Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Food for thought

More and more Java add on vendors stop their business. Looks like it is not a viable business model anymore to sell tools or software in general. Read the story of Enerjy plugin for Java (a static code analysis tool) for yet another example. Some shops close down, others switch to becoming service providers.

Also the Java community get more and more fragmented. People start looking for alternatives like dynamic systems.

Especially after more and more people lamenting on new language extensions and the growing complexity of Java (even people from Sun). Others already announce that Java as dead.

I think computer science should start to learn from past experiences (instead of reinventing the wheel) and try to decrease complexity using minimalistic concepts.
Have a look at Smalltalk to see how powerfull systems can be just by having dynamic systems based on two simple things: objects and messages.

A very interesting talk in this regard is Ian's presentation from the workshop on self-sustaining Systems (S3). Food for thought ...

Better Squeak VMs

After checking my LinkedIn contacts I noticed that Eliot Miranda
is now Analyst/Programmer at Qwaq Inc. Some of you may know Eliot
from his work on the VisualWorks Smalltalk virtual machine.

It's interesting to see that he is working there since Qwaq Inc.
builds online virtual worlds based on Squeak and Croquet.

Maybe the Squeak Smalltalk system gets future improvements on
the virtual machine side if some of the development is contributed back
from the company to the Squeak community (as it was the case for the Hydra multi-core Squeak VM).

Interesting changes in the year of Smalltalk...

HPDF - Haru Binding for Squeak

I played with HARU last weekend. It's a free, cross platform, open-sourced software library for generating PDF. So why not use it from Smalltalk to generate PDF's:

I created a Squeak binding to it using FFI. Read more here.

The Squeaksource project can be found at http://www.squeaksource.com/HPDF.html

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Monday, May 05, 2008

Google Chart API for Seaside

Seaside has more and more additional projects like SeaChart. The project now also includes examples for using the GoogleChart API. Click on the image for a few examples: