Smalltalk with James Robertson

Cool - Doug Putnam is adding Seaside to the repetoire for his students doing an Ajax project:

And about that Seaside course— there isn't one yet. But it is on my TODO list for future courses at CCSF. For the time being, as part of my own Smalltalk education, I'll take this opportunity to complete the class project using Seaside. Since Smalltalk and Seaside are new to me, I'll be starting on the same page as my PHP and Ruby students. This will be fun. I'll be doing this project with Cincom Visualworks Non-Commercial which is free for non-commercial use on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Sounds like a fun project, with some useful comparisons (read the whole thing - he and his students are going to compare how much code was needed for each of the projects - PHP, Ruby, and Smalltalk).

Technorati Tags: seaside, academic

We got a demo of CORMAS at ESUG last summer; now there's a training course being offered at the Cincom offices in Germany:

Introductory training to CORMAS "How to model and simulate ecological and sociological questions?"

• From Monday, March 1st (12:00) to Friday, March 5th (12:00)
• Location: Cincom offices close to Frankfurt/Main, Germany
• Trainer: Christophe Le Page, CIRAD
• Language of instruction: English
• Knowledge in Smalltalk would be helpful but isn't required.
• Requirements: Laptop to run CORMAS (details on request)
• Participation fee: 1.500,00 Euros, plus VAT per person (when number of total attendees is three or larger)

For registration or further questions, please contact: Helge Nowak

Today's screencast examines how self and super differ for message lookup.

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

Technorati Tags: self, super, method lookup

I was reading Dale Henreich's post about portability and Smalltalk (riffing off Kent Beck's post), and saw something I thought made a lot of sense:

Envy and Store are not viable candidates. Monticello is a light-weight solution compared to Store and Envy. If you can afford to port Seaside, then you can afford to port Monticello.

And in fact, the people doing Seaside (and WebVelocity) here at Cincom have ported Monticello (in fact, I did a screencaston that last summer).

Now, I like Store well enough, and I've worked with Envy. But yeah - both are too tightly wound into vendor specific solutions (Cincom, Instantiations), and both are pretty heavy. This really hit home for me when I thought about the process of loading some library (say, Silt, which I've been writing about recently). To do this with VW or ObjectStudio, you need to:

• Load Store (the NC download does have it loaded for you)
• Create a login for the repository (again, the NC provides a read-only one)
• Connect to the repository
• List the available packages
• Going alphabetically, find Silt (the bundle, fortunately I did not create a matching package name)
• Load it

Contrast that with something from " Talking Meta" this morning, talking about loading up some new filesystem code for Pharo:

Gofer new
     wiresong: 'mc';
     package: 'Filesystem';
     load.

Gofer seems to be a small tool Lukas built on top of Monticello to make loading (etc) easier. Now sure, you can script easy solutions for Store and Envy, too - but porting either one to another Smalltalk dialect would be a pretty big task (yes, Envy did that once. No, it won't be doing it again). Monticello though? It's pretty small, seems easy enough to port, and, being file based, can work pretty easily via http, ftp, (insert your favorite network protocol here). Neither Store nor Envy do that part. And while again, a client could be built to deal with that, it's highly unlikely to happen.

Now that Seaside is a common web framework, it seems like having a common version control system would be a good next step. I think perhaps Monticello couldbe that system - but I haven't personally done any work with it, so I could be wrong. Thoughts?

Technorati Tags: portability, version control, smalltalk archipeligo

This week Michael and I ran across Kent Beck's "Welcome to the Balkans" post - which says in part:

The thing about a Nash Equilibrium is that what is rational from within the game can be absurd from an outside perspective. I'm calling bulls*** on the state of Smalltalk. Vendors, you're acting crazy. Have the tiniest possible core defined in terms of test cases. Build a shared library on top of that, implemented in terms of the core. Include numbers, collections, meta-objects, code structure, and code loading. None of this parcel/bundle/package/pundle/category nonsense. Compete on VMs, graphics libraries, and enterprise-y tools.

I responded to that here, and that's what we spent a lot of time talking about - how things got to that place, and how they might change over time. We're welcome to any and all feedback - you can send audio or text feedback to Smalltalk Podcasts, and we'll put them on in a future episode.

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.

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!

If you have feedback, send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or visit us on Facebook or Ning - you can vote for the Podcast Alley, and subscribe on iTunes. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!

Technorati Tags: audio, podcast, balkanization, code portability, nash equilibrium

Spotted in Planet Squeak:

If you'd like to be added as developer, please send Andreas your Google Account email address so that he can add you to the project. But, he warns that unless you know how to deal with both the Android SDK and NDK, Java, JNI, and the Squeak VM it will be a very steep learning curve .

Sounds like you'll be able to do Smalltalk on the mobile devices of choice - it'll be Squeak (or maybe Pharo) for now. You can find project information here.

Technorati Tags: android

Today's screencast takes a brief tour of the APIs for class String - mostly showing you where to look, and how to discover tem on your own.

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

Technorati Tags: string api, screencast

How the Pharocasts get made on Linux

Technorati Tags: pharo, screencast

Today's screencast takes a look at the obsolete packages in VisualWorks, and what you can do if your application(s) depend on one or more of them.

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

Technorati Tags: screencast, obsolete, visualworks

I just got done reading Kent Beck's "The Balkanization of Smalltalk" piece. While he makes some good points, I simply don't see an organized effort getting us to the place he wants things to go:

The thing about a Nash Equilibrium is that what is rational from within the game can be absurd from an outside perspective. I'm calling bullshit on the state of Smalltalk. Vendors, you're acting crazy. Have the tiniest possible core defined in terms of test cases. Build a shared library on top of that, implemented in terms of the core. Include numbers, collections, meta-objects, code structure, and code loading. None of this parcel/bundle/package/pundle/category nonsense. Compete on VMs, graphics libraries, and enterprise-y tools.

Let me draw a small analogy here - this argument reminds me of various wishes I read from people who dislike the suburbs. "If only people would all live in small towns and cities, then we could have working mass transit..." etc, etc, etc. The trouble isn't with the vision - it's with the reality of the built environment we have. Getting from here to the desired nirvana of such people is a less than trivial task, regardless of what you think of the desire.

And so it is with Smalltalk. Had ParcPlace set itself up like Sun back in the late 80s, instead of letting anyone run wild with Smalltalk anyway they wanted to, things might be different. But they aren't - we not only have commercial distros, we have lots of free ones as well (listen to our recent "State of Smalltalk" podcast for an idea of how big the field is)

But let's say you limited your scope to just a few players, on the assumption (possibly flawed) that the rest would follow. Cincom is heavily committed to Store (as are her customers) - Instantiations is even more heavily committed to Envy (as are her customers). How do you get from here to the core loader Kent speaks of? What's the incentive to build that? What paying customer would rather have that than, say, compliance with (insert your favorite spec here)?

If any such standardization is to come about, I suspect it'll happen via a mechanism Kent touched on. He spoke about Grease, a portability layer that Seaside uses. Every Smalltalk implementation that supports Seaside also supports Grease. There's your starting point. As Pharo gains traction (especially commercial traction), I suspect that the commercial vendors will start to feel pressure to comply with "the emrging standard". That's the way this will play out, if it plays out at all. I just don't see a new standards effort getting a whole lot of formal traction.

Technorati Tags: standards