Planet Squeak

Torsten Bergmann: Closures

Torsten (noreply@blogger.com) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:09:00 +0000

Some news from Elliot about his work on a new Closure scheme for Squeak/Croquet.

He also made the first bootstrap code available at: http://www.mirandabanda.org/files/Cog/Closures0808/Bootstrap/

Summer of Squeak: Week 8 of GSOC - FreeCAD/Croquet

kayef (noreply@blogger.com) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:29:00 +0000

1) What did you do in the past week?
-Fixed drawing movement with mouse. Drag and move properly enabled now. Drag and rotate is also fixed.
-Experimenting with camera movements. Tilt, forward, back, rotate are some of the motions enabled on keyboard.
-Added a pop up info board that shows the position of the mouse on the drawing board to enable better and more accurate drawing. Pop up also added to drawing when dragged and moved to show the position of the drawing.

2) What do plan to do this week?
-Finalize camera movement and try to integrate some of it with the mouse.
-Implement a grid plan on the drawing board to act as a ruler and guide when drawing.

3) What can possibly stand in the way of your work?
-No feedback and no one trying out the things I have done puts me in the dark about how user friendly the controls are.

The Weekly Squeak: Plopp featured in MacWorld

Michael Davies — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:14:38 +0000

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!

Summer of Squeak: squeakGtk Omnibrowser

MrGwen (noreply@blogger.com) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:52:00 +0000

I've updated the squeakGtk website look at : http://squeakgtk.pbwiki.com/

Here is the first release of the Omnibrowser with Gtk :

At this time this is only read-only and there is not menu support.

I've solved the problem of the active waiting with a thread in C in which gtk waits
for an event and when there is an event send a signal to a semaphore and wake up
the Smalltalk process, it works but I should remove the Morphs because X events
handling is not thread safe.

I'll create an image without the morphs if it possible...

Randal Schwartz: David Mertz reviews my OSCON Seaside tutorial

Randal Schwartz — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:01:03 +0000

David Mertz reviews my presentation yesterday in his blog post: The framework itself is based on continuations and maintenance of session state. As with other rapid-development web frameworks, a very small amount of template code does a lot of w...

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Torsten Bergmann: Squeak in education

Torsten (noreply@blogger.com) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:25:00 +0000

Found a new project called iStoa.net developed for education in Squeak Smalltalk.
It is a learning environment with emphasis on interactive activities through
artifacts, recording of student activities for further analysis, curriculum
modeling with oriented graphs and learner modeling.

Looks like the client application is also running on the OLPC XO notebook.

Code is available at:

http://www.squeaksource.com/iStoaCore.html

http://www.squeaksource.com/iStoaExo.html

http://www.squeaksource.com/iStoaWeb.html

http://www.squeaksource.com/iStoaArtifact.html

http://www.squeaksource.com/iStoaEtayage.html

Torsten Bergmann: Squeak in education

Torsten (noreply@blogger.com) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:25:00 +0000

http://www.squeaksource.com/iStoaCore.html

http://www.squeaksource.com/iStoaExo.html

http://www.squeaksource.com/iStoaWeb.html

http://www.squeaksource.com/iStoaArtifact.html

http://www.squeaksource.com/iStoaEtayage.html

Torsten Bergmann: Squeak in education

Torsten (noreply@blogger.com) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:25:00 +0000

http://www.squeaksource.com/iStoaCore.html

http://www.squeaksource.com/iStoaExo.html

http://www.squeaksource.com/iStoaWeb.html

http://www.squeaksource.com/iStoaArtifact.html

http://www.squeaksource.com/iStoaEtayage.html

Randal Schwartz: My first big Seaside tutorial: three hours at OSCON

Randal Schwartz — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 04:49:01 +0000

Wow. What a rush. But I mean that literally. I've known for a few months that I'd be delivering a three hour tutorial on Seaside at OSCON. But like many of the activities, I didn't actually start writing the materials until last week, and I'd ...

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Randal Schwartz: Teaching GLORP with Squeak at PDXPUG Day

Randal Schwartz — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 04:06:18 +0000

Sunday, I spoke at the pre-OSCON Portland Oregon PostgreSQL Users Group (PDXPUG) DAY mini-conference about how to connect Squeak to Postgres using GLORP. I had originally pitched the talk with about 45 minutes or so of material in my head. When ...

