Smalltalk with James Robertson

Sean Denigris explains how to do brain surgery on a bunch of existing Smalltalk objects when you make a code change:

Now comes the problem…  I had objects floating around that already contained a non-empty OrderedCollection.  I didn’t want to add otherwise-not-needed accessors.  Luckily, because of Smalltalk’s awesome reflection capabilities, it was a breeze to reach into these objects and surgically change them.

You might wonder why that's useful, but consider this situation (which I've actually had):

• You make a code change for a running app server, such as the one you're reading this post on
• There are existing objects that have the old object shape, and need the new object shape

Just use the same sort of strategy Sean outlines above. I've done that a fair number of times over the years, both to the servers I maintained at Cincom while I was there, and to this one. It's a really handy thing to be able to do, because it's much, much better than the more standard tack of:

• Take server down
• Apply change
• Bring server back up

It works great, even in production.

As you probably noticed this morning, I pushed out a new screencast series - I intend to cover various Smalltalk dialects the way I was covering Cincom Smalltalk. The links you'll want to keep track of:

• Smalltalk 4 U iTunes enabled feed
• Smalltalk 4 U archives
• Smalltalk 4 U on YouTube
• Smalltalk 4 U on Vimeo
• Smalltalk World Video - lots of Smalltalk video listed here, including my new series.

Technorati Tags: squeak, pharo, screencast

Reza Razavi' on-line programmable CMS implemented in Seaside is now online. he announced it on the Seaside mailing list:

It is implemented by a home-made software platform that reuses and extends Seaside and Pier CMS.

You can get more details with his post on the topic. Hat tip Torsten.

Technorati Tags: seaside, cms, pier

I just downloaded the Gemstone installer I found here - while it seems pretty basic on first inspection (it's a shell script), it worked right out of the box for me. I'm grabbing the associated Pharo image (same place)as I write this, and I'll see how things go from there.

One thing I'm interested in doing is something I know how to do - a blog server - in Seaside using Gemstone as my back end. It should be a nice little project to start off with both GLASS and Pharo with - I clearly know the domain :)

Technorati Tags: gemstone, glass, seaside, pharo

Didier Bisset has released the code (the examples given) for his book, "Object Oriented Implementaton of Numerical Methods", under the MIT license.

Technorati Tags: books

John McIntosh's Wiki Server and WikiServer Pro are free (for a limited time, apparently) for the iPhone and iPad. These are Smalltalk (Squeak) apps running on IOS.

I helped beta test the Wiki Server app, and it's pretty cool.

Technorati Tags: squeak, iPhone, iPad

John McKeon has put together a SIXX based Pier facility to import and export entire Pier based sites. Follow the link for access to the code - it should be showing up in the PIer Monticello repository shortly. It addresses a known issue in Pier, apparently.

Technorati Tags: pier, seaside

The jQuery section of the online Seaside book has been updated - here's the summary for that section:

jQuery and jQuery UI are both well integrated into Seaside 3.0. This allows you to access all aspects of the library from Smalltalk by writing Smalltalk code only. The Smalltalk side of the integration is automatically built from the excellent jQuery documentation, so you can be sure that the integration is up-to-date and feature-complete.

Technorati Tags: seaside, jquery, book, pharo

Jan van de Sandt has pushed out a new Pharo/Seaside EC2 instance:

The update to the Ubuntu server makes it easier to run the AMI as a Micro (t1.micro) instance type. This is currently the smallest and cheapest EC2 image type. The image type is very well suited for running Seaside web applications. When your application becomes more popular you can scale by using a bigger instance type or by running multiple instances.

Follow the link to get the particulars, such as the AMI instance id.

Technorati Tags: seaside, cloud, ec2, pharo

Serge Stinckwich has been reporting on the Smalltalk goings on at OSDC in France today.

Technorati Tags: seaside, jquery, france, osdc