tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43310315405402214442011-11-28T00:43:24.377ZMichael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.comBlogger231100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-13654472999205225732009-05-15T13:57:00.002Z2009-05-15T14:00:20.198Z

"The thing that I really hate about Smalltalk though, is the fact that every time I wish C++ or Java did something differently it turns out that Smalltalk does it the way I want it to. I've never even used Smalltalk on a real project. I just learned it so that I could read source code, now I keep running into things that would be easier if I were using it. It's really annoying."Attributed to Phil

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-64273701393196590172008-08-16T08:05:00.007Z2008-08-16T14:45:46.609Z

Given that it looks as though ircbrowse has gone away permanently, I decided to write my own little client for viewing the logs of the #squeak IRC channel. Fortunately most of the hard work had already been done at http://tunes.org/~nef/logs/squeak/, but as the site itself notes: "these logs are purposely "raw" and are intended to be parsed/reformated/wrapped before viewing."So I put together a

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-71239992998821126752008-07-17T19:29:00.006Z2008-12-09T03:10:02.504Z

Given the recent push to get Squeak video tutorials available, I decided to have a go myself. I took as my starting point my post from a few months back, intended to act as a quick introduction to developers coming to Squeak for the first time.My first problem was to find a good screen capture utility. Unfortunately, Wink isn't available for OS X, but a bit of searching uncovered Snapz Pro X.

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-12091398870355946852008-07-14T20:08:00.007Z2008-12-09T03:10:02.872Z

I'll admit it, configuring Apache scares the bejeezus out of me. The documentation seems to be so focused on the trees, that the wood becomes an impenetrable, gloomy forest. I guess I'm not alone in this, which makes Ramon Leon's posts on configuring Apache with Seaside(1, 2, 3) so useful.Despite this, I've still steered clear of going near Apache, until Ramon posted a sample extract of

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-20438097076808427112008-07-08T19:27:00.006Z2008-12-09T03:10:03.997Z

Someone on the Seaside mailing list asked how to find out the meanings of all the icons against each method in the browser. The answer is quite interesting, as it helps you understand the importance of the "live environment" that Squeaks gives you.Looking at a typical class, you'll see that many method definitions have a little icon by the name:(nb alt- and cmd- prefixes used below may need to be

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-38302735340175107862008-05-23T14:00:00.003Z2008-05-23T14:04:47.318Z

Charles Nutter (JRuby specialist at Sun) said recently:"The CLR kind of grew up on the static language side of the world, from the C++ folks, whereas Java grew up on the Smalltalk side of the world. It was actually grown out of a Smalltalk VM. So what we have on the JVM, oddly enough, is a dynamic language runtime under the covers powering a statically typed language. The work that we are doing

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-35865731250079101292008-05-22T15:57:00.002Z2008-05-22T16:19:33.839Z

My post yesterday attracted more attention than I expected, with Paolo Bonzini and Randal Schwartz both being able to make out the code well enough to comment on it. Paolo was able to identify a number of improvements to the code, both in terms of identifying more appropriate approaches, and in identifying where the code was spending its time. As a result, here's a much faster version. It's also

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-4917005182534104042008-05-21T20:12:00.006Z2008-05-21T21:28:52.198Z

When I saw this post by Peter Norvig, and especially the lines-of-code comparison towards the end of the page, I thought it would be interesting to see how Smalltalk compared. Given the line-of-code metric, this was an ideal chance for me to play with GNU Smalltalk, which positions itself as a scripting-friendly Smalltalk. It proved to be quite a straightforward exercise, and the code came out

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-71011487355913677842008-05-11T16:29:00.006Z2008-05-12T23:14:43.064Z

A team of students from UTN (National Technological University in Argentina) co-ordinated by Estaban Lorenzano has just been doing some work on SqueakDBX, a package to allow Squeak to access OpenDBX functionality, which gives a lighter-weight alternative to ODBC for connecting to databases including Firebird, Interbase, MS SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite, SQLite3 and Sybase.This

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-53727047434423779312008-03-13T10:01:00.004Z2008-03-13T10:46:42.876Z

Richard Eng was having trouble using a checkbox to trigger a change in the contents of a textarea.Lukas responded that:To trigger a callback of a form element, you need to specify this form element with #triggerFormElement:. As the comment of this method says, this does not work for multi-select lists and checkboxes, as those two form elements internally depend on another hidden form element. So

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-65460324918131547772007-12-17T17:55:00.001Z2008-01-23T20:49:04.177Z

A lot of people are flummoxed when they first open a Squeak image, especially developers who want to just get on and write some Smalltalk code. This guide should help you get over that first hump. To start off, I'll assume that you've got a Squeak image running and you're looking at a screen wondering what to do now!First, for this exercise, you can close any windows in Squeak by pressing on the

