Smalltalk with James Robertson

Spotted in Planet Squeak

Chris Muller has recently updated Connectors to work with Squeak 4.2 images. Connectors gives you the ability to turn Morphic into a drawing environment for making connected diagrams. This tool was developed by Ned Konz many years ago and hasn’t been able to load in an up-to-date image for some time.

The open source Smalltalks have a ton of activity around them - which makes me wonder why some of the commercial vendors keep making it harder to find their products. Free is very compelling, espcially with things like Seaside and Eliot's JIT.

Technorati Tags: squeak, morphic

Vista Smalltalk has been dusted off, polished, and updated - and it's back in development as Silverlight Smalltalk:

Think of each Silverlight-enabled browser as a 2010 version of the Xerox Alto and imagine the Internet (with Comet-style instant messaging) as a scaled-up version of PARC’s Ethernet network.

Technorati Tags: silverlight, windows

Spotted in Ten is a good number

You can check Smalltalks 2010's videos at FAST's website. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: smalltalks 2010, argentina

My first job will be to deliver some (very compressed) training. On the project I'm on, there's a deployment rolling out to a new group, and some of the developers are in town to learn about the app. As part of that process, they need to learn Smalltalk. So.... I'm doing that part :)

The schedule is tough - we have 2 1/2 days to get them through a basic intro - and having just spent a week doing this, I have my doubts about how much will stick in this short a span of time.

There's nothing for it though - I'll see what we can do in the amount of time we have, and then refer them off to the extensive library of screencasts over at the Cincom Smalltalk website.

Oh, one small thought on those - if you've found those screencasts useful, be aware that there aren't any new ones coming in that particular series (I'm covering Pharo in my new series of casts). As Cincom releases new versions of their products, the older screencasts (especially the ones dealing with the tools) are going to start getting dated. I wsn't completely caught up to VW 771 and OS 821 when I left, so that's already happening for some of them :)

Technorati Tags: training, screencasts

Torsten contributes to Pharocasts with a "how to" on Pharo and ODBC:

You often have to access existing databases when you develop an application. One way is to use ODBC. I created a small small screencast to show you how

Technorati Tags: odbc, pharo, database

As some of you know, I accepted a new job recently - I'm heading to Dallas tomorrow, and I start on Monday. I'll be contracting at Northrop Grumman, on their MES project. It sounds like it'll be a fun project to be part of, although it's a bit of a commute :)

While I'm there, I'll see if there's anything I can do to perk up the local Smalltalk community. See you in Dallas!

Spotted in seandenigris.com:

An amazing feature of Smalltalk is that you can create methods right from the debugger.  This fits nicely with “write the code you wish you had.”

VisualWorks has been able to do that for awhile - it's nice to see the capability out in the OSS world. As I said the other day, the open source Smalltalks are catching up - the various commercial vendors are going to need to start paying serious attention soon.

Technorati Tags: debugger, testing

The Smalltalk archives for November, 2010 have been posted.

Need to mix together VA Smalltalk, Seaside, and then deploy it all as a Windows Service?Louis La Brunda has the answers for you. Follow the link and download the instructions from there.

Technorati Tags: seaside, VA Smalltalk, Windows

Phillippe Marschall has just announced a new Seaside/Apache adaptor that makes Smalltalk plug in better:

The AJP adatpor is a server adaptor dedicated to connecting Seaside to Apache. You can't use it without Apache because it doesn't understand HTTP. Instead it uses the binary AJPv13 protocol which is more efficient and simpler to parse. The result is a lightweight adaptor without any external dependencies but Grease/Seaside. In the multipart parser special attention has been paid to avoid unnecessary copy operations. Streaming however is currently not supported.

Technorati Tags: seaside, apache, AJP