This week's podcast is just Michael and I talking about WebVelocity 1.1 - which is currently in an internal alpha state, soon to be beta. If you're interested in taking a look at the beta when it's ready, send me an email. What's coming in 1.1?
Better Editing using the HTML5 canvas
Seaside 3.0
Instant Cloud deployment capabilities - meaning, support for a lot of the Amazon cloud platform
There's more than that - listen to the podcast to catch up!
It was a fun talk, and things sound somewhat hopeful with respect to the app store - listen to the podcast to find out what I mean by that! To get Scratch now, visit the website and become one of the millions who've created an uploaded a project.
To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.
To listen immediately, use the player below:
If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Effortless for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!
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The official Squeakfest website is now live and ready for you to propose a presentation, workshop, or panel: http://squeakfest.org. The dates for Squeakfest USA in Wilmington NC are July 26, 27, 28. The theme for this year's conference will be "Etoys in the STEM classroom."
Sounds like fun - follow the link for full details.
The S3 Conference (self sustaining systems) has issued a call for papers for the conference, to be held September 27-28 in Tokyo:
The Workshop on Self-sustaining Systems (S3) is a forum for discussion of topics relating to computer systems and languages that are able to bootstrap, implement, modify, and maintain themselves. One property of these systems is that their implementation is based on small but powerful abstractions; examples include (amongst others) Squeak/Smalltalk, COLA, Klein/Self, PyPy/Python, Rubinius/Ruby, and Lisp. Such systems are the engines of their own replacement, giving researchers and developers great power to experiment with, and explore future directions from within, their own small language kernels.
A developer with 0 knowledge of Seaside can get momentum much faster than some with 0 knowledge of Rails. Smalltalk is simpler.
I've felt that way - about the gaining momentum, that is - with every web framework I've ever used in Smalltalk. When I started with VisualWave back in the 90's, it was easy to move ahead - I recall taking to it very quickly. When I built the blog server that runs this site, it was the first application I had really done with the Web Toolkit - and again, it was very, very eays to get going.
Seaside, especially with WebVelocity, has been a similar experience. I was able to build a small application that had Ajax functionality and a database as a back end very quickly - and when I started, I really didn't know much about Seaside.
The common factor here: Smalltalk. Sure, I know Smalltalk well at this point, and that gives me a leg up - but I think Smalltalk is just simpler. The exploratory nature of the system just makes life simpler. When I don't understand something, I don't pound my head on the table - I just let it break and ponder the objects in the debugger. There, with all the application state live, things become clear pretty quickly. That's the thing Seaside really brings to the party, by the way - Smalltalk level debugging for the web. It's a powerful thing.
