FreeType Plus release for Squeak

Andrew Tween announced the FreeType Plus release for Squeak. More infos are available at the swiki.

Sudoku Solver in Seaside

Martin J. Laubach has created a Sudoku Solver in Seaside.
It shows how easy it is to create web applications with the Smalltalk web application framework.

If you want to learn more read his blog.

OmniBrowser docu

Alexandre Bergel announced a new paper on Omnibrowser:

http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~scg/Archive/Papers/Berg07cOmnibrowser.pdf

OmniBrowser is a browser framework started by Colin Putney that supports the definition of browsers based on an explicit metamodel. A first implementation is available for Squeak.

UI patents

Found a nice summary on the history of user interfaces and how Smalltalk has influenced user interfaces we know from modern operating system today.

Looks like Apple is sued by a user interface patent today. The patent was originally filed by Xerox.

What if the first cave man would have patented how to start a fire ...

2D in 3D

Channel 9 (the Microsoft MSDN tech channel) showed a video on interactive 2D controls on WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) surfaces. There is also a new blog on this topic.

Maybe this feature of WPF will soon be highlighted as the best thing since sliced bread - but Squeak Smalltalk had some of these features since years. Maybe you remember the bunny demo where you can easily mix 2D and 3D in Smalltalk.

Have a look at Croquet - there you can easily use 2D morphic projects and mix them with interactive 3D scenes. You can select 2D objects in 3D, interactively change them and even type and select text.
And it's based on Smalltalk - therefore it is platform independent and completely open source ...

The Blue Book as PDF

The so called "blue book" (Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation by Adele Goldberg and DavidRobson) is now available as PDF on the Free Books page.

Learn Seaside

There is a nice blog teaching you how to use Seaside for building web applications at: http://inchingforward.blogspot.com/

You can also watch the "How to build a blog 15 minutes with Seaside" screencast.

Plopp

Plopp, a 3D Painting Tool for kids is now ready for downloading at

http://www.planet-plopp.com

You just paint in 2D and Plopp will transform your paintings
into 3D objects. This product is created using Squeak Smalltalk.
See the announcement.

Some demo videos are available (1, 2)

Croquet 1.0 SDK is out

The Croquet 1.0 SDK is now available. Check out the new website of the croquet consortium:

http://www.croquetconsortium.org

Read more on Davids blog.

CMSBOX

CMSbox is a Squeak3.9/Seaside2.8 powered CMS which has been made available by netstyle.ch for the Swiss marketplace.

Read more at http://www.cmsbox.ch. You will find some demo movies on the right side of the page.

Smalltalk Archeology Archive

There is a new page by Aaron Reichow about old Smalltalk versions called "Smalltalk Archeology Archive". Read his posting for more.

Squeak VM for Nokia 770

Squeak now also runs on the Nokia 770.

TopLink, GLORP and O/R mapping

Oracle open-sourced TopLink last week. For those who dont know: TopLink is a object-relational mapping framework (that lets developers work cleanly at the object level rather than in relational tables). TopLink is now part of Oracles application server.

As many other notable technologies TopLink was invented and marketed in Smalltalk first and later ported to Java. The first version was written by Jon Hylands at The Object People (TOP). There is a nice summary of the history at the Oracle website.

As you may know The Object People got diverted into doing mostly Java work, and were eventually bought and split into two pieces (WebGain got the TOPLink piece, and BEA got the services piece). WebGain is now out of business, and TOPLink was sold to Oracle.

While Java people may be satisfied with TopLink any informed Smalltalker know that there is a more enhanced successor written by Alan Knight: GLORP (Generic Lightweight Object-Relational Persistence). Alan was also working at TOPLink and is now working for Cincom.

James Robertson recorded a nice podcast last week talking with Alan Knight and Michael Lucas-Smith on GLORP and about O/R mapping in general. Thanks James, for making this available!

BTW: Jon Hylands is building autonomous controllers today using Squeak Smalltalk.

DabbleDB - maps and charts

DabbleDB now supports maps and charts. Watch a screencast for a demo.

Old dude T-Shirts

As Wayne Beaton reports there are some old dudes who know smalltalk at EclipseCon conference.

It looks like Instantiations is already designing some T-shirts for "old dudes".




I already warned you that I'm infected with Smalltalk and pure OO since years. For me it is to late. ;)

So stop reading this blog - otherwise you may get the Smalltalk virus too!

New tools for Squeak

Romain announced some updates for two new tools: BrowserBooster and SpyWare for Squeak Smalltalk.

OK - lets check how usefull they are ...

Take care with math in Java

Doing some math these days with Java. As you may already guessed doing math in Java is ugly and circumstantial compared to Smalltalk.

Especially take care if you use double values. Class BigDecimal can help here - but there are pitfalls, especially when using the wrong constructor.

Pen Interaction For Authoring 3D Worlds in Croquet

The homepage of Michael Kleiber includes informations about his Master's thesis on pen Interaction For Authoring 3D Worlds. The technology used: Squeak Smalltalk and OpenCroquet

You will find the thesis, screenshots and videos.

Croquet website

Looks like the http://opencroquet.org website has a new look.

Let's throw away HTML, JSP/ASP, Flex, ... and start with the future.

Run Basic in web using Smalltalk

As Carl Gundel, author of Liberty BASIC announced on the seaside mailinglist there is a Seaside app to bring BASIC programming to the web:

http://www.runbasic.com

Yet another nice Smalltalk application that shows the power of the Seaside Smalltalk web application framework...