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The Weekly Squeak: Get recording your Squeak videos now!

Michael Davies — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:31:58 +0000

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.

Summer of Squeak: OpenNARS - Development Progress - 2nd phase

cdrick (noreply@blogger.com) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:39:00 +0000

The port of NARS is now getting in the more complex/interesting part ie. porting inference rules and make the whole thing work.

It hasn't been possible to focus on simple inference as there's not a clear distinction in the rules implementation. So I did choose to port the maximum I could understood. Most of the stable classes that are not evolving much are ported. Some are tested, some are not as I need other parts to make them work.

We had also a discussion with Klaus to agree on the objectives and ways to tackle some problems. I also had to read again documentation on the NARS approach as it's still difficult to me to explain to others. Also, java code is not always explaining by itself :).

I've extended an overview document with picture to explain relation between statement (logic expression), sentence, reasoningItems (tasks that encapsulates sentences, judgment, question goal...) and reasoning artefacts (memory...bags...). See here.

Where I'm right now is thinking about the implementation choice of Inference rules.
Indeed, Pei choose to implement inference rules, as some utility functions and the memory as static methods only in several distinct classes. I understand his choice as it's easier for him to find and modify them (java world), but this is another difficulty for me to understand the system. It's therefore kind of mixed because several methods should belong to others objects and so, hard to port as I ask myself whose object responsibility it is... I've started that for all Utility functions (that are really stable). All three classes don't exist anymore and are either extension method.

Also dispatching them in Smalltalk is less problematic as I can use Pragma or even flags to access them quickly... Besides the static'ness of these methods, I find they are too long... which makes them hard to have a global view. Over the 4 inferences classes (+ a kind of rule dispatcher - RulesTable), there around 10 reasonning method per class which is not much but they are quite long... So fisrt, I'll port skeletton, bypass the parts in relation to complex inference (temporal, structural...) and I'll try to see common parts so as to create convenience methods etc...

That's why I'm spending this week getting a better understanding of the system to propose an alternative design. I think for instance that the memory class is the reasoning controller. It has links to several bags (Nars bags), that are the real storage of the working memory (names can be very confusing sometimes). I find I need some more abstraction and one of them is a reasoning controller which will hold the reasoning process (an inference engine?). I'm also discussing that point with Pei on the Nars mailing list.

The other missing parts is the full implementation of NARS language (NARSESE) that allows to express logics expression (input belief, outputs). I'll focus on implementing first simple statements like "swan is black" "yoyo is a swan" etc... The inference engine would be already usable for more complex expression. Still the future seaside interface will only focus on simple statements, presenting inference and result(s).

To deal with language terms, I may use a visitor pattern, or at least a better dispatch but I'll focus on that later.

So, next objectives are:
-port CompoundTerms, Statements and relations subclasses (inheritance, equivalence, implication, instance...) to be able to express tasks - statement which is a logic statement with a truth value plus some meta information that allow to deal with priority, decay, life of the belief in the working memory ...
-then make NAMemory work, maybe split it into 2 classes. I need to implement inference rules (some not all)

See you all... Feel free to leave comments, give pointers on pattern or application that use rule and inference (SOUL ? NeOPUS ?)...

Cédrick

Summer of Squeak: Week 7 of GSOC - FreeCAD/Croquet

kayef (noreply@blogger.com) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:44:00 +0000

1) What did you do in the past week?
-Experiment with different camera movements
-Implemented keyboard keys with avatar motion e.g. tilt, move around etc
-Experiment with solid transformation, trying to put in better control of solids with mouse movement

2) What do plan to do this week?
-Continue to work on avatar movement with keyboard and applying different movements to have a better CAD view of assembly
-Restructure drawing of solids for better integration with mouse movement

3) What can possibly stand in the way of your work?
3D transform theories are really complicating!!

The Weekly Squeak: SandstoneDb - Simple ActiveRecord-style persistence in Squeak

Michael Davies — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 07:23:26 +0000

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.

Summer of Squeak: Safarà status: New commands and a new SATextMorph

defmacro (noreply@blogger.com) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:16:00 +0000

These week I added some support to implement commands based on multiple cursors.
As an example I provided commands to move the current point of editing between words (e.g. next-word, previous-word, etc.).

The second issue I attacked was the one related with how present the characters. Now we use a custom morph to present the content of a buffer.

