Smalltalk with James Robertson

PC World has some ideas about who should get the gig :)

TechCrunch asks an excellent question - where the heck is the iPad app for Facebook? The iPhone app looks kind of stale for that matter - maybe they can't find anyone to replace the guy who famously declared that he wasn't doing that work anymore (which should have led to his immediate termination, IMHO, but that's another story).

So here it is, 2011, and there's still no iPad app - meanwhile, Facebook is looking for help on the desktop:

On the jobs page for the relatively new Seattle Facebook office, one of the openings is for “Software Engineer, Desktop Software”. Desktop software. Desktop. Before the damn iPad. Hey Facebook, 1986 called, they want their strategic vision back.

Apparently, this is the start of some big team. I think TechCruch is right - they lost their calendar, and think they are living through a re-imagined "Back to the Future", set in the 80's....

Technorati Tags: mobile, iPad, social media

I was ready to just call it stupid the other day - now I see that not only is it stupid, it's actually dangerous in a lot of ways. That's Congress for you - they can't limit themselves to being stupid, they have to do actual harm while they're at it.

At this point, I think the cost/benefit for both copyrights and patents have flipped. Unless both are reformed in a "start from scratch" sort of way, we'd be better off without them.

Technorati Tags: stupidity, copyright

Welcome to episode 31 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson, Michael Lucas-Smith, and David Buck.

This week I have another session from Smalltalk Solutions 2011 - Pat Maddox, talking about using Seaside and Rails together. The abstract for the talk was:

Ruby on Rails has proven to be the best framework for developing open applications and platforms on the web. Seaside excels at building intelligent applications by hiding the complexity of session-based user interaction. This talk will highlight the strengths, weaknesses and impacts of each of these frameworks, and will examine how to use them together to build open, intelligent applications.

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (or any other podcatching software) using this feed directly or in iTunes with this one.

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. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.

If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Troublemaker for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!

If you have feedback, send it to jarober@gmail.com - or visit us on Facebook - you can subscribe in iTunes using this iTunes enabled feed.. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!

Technorati Tags: seaside, sts11, smalltalk, rails

Welcome to episode 31 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson, Michael Lucas-Smith, and David Buck.

This week I have another session from Smalltalk Solutions 2011 - Pat Maddox, talking about using Seaside and Rails together. The abstract for the talk was:

Ruby on Rails has proven to be the best framework for developing open applications and platforms on the web. Seaside excels at building intelligent applications by hiding the complexity of session-based user interaction. This talk will highlight the strengths, weaknesses and impacts of each of these frameworks, and will examine how to use them together to build open, intelligent applications.

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (or any other podcatching software) using this feed directly or in iTunes with this one.

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. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.

If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Troublemaker for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!

If you have feedback, send it to jarober@gmail.com - or visit us on Facebook - you can subscribe in iTunes using this iTunes enabled feed.. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside, rails, sts11

Memorial Day, 2011

Sean DeNegris talks about simpler data storage:

In an enlightening blog post, Ramon Leon explains that most applications are designed for small businesses with small amounts of data. Therefore  most applications will never have to scale (i.e. become the next Twitter), so a relational database is overkill. However, persisting by simply saving the image is slow and error-prone.

Based on these ideas, he suggests a simple (one class) framework which saves only your model. The idea is to use it as long as you can get away with, which may be forever.

I packaged the code from the post, added a few tests, and put it on SqueakSource as SimplePersistence.

You have no idea how many security headaches I've avoided by using binary serialization to store the posts on this blog instead of a SQL Database. As with Sean's example, my storage needs are lightweight, and a relational database would be overkill. Not to mention being an attack vector....

Technorati Tags: storage

Today's Javascript 4 You. Today we look at using the JQuery noConflict() function. It's common to make use of multiple Javascript libraries in a web app, and some libraries might also want to use the $ symbol for variable access. Never fear - JQuery has a way to deal with that problem. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. Join the Facebook Group to discuss the tutorials. You can view the archives here.

To watch now, click on the image below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: javascript, jquery, tutorial

My daughter is out of high school - off to college in the fall:

Travis has been working on an interface to Uniscribe:

I've been working on a Uniscribe interface to VisualWorks Smalltalk off and on for the last two weeks or so. One of the frustrating things for me so far, is the lack of a good post-doc resource to go to for help with this stuff. There's the MSDN docs, which are OK, but when you have questions beyond that, I have as of yet, not found any of the resources I'm used to using for this kind of thing, such as mailing lists, etc. And the amount of "tutorial" style pages out there is pretty small. So I thought I'd at least leave a trail of breadcrumbs here.

