Mosquit-glowFor those of you who are using or interested in Kaliningrad, you might want to take a look at Amber Skeleton, a project I just announced.

Where Kaliningrad is based on Seaside and Monticello, Amber Skeleton is based on Zinc and Cypress.

The Cypress project defines a format for disk-based packages. There are Cypress implementations available (or in the works) for GemStone, Pharo, Squeak, VAST, and VisualWorks.

The original motivation for Kaliningrad was:

I created the Kaliningrad project because I want to use Monticello to manage the code that I write in Amber.

With Amber Skeleton, the server-side Smalltalk source is stored on GitHub (using FileTree) along with the client-side Amber source, which is already managed on GitHub.

The FileTree project implements a Monticello repository type that is compatible with Cypress, it is easy to save Squeak/Pharo/GemStone Monticello packages on disk and use Git for version control.

Everything isn’t quite hunky dory:

  • Metacello does not have Git/GitHub support, but there is a project underway to address that.
  • Amber Skeleton is currently only implemented on Pharo, but Squeak and GemStone versions shouldn’t be too difficult to implement
  • Currently there is no image-based tool support for Git/GitHub, but there is a project underway to address that.

Despite the limitations, I still think that you might find Amber Skeleton interesting.

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/stonehorse/3854662047 / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0