Smalltalk with James Robertson

A cool video showing off some Open Croquet work from Krestianstvo

Technorati Tags: openGL, croquet, cog, squeak

Holger Kleinsorgen has published a wrapper for the InfoVis toolkit (for Seaside) - the VisualWorks package is in the public store, a bundle called "InfoVis". For Squeak, check SqueakSource. Some details (more at the first link):

I've published some wrapper packages for the InfoVis Toolkit (http://thejit.org/). InfoVis provides various data visualizations (various graphs and trees, charts etc.). The visualizations can be manipulated dynamically (re-layout, add/remove nodes, load new data with Ajax etc.).

Technorati Tags: seaside, visualworks, squeak

Spotted in Planet Squeak

A post on the Squeak mailing list made me reevaluate how difficult it would be to add NTLM and SPNEGO support to WebClient. Since I had done this at work before (via a plugin interface to support both Windows and Mac transparently) I figured it would be straightforward to implement it using the Squeak FFI interface. And indeed it is. The code is pretty small and a reasonable example on how to use the FFI to access the Microsoft SSP interface.

Using code someone else is already maintaining is a good idea. I've done Digest Auth and the xAuth piece of OAuth myself, and let me tell you - specs are written in a strange language, even though all of the words are English :)

Technorati Tags: squeak, ntlm

Gemstone has just moved the free tier for GLASS down a notch - the 2 CPU, 16 GB of data version is now free instead of $7k per year. You can find more details on their announcement page.

Hat tip to Randal for the link.

Technorati Tags: gemstone, glass, seaside

Spotted in Planet Squeak

Pharo now has an official continuous integration server (using Hudson) ready to build images.

Technorati Tags: pharo, continuous integration, hudson

The Citilab folks are getting me copies of the recorded ESUG talks, so I don't really need this solution - but before I knew that was going to happen, I set up two Applescripts and a Smalltalk workspace script to start recording at 3 AM my time (9 AM in Barcelona). The Smalltalk looks like this:

isTime := false.
safariScript := '/Users/james/Documents/working_77/openSafari.scpt'.
castScript := '/Users/james/Documents/working_77/doRecord.scpt'.
test := Timestamp readFrom: '9/14/10 02:58:00' readStream.
block := [[isTime]
	whileFalse: [(Delay forSeconds: 60) wait.
				time := Timestamp now.
				time >= test
					ifTrue: [isTime := true.
						ExternalProcess cshOne: safariScript.
						(Delay forSeconds: 5) wait.
						ExternalProcess cshOne: castScript]]].

And the two AppleScripts:

#! /usr/bin/osascript
tell application "Safari"
open location "http://eventv.projectescitilab.eu/index.html"
end tell

#! /usr/bin/osascript
activate application "iShowU"
delay 2
tell application "System Events"
	tell process "iShowU"
		click button "Record" of window "iShowU"
	end tell
end tell

Pretty simple stuff, and it's easy enough to do. If I had to do this sort of thing often enough, I'd likely create a CRON job instead of the Smalltalk workspace, but for ad-hoc things, this works quite nicely.

Technorati Tags: esug, scripting

Alan Knight is looking into relicensing Glorp:

At this point, it seems to me that it's desirable to go further than that, and actively relicense Glorp under a more open license. I don't think the threat of someone taking the code base and making something proprietary from it is as significant as the impediment to usage that being under the LGPL causes. So to that end, I'm going to be going through old records and trying to get in contact with previous contributors to do a relicensing under another license. I'm thinking MIT, or something in that vein.

Suggestions on licenses, process involved in doing this, arguments, or other commentary are welcomed.

Technorati Tags: glorp, ORM, database

On the eve of ESUG 2010, Seaside 3.0 has been released:

The Seaside core developers are pleased to announce the release of Seaside 3.0.

Lots of details if you follow the link.

Technorati Tags: seaside, esug10

The Toronto Smalltalk user's group is going to hear about some interesting Javascript work:

From Adam Spitz: Avocado is an (as yet unfinished) programming environment for JavaScript, built on top of Dan Ingalls' Lively Kernel, intended to bring some of the principles of Smalltalk (liveness, simplicity) and Self (directness, even more simplicity) to standard web browsers. JSQuiche, the first real application built with Avocado, is a code-organization tool, intended to let javaScript programmers browse through their objects at runtime and organize them using categories, comments, and poses.

The meeting will be on Monday, September 13; follow the link for full details

Technorati Tags: javascript, toronto

The engineers are enhancing the LaunchPad (I did a screencast on that here) - here's a snippet from an email to our development list:

For those of you who are using the VisualWorks Projects desktop shortcut, Applet or shell script, the LaunchPad application has been enhanced to create/manage an image signature file so that we can determine the particular VW installation that was used to create your Project image. The image signature file is specific to the current user, and will be created the first time a new Project is created by the LaunchPad from the current build. Each entry in the file (using the example in the comments in the file header) contains the image signature, the installed VisualWorks location, and (following a separator) the image version string. The first time a new Project is created for a new release/build the new signature entry will be appended to the file. If you re-install VisualWorks in a new location, or if/when you need to install multiple RC candidate builds (which all have the same image signature) :-) the LaunchPad will comment out the old entry and append a new correct one.