The Weekly Squeak

MacWorld magazine is running a series of reviews of their favourite free and low-cost applications for the Mac, and one of their picks is Plopp, a painting tool from Impara for easily creating cartoon-like 3D scenes. Although their review doesn’t mention this (did they even know it?), Plopp was developed and runs totally in Squeak!, which of course means that it’s also available on Windows and (for free!) on Linux.

Plopp seems to be getting a lot of attention at the moment, perhaps because you can also use it to create models for use in Second Life, so congratulations to all at Impara for the recognition their work is getting!

The Squeak mailing lists have recently seen a surge of interest in getting videos published to help explain Squeak and Smalltalk to developers coming to the language and environment for the first time.

In response to this Randal L. Schwartz has set up a new Squeak Smalltalk group on vimeo.com to allow Squeakers to easily upload and share their videos.

Videos can be a great way to help people quickly pick up a lot of complex information, which makes this an opportunity for Squeakers old and new to help promote Squeak. If there are any topics that you think would suit a short video, why not try recording one and publishing it? If you’re the developer of a powerful Squeak developer tool, and you’re amazed that no-one seems to use all of its functionality, this would be a great way to expose all of those features in a compelling way.

If you’re a new developer struggling with Squeak, let us know what topics you’d like to see covered in video tutorials. If you’ve got any recommendations for recording and editing software for Windows, Mac or Linux, please leave a comment.

Ramon Leon has released a tool he uses to simplify the development of Squeak applications. Called SandstoneDb, it’s a simple MIT-licensed object database that uses SmartRefStreams to serialize clusters of objects to disk.

Ramon needed “a simple, fast, configuration-free, crash-proof, easy-to-use object database that doesn’t require heavy thinking to use …[and] that allows me to build and iterate prototypes and small applications quickly without having to keep a schema in sync, or stop to figure out why something isn’t working, or why it’s too slow to be usable.”

By combining ideas from ActiveRecord and Prevayler, he’s certainly made it simple to use: define any objects that you want to persist as subclasses of SDActiveRecord and save your image to ensure the proper directories are created. To persist changes to your objects, call #commit on them. All data is written to disc when committed, and loaded into memory on startup.

There is a cost to this: Ramon notes that the object graph is rebuild on startup, leading to an impact on startup times; holding all the data in RAM also means that there are practical limits on how much data you can manage in this fashion. He’s happy that this solution meets his needs when developing and deploying applications for his customers, but he’s leaving open the option of a future implementation being disc-based.

There’s a lot more information, including the philosophy behind SandstoneDb, a guide to the API, and usage notes at Ramon’s blog.

Rob Gayvert recently announced on the wxSqueak mailing list that he has made a new version of wxSqueak available. wxSqueak is a Squeak interface to the wxWidgets (formerly known as wxWindows) GUI library. The project hasn’t seen much activity recently, but the new version was released following a request on the mailing list. 

Version 0.5.1 includes Unicode support, syntax highlighting and other new features, and looks like a very interesting tool for producing applications with a native look and feel. It can be downloaded from the wxSqueak website as source code, or as a fully runnable demo for Win32.

This revival of wxSqueak comes at an interesting time, as work is proceeding well on SqueakGtk; it looks as though using Squeak to develop native look and feel applications is becoming an increasingly attractive option. No doubt this will fuel the resurgence of interest in Squeak Smalltalk.

Thanks to Torsten Bergmann for spotting this announcement.

As we mentioned in March, the Squeak Project was accepted as a mentoring organisation for the 2008 Google Summer of Code. Five students stepped up to the challenge, choosing to work on the following projects:

• Safarà: an Extensible Code Editor for Squeak by Luigi Panzeri, mentored by Lukas Renggli
• Squeak IRC bot framework by Francois Stephany, mentored by Ken Causey
• Squeak GTK Support by Gwenaël Casaccio, mentored by Stéphane Ducasse
• freeCAD: 3D CAD with Motion Simulation Port to Croquet by Phua Khai Fong, mentored by Aik-Siong Koh
• OpenNARS port to Squeak using Seaside by Cédrick Beler, mentored by Klaus D. Witzel

The students have already been working on their projects with great enthusiasm, as you can see by checking their posts on the Summer of Squeak blog, and now that the summer holidays are upon us, it looks like the rate of progress is really shooting up! The projects are all going to be valuable additions to Squeak, and I’m sure we’re all looking forward to seeing the final outputs.