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-72627020024758276042007-12-01T18:16:00.000Z2007-12-02T13:56:48.763Z

This is a very simple example of how to use a decorator in Seaside, based on my understanding from two blogs. A decorator allows you to wrap standard functionality around the content generated by your component, so hiding a lot of the 'boilerplate' complexity otherwise required. This example allows you to build up a form with buttons of your choice; provide a list of buttons, and a matching

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-87114963396531978832007-07-13T10:46:00.000Z2007-07-13T10:55:01.463Z

Stephen Wessels has put together a very thorough development tutorial at http://squeak.preeminent.org/tut2007/html/index.htmlIt's aimed at new Squeakers and introduces and explains the main elements of the development environment, as well as giving an insight into areas such as test-driven development, object-oriented design, and code refactoring.

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-9650461590575175752007-05-23T16:52:00.000Z2007-05-23T16:59:44.431Z

There's a very useful step-by-step guide on how to send emails from your Seaside application at saush.com, which also documents an experienced developer's first experiences with Squeak. All good stuff.

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-21258654238325578822007-05-08T21:09:00.000Z2007-05-08T21:18:58.704Z

Ramon Leon continues his excellent series of blog posts on Squeak - this time to note his creation of a sample application demonstrating how to build a simple application using Seaside and Magritte.This is a great introduction to building a web application using these tools, and I found it a useful exercise to see how Ramon dealt with some of the common tasks involved in such an application:

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-87744325484058744482007-03-30T13:52:00.000Z2007-03-30T14:14:03.974Z

There's a lot of useful discussion going on over the seaside mailing list at the moment, triggered off by a question from Andreas Raab asking about some of the mechanics of Seaside. Some key points that were interesting to me:A component is responsible for generating a part of the html of a "page". This includes forms, since they are part of html (note that you must not nest forms, forms really

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-8857982136144564692007-02-17T20:07:00.000Z2007-02-17T20:08:08.750Z

A few weeks ago I posted a comment to the squeak-dev mailing list bemoaning the current state of UI support in Squeak. My concerns were:Most of [the many GUI-builders in Squeak] are incomplete, out-of-date, and abandoned; but they show that developers are repeatedly coming back to a need to find an easy way to create and manage a user interface that employs the metaphors that have become familiar

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-82124818938443038842007-02-16T11:55:00.000Z2007-02-16T12:01:33.418Z

One of the problems I, and many other beginners, had when coming to Squeak was in building a GUI for my application. There are many half-built and unmaintained GUI builders out there, but most of the core Squeak applications are built manually using SystemWindow. Although these are thought of as self-documenting, I found it difficult to see the wood for the trees when examining them.My first

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-13210242444570633252007-02-14T19:35:00.000Z2007-02-14T19:42:24.852Z

I've just found a link from the Squeak wiki to a set of lecture notes from Ralph Johnson (one of the Design Patterns "Gang of Four") on Smalltalk (based on VisualWorks, though he has since migrated to Squeak):http://st-www.cs.uiuc.edu/users/johnson/cs497/notes98/online-course.htmlThe lecture notes are accessible, but the video links aren't as they're copyrighted by the university. If you're

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-16870394423645992482007-02-07T22:28:00.000Z2007-02-16T12:03:42.012Z

I was browsing some of the Magritte source code, when I saw a message that confused me: selectors := anObject class allSelectors select: #isDescriptionSelector.I couldn't understand how you could pass a Symbol to #select: instead of a block-- certainly the definition of Collection>>select: implies it should only take a block. But trying it for myself, I saw it worked-- eg{ 1. 2.

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-31880367945610424712007-02-02T18:35:00.000Z2007-02-16T12:06:03.987Z

I've been playing about with Magritte a bit more over the past couple of days, and I'm beginning to get a better understanding of it - I can build edit-forms and reports now. I can't quite see how readonly views work, but I'm sure I'll crack it eventually...More impressive (to me anyway) is that I've found a couple of bugs in Squeak!The Traits-Tests suite of tests leaves lots of classes like

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-24306408893762686352007-01-30T17:53:00.000Z2007-01-30T18:17:20.529Z

Ramon Leon's ever-impressive blog has a great quick screencast introduction to Seaside and Magritte, and reading between the lines, it does appear that the approach that I described in my previous post is the right way to be thinking about the role of Magritte.

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331031540540221444.post-37744508543002122092007-01-30T16:44:00.001Z2008-06-24T14:31:17.708Z

I'm just starting to experiment with using Magritte and Seaside in Squeak, and it's proving to be interesting if slightly hard going!I think where I've got to with Magritte is that it's best thought of as a tool for building "edit" screens for objects (a task that it does very effectively under Seaside), but if you're trying to do anything else with your object, then it's back to plain old

Michael Davieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446726284329769719noreply@blogger.com0