Technorati Tags: visualworks

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at tracking overrides in VisualWorks - something that's useful when it's time to update from one version to another, and you need to know how many problems you'll have doing so.. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube.

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, visualworks, overrides

If you want to test Squeak Source 3, it's live - but it's for testing right now, note the warning:

The contents of this repository will NOT survive beyond the lifetime of the public Alpha. DO NOT store anything you are not willing to lose in this repository.

Technorati Tags: squeak, squeak source

Engadget has the scoop, and it's interesting - basically, Nokia did some actual introspection, and determined that they couldn't get where they needed to go with their own OS - so they partnered with Microsoft. A lot of companies could benefit by looking at their own strategies with as much of an open mind as Nokia apparently did.

Technorati Tags: management, strategy

Today's Javascript 4 You. Today we look at the low level AJAX functionality that JQuery makes simpler via the load() function (which we covered here). If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. Join the Facebook Group to discuss the tutorials. You can view the archives here.

To watch now, click on the image below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: javascript, jquery, ajax, tutorial

Bob explains how easy it is to push up a nice, simple graph using Seaside

Technorati Tags: seaside

Good news for Scratch fans - there's a port in progress from the (fairly old) rev of Squeak that Scratch uses to Pharo. You can check the progress and participate via the Google Code Page

Technorati Tags: scratch, squeak, pharo

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at loading and using SUnit in VA Smalltalk. SUnit is the standard way of supporting TDD in all Smalltalk dialects - and it's easy to use in VA. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

.

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Today we'll look at using SUnit (for unit testing) in VA Smalltalk. The first step is to use the Load/Unload Features menu pick to bring in SUnit support (along with all of the associated tools built into VA for it):

In the feature list UI, scroll down to SUnit, select it, and hit the >> button to move it to the right. Then click the Ok button to load the code:

Now that SUnit support is loaded, we need to create a new application that will contain our test class. We'll be building a simple test case for the previously created CounterApp - which means that our new application will need some pre-requisites to make the appropriate classes visible. First, create the application, and add the pre-reqs using the picker:

Now we can define the new test case class. This is no different from creating any other class, but if you didn't add SUnit as a pre-req, the TestCase class won't be visible to your new application. The next few images walk through creating the class:

Now, we can write a standard SUnit testcase. Create a method that begins with the word test - that's how SUnit finds the tests in your subclass of TestCase. The last part of the method should send the #assert: message, with the argument being an expression that answers a boolean. Below is the simple example that tests the #addOne method in Counter:

Now, go back to the tools menu, and pulling the SUnit option right, select the SUnit Browser:

That opens a tool showing all of the tests present in your VA image. There are ways to be more specific about what you see in this tool; we'll cover that in another tutorial. For now, simply scroll down to the test you created and select it

Finally, press the Run button, and you should see two green bars and some information. If you see red, either the CounterApp has a bug, or your test is wrong.

Need more help? There's a screencast for other topics like this which you may want to watch. Questions? Try the "Chat with James" Google gadget over in the sidebar.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, va smalltalk, tdd, sunit

Norbert Hartl has some useful maintenance tips for Gemstone/S developers and admins. Hat tip Dale

Technorati Tags: gemstone

I understand why EA wants to do this, but they'll have to work to get past Steam - Steam has a huge headstart on the social end of gaming:

Electronic Arts is diving into digital game distribution by launching its own service for selling downloadable games direct to consumers.

Technorati Tags: ea, steam

Nick Ager adds to the documentation produced by Lukas Renggli for a nice description of what to do.

Technorati Tags: jenkins, pharo

Need a lightweight REST solution for Pharo? Guillermo has one built on top of the KomHttpServer.

Technorati Tags: pharo, REST, http

Juan Vuletich has just released CUIS 3.3. What's new? Too much stuff to list it concisely - follow the link for details. Or just download it now

Technorati Tags: cuis

Spotted in Engadget:

While searching for updates in iTunes, a MacRumors reader stumbled upon this page, which alludes to an "Automatic Download" feature that allows for wireless syncing. Also, the fact that Apple went out of its way to say "...if your device has Automatic Download enabled for apps" makes us wonder what else we'll soon be able to update over the air. The company has since pulled the tattletale page in iTunes, but MacRumors grabbed a screenshot while it was still live.

I'd be happier about it if the phrase "about d*** time" didn't keep coming to mind :)

Technorati Tags: ios, apple