Smalltalk with James Robertson

Smalltalkers have more choices than ever in terms of platform (dialect) and framework - AidaWeb now runs on Pharo (it already supported Cincom Smalltalk and Squeak). From Janko in the Pharo mailing list:

I just made Aida ready on new and wonderful Pharo 1.1. and now Aida installs and run nicelly and even side by side with Seaside. You can even run both on the same Swazoo web server, which is also included.

Choice is good - you can now run a Smalltalk server built on a commercial grade web framework (AidaWeb or Seaside), using a standard database solution - Glorp - and have that server move pretty seamlessly between the various Smalltalk dialects.

Technorati Tags: pharo, aidaweb, seaside

I decided to take a serious look at OAuth again - since I have a Twitter account and a set of application keys, I'm using Twitter as the service to test against. I had problems the last time I tried this; I spent awhile reading various websites, and this Twitter developer page has a nice sample of what you should be creating. The problem I was having?

• The callback url needs to be double encoded, something I missed the first time around
• In creating the signature base, I had managed to drop an ampersand from a spot where it needed to be

So now I'm writing some actual code, instead of just ramming my head against a wall in a workspace. With luck, I should have something working (and posted to the public store) later today or tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: web, authentication

Looks like the Pharo sprint at Camp Smalltalk London paid off:

Pharo 1.1 was released on July 26, 2010. This is the second release. It provides bug fixes, system cleanup, and new features. In total, 883 issues were resolved and went into this version.

Technorati Tags: pharo

We have a pretty interesting lineup over the next three weeks:

• Eliot Miranda on his Cog VM (Part 1)
• Eliot Miranda on his Cog VM (Part 2)
• Alejandro Reimondo and Frank Lesser on their Smalltalk VM

The last one above is a bit short, I recorded it at Camp Smalltalk London a week ago - but I figure it's of interest to Smalltalkers. Good stuff coming down the pike!

Technorati Tags: podcast, industry misinterpretations

The 4th annual Smalltalks conference in Argentina has issued a call for submissions:

SMALLTALKS 2010

4th Argentinian Smalltalk Conference
Research Track: Call for Papers
November 11th – 13th, 2010

Important dates:

Submission (Hard Deadline): September 7th, 2010 (Argentinian time: UTC/GMT -3 hours).
Notification of acceptance: October 6th, 2010.
Camera Ready Submission: October 20th, 2010.

The Smalltalks conferences have been growing pretty nicely, so it looks like a great opportunity to get in front of Smalltalkers you probably haven't seen yet.

Technorati Tags: argentina

I spent the afternoon taking a look at the performance of VW, Pharo on Cog, and Squeak on a standard VM. I used the package SimpleBenchmarks from the public store repository - I have a Squeak port as well. Here are the numbers (in milliseconds) for the tests, each one running 100,000 times on my Macbook Pro:

You'll have to grab the code to see exactly what the tests do, although the names are mostly explanatory. Bottom line: VisualWorks is still pretty darn fast, but if you're using Squeak or Pharo, Cog looks like a good thing.

Technorati Tags: benchmarks, performance

I had another look at the Twitter documentation pages for the OAuth workflow; it seems a bit more detailed than it was when I last looked. With 7.7.1 done (not released, but in the process of being released), it's time I had another look. So - on with the OAuth attempts.

Technorati Tags: oauth, twitter

Chris Thorgrimsson has announced the Cairo Graphics Kit over on his VW/Cairo blog. It's a set of new view objects for VW done up in Cairo - to get going with it, make sure you load Cairo (the parcel that comes with VW) and the UIPainter first. If you see load time exceptions, it most likely means that you forgot to load the UI Painter.

Technorati Tags: graphics, cairo, pango

Eliot has posted a screencast on his Cog VM and how it does some of what it does. It's 163 MB, so you might want to just download the video and watch it locally.

Technorati Tags: squeak, pharo, cog

The July Digest has been posted!

Technorati Tags: cincom, digest