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"

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 ;)

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.

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.

Seaside 2.9 Alpha 1

A first release for Seaside 2.9 Alpha 1 is available.

Squeak on the iPhone 1.07

John has updated the iPhone VM to version 1.07.
This new virtual machine uses the latest pharo image.

Smalltalk on the wall

Cobalt (written in Smalltalk) on a 13-foot by 5-foot multi-touch visualization wall, read more here.

I definitely need a larger office ...

Smalltalk in Eclipse

There are some first screenshots from STDT (Smalltalk Development Tooling) in Eclipse - an internal project at IBM.

Can you play with it? I dont think so. From one of the comments by Dan Heidinga:

"Currently, the project is strictly internal. We hope to be presenting at EclipseCon this year and should have a better answer by then."

However, it's nice - but working with a full Smalltalk system is better ;)

Smalltalk Superpowers video from OOPSLA

OOPSLA is running and a first video from Smalltalk superpowers is up. Thanks to Göran.

Crack.NET

If you like tools like the windows utilities from Sysinternals (now at Microsoft) you will surely love tools like Snoop or the new Crack.NET.

SmallFaces, a widget toolkit for Seaside

Hernan, Norberto and Juan announced "SmallFaces (SF) for Seaside". You can now create web applications with Seaside just using widget objects.

Read more here and here.

Silverlight and Eclipse

There is a nice Eclipse UML plugin "eUML2" from a company called Soyatec. When doing Java stuff I use it for various reasons:

- UML is a good way to communicate designs
- it integrates nicely with the editors (changes in code are reflected in model diagrams and vice versa)
- the file format is XML
- refactorings can also be applied in the diagrams
- the graphic is nicely done and visually appealing

I was suprised to hear that Microsoft is now giving funding to them to develop a Silverlight (yes the one from .NET) integration into Eclipse. See:

http://www.eclipse4sl.org/

Until today support for .NET in Eclipse was very comfortless. There was once a simplified C# Editor and there were no real builders and natures to support compilation for .NET languages. Will see how far they integrate, so new things to try out this evening...

Gartner analyst and Smalltalks comeback

Mark Driver, an analyst at Gartner group blogs on Smalltalk. I like this quote:

"You think Rails is cool? Check out seaside."

Hat tip to Randal for the news.

Squeak "multi-vm"

Looks like Sam S. Adams (IBM Research) and David Ungar (known from Self programming language) have constructed a Squeak "multi-vm" a Squeak VM adapted to run on 56 of the 64 cores on the Tilera64 processor family.

Read more here and here.

As Sam noted on the Squeak list they plan to attend the SqueakBOF at OOPSLA and demo the current multicore VM work.

Sounds like Smalltalk

TaalPulse is a free software Lehra, Theka and Tampura machine for the student of Hindustani (northern Indian) music. It is designed to run on portable devices (such as Compaq iPaq) but it also runs on desktop computers (Windows, Linux and MacOS).

TaalPulse is developed by Guillaume Pothier using Squeak Smalltalk. See

http://taalpulse.net/

for more information.

FreeCAD/Croquet update

Phua Khai Fong gave an update on the state of his FreeCAD/Croquet project for GSOC 2008.
There is also a website available:

http://www.oopgames.com/freecad/

WAX - Writing API for XML

The writing API for XML (for Java and Ruby) is now also available for Smalltalk from the author R. Mark Volkmann.

see http://www.squeaksource.com/WAX.html

Sophie news

Looks like the open source Sophie project (developed in Squeak) gets no funding anymore and should be redeveloped in Java by a new company.

Meanwhile this is also discussed on slashdot.

Sad - but the original developers try to keep the project alive and moved to
http://opensophie.org.

How to get a SOA

See how easy it is to get a SOA architecture: "It's a SOA" (LOFL)