Smalltalk with James Robertson

Tudor Girba has announced some interesting enhancements to the Glamour toolset:

I am happy to announce the first release of the Glamorous Inspector, a new browser for inspecting objects based on Glamour.

Technorati Tags: glamour

JTalk (Smalltalk on Javascript) seems to be moving forward nicely - you can try the browser yourself now.

Technorati Tags: jtalk

Dave Buck will be teaching a 2 day online Smalltalk course September 26-27th - you can get more information and register on his website.

Technorati Tags: simberon, training

I just spoke to Arden Thomas, the Product Manager for Cincom Smalltalk. here's what he told me: Xtreams continues to be open source software. The grid implementation, on the other hand, is not open source - it's "take two" on what Cincom has been calling Polycephaly.

There was apparently concern over the naming - using the Xtreams name would have developers presume that the software - like Xtreams itself - was open source.

That's the good news, as it were - the entire kerfuffle (mentioned here) is a misunderstanding. The bad news? The utter lack of communication from Cincom. Yes, Arden graciously spoke to me about this, but I'm sure that he doesn't want to make personal phone calls to every single person with a question about this sort of thing. When questions like this arise, there really ought to be some kind of statement, even if it only amounts to "we regret the confusion, we'll have more details out shortly". The vast well of silence approach leads to questions, and worse - leads to people coming up with their own answers.

Ultimately, this kind of thing is a management failure. I'm happy that Arden was willing to reach out to me on this, and he deserves kudos for that.

Update: Here's the kind of community behavior that they are creating - I saw this at the end of a VWNC mailing list post, where someone was trying to explain how to solve a problem:

I'm not sure what the rules are on posting the code, and so I'm just providing the references.

When people are thinking that way, it's not a good thing.

Technorati Tags: xtreams, polycephaly

I saw this (that link will pass through a small registration UI if you haven't visited the archives before, I think) pop up in the VWNC mailing list today:

WANTED for xtream coolness and usefulness: Xtreams-Grid The delinquent has last been seen on the 11th of July, when he disclosed his shocking crimes. He left his home and went into hiding shortly after. Every hint is appreciated. Please call 1-800-GRID or report here.

While it's amusing, it's also a good question. I saw the grid announcement as well, and then... nothing. I know it's not the developers of that code keeping it quiet on purpose; that's not their style. So it's a Cincom question. Anyone? Bueller?

Update: I spoke to Arden Thomas, CST Product Manager about this. Details here.

Technorati Tags: xtreams, grid

Craig Latta has been busy:

Hey there, I’ve released Spoon 3 alpha 3. I look forward to tearing through a few more alphas in the coming days at ESUG! :) See you soon.

Technorati Tags: spoon

There are some curious things about the new license for the eval (not NC; they apparently changed things) version of VW and OS. I didn't look at the license carefully when installing (I know, but really - who does?). After seeing some discussion in the mailing list, I dug the license out of the product directory, and wow - it's a lot more restrictive than it used to be. Take this, for instance:

Licensor hereby grants to you, and you do hereby accept, a nonexclusive and nontransferable license to use the Product only as is authorized in this License Agreement. The Product may be used only at a single location on computers owned, leased or otherwise controlled by you in the manner and subject to the terms set forth in this License Agreement. You agree that you will not deploy, assign, sublicense, transfer, pledge, lease, rent, allow access to or share your rights under this License Agreement. You agree that your rights under this License Agreement do not cover deployment and are not to pass to a successor through merger or consolidation.

Technically speaking, you can't create a runtime image and deploy it even for personal, non-commercial use on one machine. That's kind of silly; I can accomplish the same thing by running a development image, so it's not clear to me who or what they think they are protecting here.

More importantly, this takes any and all community projects that might consider using VW or OS and just stops them dead. If you have been using the NC, the safest route is probably to stay with the latest version that was downloadable (7.7.1 if you grabbed it before they had it offline). As a curious side note, the old license is still the one they have on the website, which makes the whole thing even more confusing.

The amazing thing about this is that Smalltalk is already a niche product - the primary problem is that there aren't enough developers using it. How this encourages more people to grab it and give it a try is beyond me. Instantiations has the open source license path, if you are building open source applications - that leaves a door open to people who want to try something out using VA. Gemstone makes it even easier - you pay them for Gemstone/S when you hit a wall with the (CPU limited) version they have up for download.

Meanwhile, Cincom reminds me of the opening scene in "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" - where the aliens remind humanity that the bypass plans have been locked in a basement on a distant planet for 50 years, and gosh, that should have been obvious enough.

Technorati Tags: cincom, gemstone, instantiations

Mariano has some fun things to show off with Fuel at ESUG:

The first thing it come to my mind, was the following: debug something from the workspace and in the middle of the debugging, serialize the debugger into a file. Then open another image, materialize the debugger, and continue debugging. The good news is that it worked from the first shoot! Nice! I will show it in ESUG. Now, the second thing was something that was in my head since a couple of months: use Fuel to get a byte array representation of an object graph and store/retrieve it from a NoSQL database. Of course, there are several NoSQL databases, and even several wrappers for Pharo. For my experiments I choose Riak because I read it may have the best results. Runar Jordahl did the binding for such database and as many cases, the API is using HTTP protocol. Thanks to Sven Van Caekenberghe, we have now a wonderful HTTP library in Pharo Smalltalk: Zinc. Obviously, Riak client for Pharo uses Zinc.

Wish I could be at the conference or, failing that, that there was live streaming like last year :)

Technorati Tags: fuel, pharo, nosql

Need a JQuery Tree Widget for your Seaside App? Torsten has the answer:

I've wrapped the MIT licensed dynatree widget as part of the JQueryWidgetBox project. So if you need a tree in your web app just try it.

Technorati Tags: seaside, jquery, javascript