The site soek.goodies.st gives access to the sources of open-source Smalltalk libraries and frameworks. A big advantage to developers is that they can explore Smalltalk classes without having to successfully load them into one of the Smalltalk dialect platforms. Recently, I have changed much of the Smalltalk generator and HTML/Javascript generated code.
Formerly, all Smalltalk source was highlighted using a client-side Javascript library. This resulted in long page loading times because it had to iterate through all DOM elements and replace the HTML content by a post-processing (using regex) result. Current version of Soek uses a highlighter written in Smalltalk that can pre-process all class source files.
Melissa is a simple tool that can help in building development and runtime images in a continous integration environment. It is being used extensively to create daily builds for Smalltalk images. This post describes the steps to use Melissa for VA Smalltalk 8+.
The intended way to use Melissa is to start with a clean VA image, load the Melissa config app and save it as melissa.im. In order to tell Melissa what to build, you need to start that image passing the command line parameter “-melissa buildscript.ws” like:
JNIPort for VisualWorks provides a way to use Java and its huge number of available libraries directly from Smalltalk.
For example, to access the Google Spreadsheets APIs and Tools, you need to download the Java client libraries and all its dependencies. The paths to there Jars must be known to the JVM and can be set through JNIPort. For easy deployment, I put together a single jar using an Ant build script such that the Runtime settings could be:
One way to build applications for the iPhone is to create a Web application that tries to look and behave like a native one. Currently, many Javascript libraries are being developed that try to accomplish just that. One of the big reasons for choosing this route is that developing such applications is so much easier compared to the Apple-way (learn Objective-C, build and test on the local emulator and try to get it accepted by AppleStore).
Soek is a Smalltalk application that provides a different way to navigate through documentation and source code of a Smalltalk library. Instead of the classic multi-list browser view in an image, Soek offers a flat view on all methods and classes and is build using the Seaside Web framework.
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I discovered this way of publishing a framework when I worked with Rails and did most of my searches on Railsbrain.com. Not only I could easily find a particular class or method, it also showed me similar methods, other implementations, classes and their sources. The learning effect was great and it became my standard search tool and recommendation to others.
If you want an existing package to register as a WebVelocity one and as a result make it visible to the browser page, you can evaluate this script:
(Store.Registry packageNamed: 'Your-Package-Name')
propertyAt: #application put: true;
propertyAt: #namespace put: 'Your-Namespace';
propertyAt: #velocityThemeName put: 'Default'.
which I found when looking for the newApplication functionality in the image.
Logging can be very helpful in analyzing the (faulty) behavior of a server application in response to client requests. HypertextLogger is a simple component that produces HTML in response to logging instructions. Its main purpose it to provide a better readable log file. By choosing you favorite CSS, you can highlight what is important and leave other information unfocused (timestamps).
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Upon creation of the logger, it produces a new .html file to which logging events are written. Because most Browsers can deal with open-ended (i.e. not properly closed by tags) HTML files, a single page can be used to collect lots of events. And if you let e.g. Apache serve these log files, you can monitor server applications remotely.
Glare-DataServices is a framework for building Flex Remoting services in VisualWorks Smalltalk. In this post, I will guide you through the steps for creating a small application that demonstrates the use of the framework.
Install the bundle
First, you have to connect to the Cincom Public Store Repository. Then open the list of Published Items and load the bundle GlareDataServices. It includes the Glare bundle and Glare-DataServices packages. The required dependencies AT MetaNumerics and Opentalk are automatically loaded if not present.
To make the VAStGoodies client work right from the VA image, I needed a service API in addition to the Seaside application that is running on VAStGoodies.com. Requirements for that service include “get all available configuration map names” and “get a download url for a particular version of a configuration map”.
Instead of implementing a full-blown end-to-end SOAP based Webservice, I decided to implement a much leaner RPC-style design that simply returns Smalltalk expressions.
The Cloudfork project is available for the three larger Smalltalk implementations: Squeak/Pharo, VA Smalltalk and VisualWorks. For maintaining the ports based on the Squeak implementation, we use the Package-Exporters package.
For porting to VA Smalltalk, we are using the VAPackageExporter as explained by Adriaan van Os. One important feature is the ability to maintain the port based on the changes to a project rather than repeating the all-in-one export.
For maintaining the VisualWorks port of Cloudfork, I extended the Package-Exporters project with a VWPatchExporter that can be used to export changes in the VisualWorks XML format. Having this feature, I can write the following expression to export only the additions/removals and changes to our project:
