Looking Forward to ESUG 2008

Monty Williams, James Foster, Martin McClure, and myself will be attending the 16th International Smalltalk Joint Conference 2008 put on by ESUG. The conference will be held in in Amsterdam, the Netherlands from August 25-29, 2008. Camp Smalltalk will run August 23-24, 2008.

Martin will be giving a talk entitled “GemStone for Dummies”:

[The] presentation is an introduction to GemStone/S from the viewpoint of the Smalltalk programmer, focusing on the differences from other Smalltalk implementations…

Monty will be giving a short talk on MagLev:

MagLev is a new ruby VM developed by Gemstone…

I’ll be giving another version of “Glass: Share Everything”:

Seaside has been characterized as a “heretical” framework because it breaks many of the widely-accepted “best practices” for web applications, including “share as little state as possible.” With GLASS (GemStone/S, Linux, Apache, Seaside, Smalltalk) GemStone takes this heresy to the next level where “everything is shared” – transparently and persistently….

James will be giving a tutorial “Glass hands on”:

This hands-on tutorial will present Seaside and walk through the process of building an application using GLASS (GemStone, Linux, Apache, Seaside, and Smalltalk). Topics covered include handling user logins, where to put session data vs. application data, building reusable components, styling a web site with CSS, and an introduction to Javascript…

We had an excellent time in Lugano, Switzerland last year and I’m looking forward to another excellent show this year.

Early registration ends on July 15th, so make your plans and register.

Smalltalk Solutions 2008

For those of you who missed the great conference in Reno this year, you can head over to the STIC site and view the slides for most (if not all) of the presentations.

For the GemStone talks, you can download the slides for my “GLASS: Share Everything” talk or James’ slides from his “Building A Seaside Appplication (with GLASS)” tutorial.

[Update: 9/25/2008] When video and/or audio becomes available, I’ll post another note.Apparently there will be no video or audio of my talk at Smalltalk Solutions. James was in the room and taping my talk, so there must have been technical difficulties.[Update: 9/29/2008]James does have audio and video of my “GLASS: Share Everything” talk. Sorry about the confusion, but I didn’t bill my talk as a “Gemstone Roadmap”. Thanks for all the hard work you’ve put into making the audio and video available!

GLASS Beta Update: GLASS-dkh.118 & GLASS.230-dkh.146

I’ve just published GLASS-dkh.118 (2.2.5) and GLASS.230-dkh.146 (2.3.0 or 1.0beta9). These two versions should be used with GemStone-dkh.279 (Squeak). All three of the versions can be found in the GLASS project on GemSource. If you decide to upgrade to these versions, first load the version on the GemStone-side, commit and logout. Then load GemStone-dkh.279 into your Squeak image and save your Squeak image.

With this update, you will need to do a couple of things to get things to load correctly:

1. Before loading the GLASS package, turn off autoMigrate or evaluate ‘MCPlatformSupport autoMigrate: false.’ The shape and superclass of WAExternalID has been changed in Seaside2.8.2 and the automatic migrate algorithm chokes. As Seaside sessions expire, the old instances will go away.
2. After loading evaluate ‘WAAllTests initialize’ and turn autoMigrate back on.

This release contains the following features:

• Seaside 2.8.2 (Seaside2.8a1-lr.563) merged
• fix bug38366 – blank versions in history list
• fix bug38916: FSSocketServer>>addConnection: and FSSocketServer>>removeConnection: not threadsafe

See GLASS package history for more details.

Between preparations for Smalltalk Solutions and working with Seaside2.9 and 3.0, I’ve been keeping pretty busy. After Smalltalk Solutions, I hope to find time to make another pass at the tools and do a little blogging about GLASS.

Public GLASS Beta

It was just over a year ago that we annnounced GLASS at Smalltalk Solutions 2007 (May 2007). We were running on Seaside2.6 and at the time we figured we would be ready for a public beta in about 3 months – ho ho!

By ESUG 2007 (August 2007), we had ported Seaside2.8 to GemStone/S and we had a set of Squeak-based development tools for GLASS. By OOP 2008 (January 2008), we (nearly) had all of the tools implemented in OmniBrowser.

By the end of January we had shipped GemStone/S 64 2.2.4 and made version 1.0beta6 of the appliance available for download to those who had the appropriate hardware and were interested enough to send us an email.

In the last few months, we have addressed commit conflict handling for Seaside, debugging in a multi-vm environment, shipped GemStone/S 64 2.2.5.1 and created 1.0beta9 of the appliance (based on a 2.3 beta).

We’ve had a steady stream of requests for GLASS and now we are prepared to make the beta publicly available. So head on over to the downloads page and get busy! While you are thinking about it join our Beta mailing list, too.

If you are considering putting your GLASS application into production, then you should use version 2.2.5.1. As a released version of GemStone/S 64, 2.2.5.1 has undergone our full QA testing and when future versions of the product become available we will document the procedure for upgrading your GLASS repository to the new version of the product.

MagLev for Smalltalk

I assume that most of you have heard about MagLev which is a product that brings GemStone/S techology to the Ruby world. It is no secret that MagLev leverages a large chunk of the GemStone/S code base, but what hasn’t been emphasized is the fact that we are planning to release a new version (version 3.0) of the GemStone/S 64 product that is based upon the same MagLev vm technology.

Development for the new vm actually began last summer with an effort to speed up the Smalltalk vm by generating native code. Along the way features have been added, like the ability to support the Ruby language:). For Smalltalk execution, it looks like the 3.0 vm will be 1.5 to 2 times faster than the 2.0 vm.

We are shooting at the end of the year for the release of ‘GemStone/S 64 3.0’ and we will have more product details at Smalltalk Solutions.

For Seaside fans, you will be interested to know that I am in the middle of porting Seaside2.9 to version 3.0. I’m down to 4 failed and 15 errors in the Seaside unit tests.