Smalltalk with James Robertson

Eliot Miranda's Cog VM is out - Squeak News has the story:

The VM selectively re-compiles code to native (Intel) machine-code, based on the size and complexity of the methods, and how often they’re called. This means that the benefits of the new VM vary from task to task, but Andreas Raab estimates that you should expect a 2-3x performance improvement generally, “more towards 2x when running primitive and I/O-bound stuff; more towards 3x when running ‘pure’ Smalltalk code”.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cog, JIT, squeak

Jerry Kott, one of our WebVelocity developers, has put together a demonstration of the product running on Amazon services. You can watch the video (down converted) below, or grab the high quality version here.

WebVelocity on Amazon from James Robertson on Vimeo.

You can also watch this video directly over on the WebVelocity Vimeo Group.

You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Videos"?

Technorati Tags: webvelocity, seaside, amazon, rds, ec2, cloud

The Cincom Smalltalk team in Japan is working with Apple on a software in healthcare oriented event - follow the link for details,

Technorati Tags: japan, healthcare

ComputerWorld has an interview with Alan Kay - part of their "Programming Languages A-Z" series. Good stuff:

This week, we take a look at the pre-cursor to Objective-C and the foundation of much of modern programming today: Smalltalk-80. One of the men behind the language, Alan Kay, is credited not only with helping to develop the language, but also the invention of object-oriented programming as a concept, and even inventing a personal computer concept that has eerie similarities to the iPad.

Follow the link for the actual interview.

Technorati Tags: software development

Michael van der Gulik has an interesting Smalltalk project involving a tiny Linux system:

Tiny Core Linux is a mini Linux distribution that is, before boot, only two files. One is the Linux kernel. The other is the entire filesystem which is loaded into RAM.

...

Now, the micro version can be used to run Squeak

Follow the link for the details - it sounds like a fun project.

Technorati Tags: squeak

The Toronto STUG knows that it's summer, and has planned their next meeting accordingly:

The next meeting of the Toronto Smalltalk User Group will be Monday, July 12 at 6:30, on the street level outdoor patio of Pauper's Pub, 539 Bloor St. W, at Bathurst.

Sounds like it'll be a fun meeting; wish I could get to it :)

Technorati Tags: toronto

Deepcove in Vancouver (BC) is looking for a Smalltalker:

We are pleased to announce that DeepCove Labs are looking for another full-time developer to join our agile team of long time Smalltalk fans. Our primary focus is evolving and maintaining mature industry leading international payment processing platform that we have built from the ground up over the past 10 years as well as developing new and exciting products for financial services industry.

Technorati Tags: jobs

Julian has announced the Seaside 3.0 RC - unless someone finds a show stopper, this is th elong awaited 3.0 shipment:

This release runs leaner, on at least six Smalltalk platforms and is, I think, easier to learn, easier to use, and easier to extend. Seaside 3.0 is the best platform out there for developing complex, server-side web applications.

There's a lot more at the link.

Technorati Tags: seaside

Randal Schwartz explains why the Squeak license cleanup was so important - it enabled Squeak's entry into the SFC:

This is big.  The community has been working towards having the Squeak Project join the SFC for years. And we've finally finished! Through the SFC, we can avoid duplication of legal and administrative services to accept donations and deal with copyright and license issues.

That's pretty cool, and it makes Squeak a more legally "clean" product.

Technorati Tags: squeak, open source

Ok, I have a Windows 7 VM setup - it's using my wifi adaptor (this is parallels) for network, so that it can appear to be a "separate machine". I also have shared setup for things like the Documents folder. So... I found this odd. I couldn't get a Seaside server to start, and it boiled down to this - executing the following:

IPSocketAddress hostNameByAddress: #[127 0 0 1]

Comes back with - wait for it - '.psf'. I'm baffled; the call goes straight to the VM for some host API call. I suppose maybe I should configure a different sort of VM, but how much time do I want to spend on that? It was simpler to hack class IPSocketAddress and save the image to a new name. I'd still like to know what the heck is going on though...

Technorati Tags: windows, mac, parallels