The next step will be to define a GUI-independent model for styles and interactions with ranges of text. This will enable us to provide some features like text-selection, syntax-highlighting or "Do it".

As in the last post and from now on, I will try to provide a snapshot:

Torsten Bergmann: Squeak and Namespaces

Torsten (noreply@blogger.com) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:38:00 +0000

The Squeak community had many discussions in the past on Namespaces within the standard image. Especially after other Smalltalks like VisualWorks provide Namespace by default.
The easy way is to have conventions so the names just don't overlap.

There have been proposals like the one from Göran (and working implementations) for namespace support.

One idea is to reify the prefixes so you could write My::Class instead of MyClass.
Smalltalk/MT uses the same notation. However, no proposal for Squeak has been adopted yet.

Michael van der Gulik has now released a premade Namespaced image. This is part of his SecureSqueak project.

There is also a video available.

Summer of Squeak: Cairo support under SqueakGtk

MrGwen (noreply@blogger.com) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:09:00 +0000

Cairo is a 2D graphics library with support for multiple output devices. Currently supported output targets include the X Window System, Quartz, Win32, image buffers, PostScript, PDF, and SVG file output. Experimental backends include OpenGL (through glitz), XCB, BeOS, OS/2, and DirectFB.

for more informations go to the cairo website : http://cairographics.org/

The support of Cairo under squeakGtk is not complete but most of the functions are supported, it lacks the support of the transformations functions, ...

May be it will be possible to use cairo for the morphs ?

The Weekly Squeak: WxSqueak reaches 0.5

Michael Davies — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:53:10 +0000

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.

Summer of Squeak: SqueakGtk status

MrGwen (noreply@blogger.com) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 08:42:00 +0000

Here are some news of the SqueakGtk project :

I've extended the Gtk support with new widgets :

GtkAboutDialog (added some fields)
GtkFontSelectionDialog
GtkAccelLabel
GtkLinkButton
GtkScaleButton
GtkVolumeButton
WebKit
...

I've corrected a bug with the memory management, it seems that Gtk doesn't like
g_object_unref when there is a parent widget. The support of Gtk
is more stable but there are others problems in the events handling
this is an active waiting so it uses a lot of cpu times, an other problem
is when the user save the image a "Gtk" object in Squeak only contains
a pointer in a C structure and I need to save and restore this structure.

I'm working on the Omnibrowser support and in the improvement of the
new tools :p

Some basic tools :

Squeakzilla a new browser :p

Randal Schwartz: Dynamic languages for web development vs Java

Randal Schwartz — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 15:02:50 +0000

From a recent blog post:[...] The simple truth is that for web applications dynamic approaches are massively more productive. Take a look at Seaside (Smalltalk), Grails (groovy) or Rails (Ruby) and its clear that Java has nothing to compare. The ...

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Luca Bruno: Syx gaining more stability and speed

Luca Bruno aka Lethalman (lethalman88@gmail.com) — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 14:00:00 +0000

Hello,
in the new branches of Syx (an open source Smalltalk-80 implementation) we're working to try a new kind of memory management and add many features that have been missed until now to focus on other stuff.

The new faster and more modern v0.1.8 release will contain the following refactoring:

Objects will be variable-length (minumum 12 bytes on 32-bit processors and 16 bytes on 64-bit processors)
By changing the objects also the GC changed to a mark and compact GC
Threaded-switch statement to run processes
More efficient method cache (maybe a simple global cache lookup for this release)

API for primitives will only change slightly.

Suggestions for any new particular technologies are welcome.

The Weekly Squeak: Squeak’s Google Summer of Code projects

Michael Davies — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 07:42:43 +0000

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.

Summer of Squeak: Safarà Status

defmacro (noreply@blogger.com) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:29:00 +0000

A first prototype of Safarà is ready at last.

Currently it supports basic ascii text editing, that can seem not so much.

Actually I am really happy for the work done as I think (and I hope) I met several goals:

extensibility in terms of features: you can add features (commands gestures syntaxes) to Safarà at runtime, without interfering or having to interact with other layers;
portability over implementations: the model does not know anything about the UI as they are completely decoupled and communication between them occurs by using announcements. Thus, you can write also a non-morphic UI for example. Just make your UI objects subscribe to the right announce and write a bridge to translate the GUI-dependent events to the Safarà events;
Classes and methods are well categorized, documented and tested.

