Smalltalk with James Robertson

Pat Maddox is talking up Seaside at Ruby|Web:

Okay as for what's so interesting to me about Seaside... it's 50% the framework and 50% the Pharo environment. Seaside itself represents a step forward in web development similar to how Rails did. Rails takes care of a lot of the plumbing for you - you don't have to parse query params, set up response headers, manage the session (unless you want to of course). Seaside does all that of course but also manages application state for you. So you don't have to worry about putting stuff into a database, then pulling it back out and operating on it. I can't do it justice in a few sentences, but that's why I'll be showing lots of examples at the conference! :) At any rate, that same feeling you get when you code Rails for the first time and see how much easier things are, you get that same feeling with Seaside.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Seaside works across all the Smalltalk dialects - so you can move your application to another Smalltalk if you want/need to - for instance, you might want to consider Cincom Smalltalk if you want full commercial support :)

Technorati Tags: seaside, ruby

Andreas Raab talks about how Squeak, Pharo, Cuis, and EToys are helping grow the Smalltalk community - and moving towards cooperation on the core stuff.

Technorati Tags: squeak, pharo, cuis, etoys

The next Smalltalk User Group in Frankfurt, Germany takes place on September 21, with Alan Knight and Arden Thomas:

We are happy to invite you to our next meeting on Tuesday September 21st.

Alan Knight, Engineering Manager Cincom Smalltalk and lead developer of GLORP, will talk about the internals and optimization of GLORP. GLORP (Generic Lightweight Object-Relational Persistence) is an open-source cross-dialect OO-R mapping framework available for VisualWorks, ObjectStudio, VASmalltalk, Dolphin Smalltalk, Smalltalk/X, Pharo and Squeak.

Arden Thomas, Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager, will be attending too. He will certainly be open to answer your questions and listen to your suggestions about the further development of Cincom Smalltalk.

We welcome you at 18:30 on Tuesday September 21st in the offices of ITS-People GmbH, Frankfurt/Main, Lyoner Str. 44-48.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, germany

I'll be on vacation next week, so there won't be any new Smalltalk Daily screencasts until a week from Monday. In the meantime, just check the archives, and feel free to send me suggestions for things you would like to see covered!

If you're a member of the ACM, then you now have access to the 2009 Proceedings of the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies.

Technorati Tags: acm

Andreas Raab notes that Teleplace is using Squeak 4.1 in their (commercial) product:

We just finalized the release of the Teleplace Enterprise Server 3.5 which is our first product release based on Squeak 4.1.

Technorati Tags: squeak, teleplace

I got a query about Smalltalk code to handle RSS/Atom feeds this afternoon, and - obviously, as the main author of BottomFeeder - I have some code around to do that. In the public store repository, you can load the bundle Syndication-Handling. I've done a screencast on using it:

And on YouTube:

RSS.Constructors.Constructor 
	getFeedFromUrl: 'http://www.jarober.com/rss/blog.xml'.

Technorati Tags: syndication, xml, rss, atom

The latest release of the Cincom Smalltalk suite are out: ObjectStudio 8.2.1, VisualWorks 7.7.1, and WebVelocity 1.1. There's a fair amount of new stuff, even though this is a point release - check the release notes for more. When the NC systems are ready for download, I'll let you know:

ObjectStudio 8.2.1:

• Windows 7 Certified
• Updated Modeling Tool
• Updated Mapping Tool, bringing a tool level interface to the power of our Object/Relational framework
• Built on top of VisualWorks 7.7.1, so that you have access to all the enterprise frameworks in both products

VisualWorks 7.7.1:

• Improved 64 bit support for Solaris and Linux. Windows support is being built for the next release
• Improved Mac OS X VM - faster and reliable
• Overhauled memory management for the VM
• New code comparison tool for Store
• Continued incremental improvements to the GUI
• Project Manager Tool to organize your development images
• Many enhancements to our Oracle database support
• Store now runs on top of GLORP
• WSDL 2.0 support, including support for SOAP 1.2
• Enhancements to our internationalization frameworks
• Support for the SQLLite database
• Preview support for Cair Graphics

WebVelocity 1.1:

• Support for Amazon's cloud services: S3, EC2, RDS
• An Amazon instance is available for you to experiment with
• Built on Seaside 3.0
• Completely new UI, built with JQuery
• Support for coordinated development between remote developers via the browser
• Seamless deployment of a headless system

Technorati Tags: cincom, visualworks, objectstudio, webvelocity

The next Cologne (Germany) Smalltalk user meetup is approaching:

Please join us on the 30th of September for our fourth Cologne Smalltalk User Meetup.

Follow the link for details.

Technorati Tags: cologne, germany

Dave Buck just published a useful little tool to the public store repository.

I've published a package called FindAgain to the Cincom public Store repository. It allows you to search for senders of a selector or references to a class or shared variable (which you could do before) and when you select one, find subsequent references to that selector or variable in the method (which you couldn't do before).