Dear Squeakers,
welcome to this edition of The WeeklySqueakSummary, an irregular traffic-dependent report on what's going on in the world of Squeak based on the WeeklySqueak blog. Again, too many weeks have passed since the last issue, but the number of items given below is still rather small... is that good? Let's produce more news, preferably good ones!
Highlights of the past weeks:
I'm not sure whether it's a good or a bad sign that some Gartner analyst has come to the conclusion that Smalltalk is a good thing [11]. Given what havoc analysts are capable of creating, it's probably a double-edged sword. One can take out of this whatever one wants, I think.
Anyway, on to more pleasant things.
About IDEs and GUIs: Trygve Reenskaug's DCI paradigm (read the reports on his home page, it's worth it!) comes with an IDE concept, which he has implemented in Squeak [6]. The Dependency Browser [12] allows for keeping track of one's classes and their interactions. Mars [20] gives you a native (read: Cocoa) GUI for Squeak on Mac OS X, and the Maui GUI tool kit has been updated [19]. Oh, and IBM rediscovers their likening for Smalltalk, integrating it with Eclipse [15] - I sincerely hope the project won't be cancelled given the raging recent layoff epidemic.
Alien FFI [18] is a lean and mean FFI implementation, coming from Newspeak, and having been ported to Squeak. SqueakDBX [2] is a relational database access layer.
Squeak is available for the iPhone [7] (makes me wish I had one), and Pier has been updated [9].
The past weeks' news items:
[1] New Screencasts on DrGeoII http://news.squeak.org/2008/08/20/new-screencasts-on-drgeoii/
[2] SqueakDBX: beta release for OpenDBX plugin http://news.squeak.org/2008/08/22/squeakdbx-beta-release-for-opendbx-plugin/
[3] Squeak projects at Camp Smalltalk http://news.squeak.org/2008/08/25/squeak-projects-at-camp-smalltalk/
[4] ESUG Innovation Awards 2008 http://news.squeak.org/2008/08/28/esug-innovation-awards-2008/
[5] ESUG '08 - Seaside Sprint http://news.squeak.org/2008/08/30/esug-08-seaside-sprint/
[6] BabyIDE - A New Interactive Development Environment http://news.squeak.org/2008/09/06/babyide-a-new-interactive-development-envi...
[7] Squeak on the iPhone - available for download! http://news.squeak.org/2008/09/11/squeak-on-the-iphone-available-for-downloa...
[8] Subversion integration for Squeak http://news.squeak.org/2008/09/16/subversion-integration-for-squeak/
[9] Pier Content Management for Seaside http://news.squeak.org/2008/09/24/pier-content-management-for-seaside/
[10] Squeak BOF at OOPSLA 2008 http://news.squeak.org/2008/10/07/squeak-bof-at-oopsla-2008/
[11] 'Smalltalk is cool again', says Gartner http://news.squeak.org/2008/10/11/smalltalk-is-cool-again-says-gartner/
[12] New Dependency Browser for Squeak http://news.squeak.org/2008/10/22/new-dependency-browser-for-squeak/
[13] Squeak and Seaside BOFs at OOPSLA '08 http://news.squeak.org/2008/10/25/squeak-and-seaside-bofs-at-oopsla-08/
[14] "Squeak: Learn Programming with Robots" now free! http://news.squeak.org/2008/10/28/squeak-learn-programming-with-robots-now-f...
[15] Smalltalk on Eclipse http://news.squeak.org/2008/10/31/smalltalk-on-eclipse/
[16] Monticello 2 podcast http://news.squeak.org/2008/11/04/monticello-2-podcast/
[17] Exploring history using Squeak multimedia http://news.squeak.org/2008/11/23/exploring-history-using-squeak-multimedia/
[18] Aliens coming to Squeak http://news.squeak.org/2008/12/08/aliens-coming-to-squeak/
[19] Building user interfaces in Squeak http://news.squeak.org/2008/12/24/building-user-interfaces-in-squeak/
[20] Squeak goes to Mars http://news.squeak.org/2009/01/08/squeak-goes-to-mars/
[21] Soup for Squeak http://news.squeak.org/2009/01/19/soup-for-squeak/
You can find this and much more on The WeeklySqueak blog, the newsblog dedicated to the world of Squeak:http://news.squeak.org/
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Happy squeaking,
Michael