Friday, May 19, 2006

Squeak NOS is back

The SqueakNOS (Squeak No Operating System) project is back.

SqueakNOS was an attempt to get Squeak running on x86 pcs without an underlying OS. The aim was to push as much of the hardware interface into the Smalltalk image as possible. There has been no progress since 2001 but now the original team is back and SqueakNOS is quite live and quite kicking!

You can either throw away your installed OS (not yet recommended ;) or use PC emulators like VMWare for a first test.

Squeak NOS is back

The SqueakNOS (Squeak No Operating System) project is back.

SqueakNOS was an attempt to get Squeak running on x86 pcs without an underlying OS. The aim was to push as much of the hardware interface into the Smalltalk image as possible. There has been no progress since 2001 but now the original team is back and SqueakNOS is quite live and quite kicking!

You can either throw away your installed OS (not yet recommended) or use PC emulators like VMWare for a first test.

Thursday, May 18, 2006

SqueakNOS is back

The SqueakNOS (Squeak No Operating System) project is back.

SqueakNOS was an attempt to get Squeak running on x86 pcs without an underlying OS. The aim was to push as much of the hardware interface into the Smalltalk image as possible. There has been no progress since 2001 but now the original team is back and SqueakNOS is quite live and quite kicking!

You can either throw away your installed OS (not yet recommended) or use PC emulators like VMWare for a first test.

SqueakNOS is back

The SqueakNOS (Squeak No Operating System) project is back.

SqueakNOS was an attempt to get Squeak running on x86 pcs without an underlying OS. The aim was to push as much of the hardware interface into the Smalltalk image as possible. There has been no progress since 2001 but now the original team is back and SqueakNOS is quite live and quite kicking!

You can either throw away your installed OS (not yet recommended) or use PC emulators like VMWare for a first test.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Just 5 seconds ...

Just read about Sun finishing Java Enterprise Edition 5 on the heise newsticker (german only). One of the added user comments was:

"The Sun App server (Glassfish) really rocks. The thing is coming up in only 5 seconds together with derby and admin console. Compared to this most application servers should hide themselves ..."

That's really a huge step forward for J2EE - it should now be less painfull to always reboot the webserver after doing refactorings and program changes. ;)

I'm working with both: Java/J2EE and Smalltalk/Seaside and the situation is always the same:

I constantly see the Java world beeing happy about small things making this painfull style of development easier. Nobody asks the question if this change-compile-restart process makes sense in general!!!

On the other hand things like that have never been an issue in dynamic environments like Smalltalk. You dont have to restart the web server after large changes - even if you restructure large parts of your application framework or the web server code itself.

This is one factor why Smalltalk development makes you more productive - you can focus on solving the problem...

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Comet implementation for Seaside web framework

Comet - the next web technology after AJAX allows the server to push updates to all clients (for instance web browsers) when they happen.

Diego Gomez Deck published a first implementation on SqueakMap (called Asteroid). It runs with KomHttpServer (Comanche), JSON and Seaside.

I had to patch the class FastSocketStream with a copy of SocketStream>>sendImmediatelly: to make it work in Squeak 3.8. (3.8 uses a different socket implementation and this method was unfortunately missing).

What it does:
=============
After running "ACometWidgets start" in the Squeak server image you can open more than one web browser on http://localhost:9999

You see some text fields - if you change their values the changes are sent to the server and from there dynamically pushed to the other client web browsers without having to use their "refresh" button.

By evaluating "ACometWidgets instance pushAlertHelloWorld." you get an example how to push data (in this case a java script with an alert) from the server to any connected web browser client. If you leave the Transcript open and close the browsers you will also get a notice that they disconnected.

Update:
I created a short Shockwave demo of Asteroids.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Forward to the past

For those of you who want to play with a simple Smalltalk image running on a Java VM (within a browser) try the following link:

ForwardToThePast.jnlp

Note that Java Webstart is required for your browser. Read the original announcement by Dan Ingalls. The running image is based on the mini.image from Squeak and runs slower than the C based VM but actually it works.

Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

Interview with Dan Ingalls from ESUG 2004

Found an interview with Dan Ingalls from ESUG 2004. Scroll down for the english version. Interesting ...

New beginners squeak mailing-list

A new mailinglist for Squeak beginners has been set up. For a complete list of Squeak related mailinglists click here.