Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Didn't get a chance to see us at any of our recent Smalltalk technology events? Well, you can still see what we presented - we have video of everything. You can subscribe to our video feed to have them downloaded directly with your favorite podcatching software, or head on over to the video page for the events.

Technorati Tags: video, cincom

The Cincom Smalltalk team recently completed a five city tour - Seattle, Toronto, Baltimore, London, and Paris. We filmed the presentations we gave at each of the one day events, and now I'm releasing the highest quality iterations. Today's video is of Arden Thomas, talking about WebVelocity - the best way to get database driven website implemented and deployed quickly. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. Stay tuned - there's more to come from this series of events!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside, WebVelocity, cincom, web development

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at generating UUIDs in Smalltalk, using a library to generate standard identifiers. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: uuid, unique identifier, smalltalk

Travis explains:

we've separated what to diff with how to diff completely. This means that I can have a method on RBScanner which scans source tokens. But it can go further. Since said scanner knows where comments are, we can produce strings for the comments. In fact we can go further, we can break the comments up into words easily. We can even note when the token is a string literal token and break it up into words as well. And we can insert elements for white space. So that when we difference Smalltalk methods, we get everything broken down to the granularity we'd like.

Travis shares some ideas he's got on evolving the UI in VisualWorks - complete with a screencast.

Technorati Tags: visualworks, UI

Very nice Cairo and Pango work in Cincom Smalltalk from Chris Thorgrimmsen.

Technorati Tags: cairo, pango, graphics

The Cincom Smalltalk team recently completed a five city tour - Seattle, Toronto, Baltimore, London, and Paris. We filmed the presentations we gave at each of the one day events, and now I'm releasing the highest quality iterations. Today's video is of Arden Thomas and me, talking about the solving problems with VisualWorks. Arden handles the slides, while I did a demo involving VW and ActiveX controls in Windows. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. Stay tuned - there's more to come from this series of events!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, visualworks, activeX, windows, COM

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at a couple of small, but useful features of the browser that you might have missed. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, code browser, code editing

The Cincom Smalltalk team recently completed a five city tour - Seattle, Toronto, Baltimore, London, and Paris. We filmed the presentations we gave at each of the one day events, and now I'm releasing the highest quality iterations. Today's video is of Andreas Hiltner, talking about the Modeling and Mapping tools, and how they can aid enterprise Windows development using ObjectStudio 8. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. Stay tuned - there's more to come from this series of events!

Technorati Tags: objectstudio, enterprise, modeling, mapping

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at setting up a personal store repository on Windows, using MS Access. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, store, version control, ms access

I'm processing the videos we shot on our technology event roadtrip - I hope to have them posted by the end of the week (if not then, by Monday). Exporting out of iMovie takes time, and then I have to post-process the resulting export so that I'm not asking people to download an enormous file :)

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at the Registry package, a contributed piece that makes it easier to work with the Windows registry from Smalltalk. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, registry, windows

We've wrapped up the current round of Cincom Smalltalk events - if we schedule more, it'll be announced here. In the meantime, you can check out our video wrapups from 4 of the 5 events (I neglected to hit the "record" button in London) on uStream - I've embedded the player below. I'll have video for the talks themselves up in the next few days - I have initial processing, editing, and post production ahead of me on that - and some of the steps are all about "hurry up and wait" :)

Live Video streaming by Ustream

Technorati Tags: smalltalk conference, cincom, video

Here's another video from ESUG 2009 - the Thales project to get metrics from code projects. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

Thales - Metrics and Modeling from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, thales, metrics, esug09, france, brest

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at setting up a personal Store repository using SQLLite. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: sqllite, store, version control

This week's podcast is an interview we did with Dale Henrichs of Gemstone about the Metacello project - a configuration management add on for Monticello (version control for Squeak and Pharo). We'd like to thank Dale for taking the time to talk to us - it was a lot of fun!

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.

To listen immediately, use the player below:

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

If you have feedback, send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or visit us on Facebook or Ning - you can vote for the Podcast Alley, and subscribe on iTunes. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, metacello, monticello, version control

This week's podcast is an interview we did with Dale Henrichs of Gemstone about the Metacello project - a configuration management add on for Monticello (version control for Squeak and Pharo). We'd like to thank Dale for taking the time to talk to us - it was a lot of fun!

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.

To listen immediately, use the player below:

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

If you have feedback, send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or visit us on Facebook or Ning - you can vote for the Podcast Alley, and subscribe on iTunes. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, metacello, monticello, version control

Here's a question that cropped up on the ESUG mailing list about application distribution:

As a non professional writing for fun the [deleted: ed], there is a very practical feature I badly need. I would like to be able to distribute my application without the need to distribute over 20Mb of image, change, VM. Doing so for one application is ok, but for 10 applications it is unacceptable (it does not scale well the on the target resource host).

This has always been an interesting problem with Smalltalk, but it's something you can deal with in VisualWorks and ObjectStudio:

• Create your base deployment image
• Ship the base deployment image and VM into a "well known" application directory
• At startup, your application knows where the base VM and image are, and has a directory of application components (parcels) to load, along with a manifest specifying what to load first - this can be accomplished with ini files and a startup class which fits into the Smalltalk startup machinery .

I suppose I coud do a screencast on it :) All of the pieces are there, they really just need to be put together more properly.

Technorati Tags: startup, deployment

If you're interested in the streaming broadcasts we've done (and will do in the future, you can find that stuff one of two ways:

• Visit the ustream page for Cincom Smalltalk
• Visit the Smalltalk Video page, where I've embedded the ustream widget (scroll or jump past that to get to the regular video section).

Technorati Tags: streaming, video

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at a small package of convenience methods I've used to deal with various network interfaces. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, convenience