It’s an absolutely beautiful day today. Every February we get a week of sunny, fifty degree weather and it looks like this is the week. It is so nice to see the sun! Over the holiday weekend we were able to take our dogs for a run in a nearby dog park. It’s a real treat to see a Saluki in full flight.

Besides playing with dogs, I’ve spent some time playing with and cleaning up some things in GLASS. I’ve published a new version of the GLASS package (GLASS-dkh.88) and here are some of the hightlights:

1. I’m getting happier with the remote debugging factility – the steps for debugging are greatly simplified and I’ve even replaced the Hyper button on the GemStone Transcript with a Debug button that will open a debugger on the first continuation in the RcQueue (you’ll need to load GemStone-dkh.240 into your Squeak image for this feature). When you’re in production (#deploymentMode == true), the debug continuations are unconditionally added to the queue.
2. In the same vein as remote debugging, I’ve added a consolidated object log where you can dump a LogEntry into an RcQueue from any one of the gems serving Seaside requests and view the logged objects in the comfort of your own development image. No need to muck around in N different logs to look for stack traces or important error messages.
3. You may have noticed that in the past I have been somewhat vague whenever the subject of commit failures was brought up. Now, when you hit a commit failure, we drop a transactionConflicts Dictionary into the object log (see the comment in System class transactionConflicts for a description of its contents), and simply retry the HTTP request. If retry fails 10 times in a row, we throw in internal error.

I’ll be writing a couple of posts in the next week or so to provide more details.