So, what are the next steps?

For the Morphic UI: Do not use TextMorph as base class but a custom morph

For the model: Integrate into Safarà some code wrote by Lukas for syntax-aware commands

You can find the latest snapshot here. There is also a developer mailing list, you can subscribe to. As Safarà partecipate to the ESUG 2008 awards you can find additional documentation about the project goals and design here.

For the most curious, this is a snapshot

Torsten Bergmann: WxSqueak 0.5.1 demo

Torsten (noreply@blogger.com) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:08:00 +0000

A new 0.5.1 demo version of WxSqueak is available. Read the announcement or check out the updated project page:

http://wxsqueak.org/

Summer of Squeak: Week 6 of GSOC - FreeCAD/Croquet

kayef (noreply@blogger.com) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 09:34:00 +0000

1) What did you do in the past week?
-Created handles to interactively draw objects.
-Handles allows extending and rotating the drawing.
-Putting in markers and selecting them so that Joints can be created and linked to them.
-2D drawing detection to move drawings and to select it

2) What do plan to do this week?
-Will continue work to create Joints that will reference 2 markers for simulation purpose
-Look into how the camera view can be adjusted for better viewing angles. Any suggestions on this is much appreciated

3) What can possibly stand in the way of your work?
3D transformation is quite complex and i'll need some time to understand it better in order to create better functions.

Here's a video showing some of the work I did:

Summer of Squeak: Status

Francois Stephany (noreply@blogger.com) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:48:00 +0000

As promised, some news of the project!

So far, the bot framework is on the good way... I tried as much as possible to have an easy public interface so that it should be easy for anyone to develop with the framework. The base is maturing and shouldn't change much in the future.
I've developed some basic functionalities: an administration interface, a help system, a greeting (a bot has to be polite) and a simple infobot that can memorise definitions.

At the moment, the IRC protocol is handled by the existing IRC client in Squeak. Unfortunately it relies on Morphic ( in short; the gui ). I've abstracted it so that the bot isnow completely indenpendant of it. It is planned to develop a clean IRC library which wont rely on any gui.

So what next ?

Continue the real world tests (yesterday was the first attempt on freenode :),
Polish the admin and help,
Add logging functionalities
Develop a web interface (with Aida or Seaside)
Develop a clean IRC library
Write docs

Stay tuned!
(if you see squeakbot on freenode, introduce yourself to him :)

Torsten Bergmann: Domino simulation

Torsten (noreply@blogger.com) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:38:00 +0000

Willi Griephan of Bremen shows the operation of two Croquet simulation spaces that he created using the Croquet SDK.

Read more here (german) or the summary from Julian Lombardi.

Reminds me on the Smallscript3D library from Ernest Micklei (Philemonworks.com) who did a World Record of 4.7 million 'Virtual' Dominos using (VisualAge) Smalltalk. Ernest's page has changed, but the wayback machine shows some details.

Torsten Bergmann: Potato aka JSqueak

Torsten (noreply@blogger.com) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:34:00 +0000

Looks like the HPI has created an extended version of JSqueak (Squeak VM implemented in Java to run on JVM) called "Potato".

Read more here.

Torsten Bergmann: JavaScript and Smalltalk Diff

Torsten (noreply@blogger.com) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:22:00 +0000

Tony Garnock-Jones implemented a Hunt-McIlroy diff and a diff3 implementation in JavaScript and Squeak.

He blogged about it here and here.

The source is available at http://www.squeaksource.com/DiffMerge.html

The Weekly Squeak: Potato - version of JSqueak from HPI

Michael Davies — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:13:00 +0000

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:

support for 32 bit color depth
calling Java (in the moment only for strings and integers)
refactored code
consistent use of Java libraries
removed redundancy
added a dynamic object table (for loading big images)
support for little and big endianness
loading of unzipped images
fixed lots of bugs and improved usability.

Their plans include further improvements like:

adding support for 8 and 16 bit color depth
implementing BitBlt warp functionality
enhancing BitBlt implementation (”tryCopyingBitsQuickly”, blending)
adding save image functionality
implementing additional primitives
being able to support current images
extending Java access
finding and removing bugs.

Anybody interested in viewing the work so far, or contributing to future development, can access the code at the following locations:

SVN repository: https://potatovm.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/potatovm

Sourceforge project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/potatovm/