Smalltalk with James Robertson

Moving Back the Chains on Build Tools

5 January 2011 2:37:23 PM

I'm still working on build automation - the work I did yesterday got me where I wanted to go for BottomFeeder, but that's because all of the scripts existed already. What I need to get to is this:

Starting from a development image, specify a set of packages and bundles to include in a build
Have a tool that takes that information and generates a minimal build script
From there, be able to execute said build script

And that's what I'm working on today. I've got a simple domain model hammered out - I still need to create a UI to live on top of that as a specification tool. But it's progress :)

posted by James Robertson

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Custom Window Styles in Pharo

5 January 2011 7:46:33 AM

NullPointer has three videos up demonstrating some of the new features of the UI Painter for Pharo - I've embedded them below:

Technorati Tags: pharo, ui painter

posted by James Robertson

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More Build Automation

4 January 2011 5:33:55 PM

I wanted to move my build script one level further back - meaning, I wanted to have it work like this:

Fire off an image
Load all the latest code from Store
Drop each package/bundle from the image into a build directory
Fire off a new, clean image, load the parcels, and proceed from there

That way I could ensure that a build actually had the latest code, instead of the latest code I remembered to parcel out - and my build doesn't need any of the Store machinery in it. So, here's the guts of that new script. First, some code to load a package from Store, then dump it out as a parcel:

savePackageBlock := [:name :dir |
	| pkg |
	pkg := Store.PackageModel allInstances detect: [:each | each name = name].
	pkg
		saveAsParcel: (dir asFilename construct: name) 
		saveStructure: true 
		saveLinks: true].

(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'MyCounter') loadSrc.
savePackageBlock value: 'MyCounter' value: 'buildTest'.

That's easily built up to more packages. Then I just add this new script to what I last posted on, and bam - I go from a clean image and an empty build directory to a full build directory and a clean build. Pretty nice :)

posted by James Robertson

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A Free EC2 Instance with GLASS

3 January 2011 6:45:14 AM

Amazon is offering free micro-instances for a year, and Nick Ager is showing you how to use it with Gemstone and Seaside:

Deploy your Seaside application for free with an EC2 micro instance and Gemstone from Nick Ager on Vimeo.

Hat tip Torsten

Technorati Tags: gemstone, seaside, ec2, cloud

posted by James Robertson

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Musical Representation in Smalltalk

2 January 2011 11:05:30 AM

The Cyclades project looks pretty neat.

Technorati Tags: music

posted by James Robertson

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New Cog VMs

30 December 2010 10:49:39 PM

Eliot Miranda has released new Cog VMs - I'm quoting an email to the Squeak list below:

I've released a new version of Cog that has a substantially improved code generator along the lines of Peter Deutsch's HPS (VisualWorks) and various of Ian Piumarta's VMs. These all use a simple tecnique to identify constant references in bytecode and to support a register-based calling convention. While this does produce faster code it tends to accelerate low-level code much more than high-level code

You can download them here - and follow Eliot on his blog here.

Technorati Tags: squeak, cog

posted by James Robertson

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