about typing:

"Before I was an effienciency/static typing junky, but smalltalk has made me
rethink the typing at least. :) After all, how many errors *has* that
really caught for me compared to all the times code didn't compile because
the compiler was confused about something that should work."

In dynamic languages you can focus on solving the problem - in static languages you always get distracted by annoying compiler messages...

Rubics Cube

There are a couple videos of a Rubik's Cube in croquet space on YouTube. Looks like this is work done by one of Robert Hirschfeld's students.

- Video 1
- Video 2
- Video 3



Robert is the author of various Squeak packages like AspectS or MethodAnnotationBrowser.

Unfortunately he now moved to Potsdam to work for the Hasso Plattner Institute. We are both native-born in Thuringia (which is one of the most beautiful landscapes in germany by the way) and I miss the endless Smalltalk discussions with him after work in Munich's beer gardens...

Crashing toad

TOAD is a really usefull tool when working with databases. While working with Oracle today it suddenly crashed and displayed an interesting call stack. Did'nt know that the UI was written using Pascal:

The power of two

If you work in IT business then some numbers are very meaningful
if you see them in a memory dump or a code listing. If you know
about bits and bytes and the mathematics behind them then at least
the following series should be well known:

1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 1024 2048 4096 8192 16384 32768 65536 ...

The series for 16 bits is something you could easily remember.
But whats next. Let's write a small(talk) expression to see how the
series continues up to 1000 bits:

(0 to: 1000) collect: [ :each | 2 raisedTo: each ]

Ooops - I didnt know that (2 raisedTo: 1000) is:

10715086071862673209484250490600018105614048117055336074437503883703510511249361224931983788156958581275946729175531468251871452856923140435984577574698574803934567774824230985421074605062371141877954182153046474983581941267398767559165543946077062914571196477686542167660429831652624386837205668069376

Really? Unbelievable! Next step would be to learn all of them ;)

StarUML

Found a nice and free Win32 UML Tool on the web. It is called StarUML.

StarUML supports Java, C++, C#, Pattern, RationalRose and XMI. Last one is especially important - so I can transform the model to anything I like. Diagrams can also be exported to JPG, EMF, WMF and BMP. It comes with full Delphi source code - so it is easily adaptable.

I like it but even with all these features I think it will not replace my hottest design tool.

Christo Code Coverage

Stefan Reichhart has announced "Christo" - a tool to dynamically and safely retrieve coverage of code-elements (e.g. packages, classes, methods, ...).

It adapts many different technologies to collect data. So you might apply this tool using ByteSurgeon, MethodWrappers, ObjectAsMethodWrappers, JCompiledMethods/AST (short: JAST), or ...

It's part of his Master Thesis about "Testing".

Identity parade

From a friends website:

No comment ...

Injection Rejection

Software developers should always take care for security and prevent SQL injection as explained in this funny story. :)

Seaside at OSCON

Some more notes about Avi's OSCON presentation about the Seaside web framework. I'm using the framework from it's early days and really enjoy it (especially after hard times with other "mainstream" frameworks) ...

SqueakSource servers

Here is an update on the current list of public squeak source servers:

• http://www.squeaksource.com
  
• http://source.squeakfoundation.org
  
• http://squeak.saltypickle.com
  
• http://source.impara.de
  
• http://mc.lukas-renggli.ch
  
• http://squeaksource.blueplane.jp
  

It's fun to browse the last one - it's japanese (from the SqSquare project) but I'm able to navigate and explore it. I like the FileMan package from it. It makes file handling in Squeak much easier.

If you want to set up an own squeak source server: some months ago I prepared an image for easily setting up SqueakSource.

Seaside at OSCON 2006

Avi is talking about Seaside at OSCON 2006

Obie Fernandez is lamenting about the vodoo magic of the seaside framework. It's not vodoo - just plain objects at work. ;)

SqueakCMI

A new website called SqueakCMI is available at:

     http://squeakcmi.org

The SqueakCMI Group is working to bring Squeak to more teachers and children to develop mathematics and science activities using Squeak as a platform.

Stupid Metrics

Found yet another article on language popularity:

A new TIOBE Software study has found that Java is the most popular programming language among developers
...
This popularity measurement uses a simple metric: the number of relevant search engine queries.


I would guess the reason is that you always need to look up Java stuff in reference manuals or tutorials which is easier to do using a search engine. Programming in Java without online access to the internet is a pain. When I do Java work the web browser is one of the most used tools ...

When doing Smalltalk work I just use the Smalltalk IDE's code browser since everything is there and fully accessible/changable. I can care about solving a problem instead of constantly looking up Java API and framework descriptions, bug reports, ...