Robert Krahn from the Hasso-Plattner Institut announced this weekend on the squeak-dev list that he and his colleagues have created a SVN repository for their extended version of JSqueak - named Potato (like Dan Ingall’s original VM) - which includes a lot of improvements:

A set of posts to the squeak mailing lists has given more details about the 16th International Smalltalk Joint Conference organised by the European Smalltalk Users’ Group, to be held 25-29 August 2008 at CWI in Amsterdam.

Programme Details

Mathieu van Echtelt writes that the programme features more than 40 presentations on, among others, the following subjects:

Programming Language Platforms

• Newspeak (New open source dynamic language focusing on modularity, security and interoperability)
• Cog (New highly optimized open source Squeak VM)
• Maglev (Highly scalable Ruby VM)
• OpenCroquet (Deeply collaborative, multi-user online Smalltalk development environment)

Web Frameworks

• Seaside (The continuation & component-based web framework)
• WebVelocity
• AidaWeb (Smalltalk Web Application Server)
• WebTerminal

Model Driven Engineering:

• The Meta Environment Language Workbench
• ObjectStudio ModelingTool
• Fame; Meta-modeling Framework
• MBA Smalltalk; to manage your objects

 
Additionally, the winners of the ABN Amro sponsored Innovation Awards will be presented.

Booking Accommodation 

Noury Bouraqadi notes that discount hotel rates for conference attendees are available until 11 July.

Seaside Sprint

Lukas Renggli has announced that the core Seaside dev team will be holding the first official Seaside Sprint, starting after the conference closes at 14:00 on 29 August, and finishing when the last participant collapses over their smoking keyboard. He invites anyone interested in working on Seaside or related code to participate. The venue details will be announced once agreed.

Camp Smalltalk

As usual, the weekend preceding the conference will be used to host Camp Smalltalk, an opportunity to work with colleagues on a number of exciting projects. See the Camp Smalltalk page for more information.

Most of the slides from the presentations at this year’s Smalltalk Solutions conference are now on line.

The material available includes Gilad Bracha’s talk on Newspeak, James Foster’s guide to building a Seaside application using GemStone/S, Michael Rueger’s introduction to Sophie, Arden Thomas demonstrating WebVelocity in action, and Randal Schwartz’s double-header keynote: Seaside - Your Next Web Framework and an introduction to persistency solutions for use with Seaside.  

There are also slides from a couple of sessions looking at the reasons for the recent resurgence of interest in Smalltalk: Arden Thomas looks at the features of Smalltalk that other languages lack, and Rob Rothwell explains how Smalltalk helps with the development of healthcare applications.

There are many more slide-packs available, and still more to be added, so please check out the conference page for more information. James Robertson is adding video and audio as it becomes available.

Randal Schwartz is very keen that there should be one community-supported site for collating and finding Smalltalk-related job postings. He says:

It’s been very helpful to the Perl community to get one place for all serious Perl jobs: jobs.perl.org. Because then all the smart people look there, and all the clueful employers post there, and it’s also free. And the stats at http://jobs.perl.org/about/stats show that Perl is far from dead.

I’m trying to do the same thing for Smalltalk. Please support me in that. Don’t point at other places.  Get them to post at http://smalltalkjobs.dabbledb.com.  It will be good for all of us overall. Truly.

The DabbleDB interface has many RSS feeds for particular areas, and can be pulled out and searched in detail.  It’s also all in Smalltalk, which is a good demo.

Ken Causey has already set up jobs.squeak.org to redirect to http://smalltalkjobs.dabbledb.com, so it look like Randal’s hopes will be fulfilled.

Hilaire Fernandes wrote to tell the Squeak-dev mailing list that the 9th Libre Software Meeting will be held at Mont de Marsan, Landes, in SW France, on 1 - 5 July. LSM is an international free software event taking place in July each year, in a French town; the first event took place in 2000 at Bordeaux. This year, Squeak/Smalltalk will be well represented with conferences and workshops on Squeak, Seaside and Sophie. There will also be a coding sprint for Pharo, a new implementation of Smalltalk based on Squeak.

For more information, see the post about the conference on Hilaire’s blog.
http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire/index.php?post/Squeak-Smalltalk-LSM-2008