More recently I’ve looked at Squeak. Squeak’s interesting in that it’s a fairly direct descendent of the original Smalltalk. In fact a recent discussion on the mailing list suggested that some of the object instances in the current image were probably first “new’d” back in the 80s. Squeak has a rather complicated history and both suffers and benefits from the rather different uses to which it is put.
The trouble with Squeak, for me anyway, is that since it’s so many different things to so many different people it can be a little distracting when you’re just trying to find an entrance. I’ve a feeling that it’ll be a little easier to get “into” Squeak once I can bring a more complete understanding of a more traditional Smalltalk—with that I think the experimental and exploratory aspects of Squeak will be much more approachable.
So lately I’ve been playing with Cincom’s Smalltalk. Their non-commercial release is free (as in beer), unlimited, and uncrippled and serves as a somewhat more straightforward environment to work with, at least for me. In any event they’ve got a rich set of documentation that’s focused on building the kind of apps I’m used to.
While I’m on the subject of learning Smalltalk, it’s worth pointing out Stephane Ducasse’s Free Smalltalk Books. Professor Ducasse has done the extraordinary work of tracking down the rights holders to a fairly complete library of Smalltalk books and gotten permission to make PDFs of those books freely available on the Internet. With those and the Cincom Visual Works product, the budding Smalltalk student is well supplied with the need to invest only time.
Tags: Smalltalk
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]]>The primary change triggered by the Yahoo announcement is that Konfabulator is now a free download. The purpose of the application is to allow you to place snippets of information in an attractive way (with hip transparency and fade effects) on your desktop. That information might be local (e.g. the system clock, the CPU load, network traffic) but things get more interesting when those snippets come from the Internet. Indeed, since Yahoo! is essentially a repository of information their acquisition of Pixoria and Konfabulator as a means to move that information to more desktops makes sense at least at one level.
From a development point of view Konfabulator is interesting in that it provides a “widget” plug-in architecture as a primary feature. Interestingly, the supported language for writing widgets is JavaScript (mostly embedded in an XML plug-in manifest). What with all the fuss and bother about AJAX, getting a somewhat better feel for JavaScript programming has been on my “to do” list for a while so I off I went.
For my first widget, I’ve got an idea about displaying certain kinds of data available at Amazon, so I’m using the Amazon’s Web Service API
I had hoped to write unit tests using JsUnit but its not clear that I can get enough coverage once I’ve abstracted out all of the Konfabulator specific bits (since JsUnit is designed to run in browsers). I’ll probably need to roll my own unit testing strategy. Ah well.
We’ll see how this goes…
Tags: Konfabulator JavaScript JsUnit
]]>The first two detail the means by which one might do the least thing that might possibly work in order to build effective ad-hoc groupware solutions. The last of the above list arose out of my observation that the TortiseSVN project, by integrating seamlessly with the Windows Explorer file browser, had become a rather interesting personal archiving tool for non-programmers.
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