GLASS Beta Update: GLASS-dkh.119 & GLASS.230-dkh.150

Over the Fourth of July weekend my wife and I took some time off and stayed at a condo in Cannon Beach, Oregon. Besides the cannon, Cannon Beach is famous for Haystack Rock, the remnants of an ancient volcano and the third tallest sea stack in the world. The condo is located on the north end of Cannon Beach between Chapman Point and Ecola Creek. The sea stacks around Cannon Beach were formed some 15 million years ago when massive fissure volcanoes erupted in what is now westerneastern Oregon and easternwestern Idaho forming the Columbia River Basalt Group a flood of lava that covered 63,000 square miles. Over the ensuing millions of years, the Pacific Ocean has been pounding away at the these ancient lava flows and only the most stubborn chunks of basalt have survived as the beautiful sea stacks off Cannon Beach.

When I got back to work I began pounding away on the remnants of some ancient GLASS bugs:

• bug 38372 – ‘OGStackFrame dnu #homeContext during debugger restart’
• bug 38493 – ‘Loading and Saving a package with lots of requiredPackages is WAAAAY TOOOO SLOOOOW’
• bug 38544 – ‘TransientValue holds onto too much stuff’
• bug 38667 – ‘Check authorization before renaming a method category’
• bug 38844 – ‘asOctetString inefficient in Squeak methods’
• bug 38852 – ‘accept in debugger puts method in wrong class’

Bug 38493 is one of the more annoying bugs in GLASS and frankly once I fixed the bug (you should see a SIGNIFICANT speedup on future loads), I decided that it was worth publishing an upate. It’s hard to beat the beauty of Cannon Beach, but fixing Bug 38493 comes pretty close … haha!

I’ve published GLASS-dkh.119 (2.2.5) and GLASS.230-dkh.150 (2.3.0 or 1.0beta9). These two versions should be used with GemStone-dkh.283 (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. Load GemStone-dkh.283 into your Squeak image, then save and restart your Squeak image.

If you are running with a version of the GLASS package that is earlier than GLASS-dkh.118 or GLASS.230-dkh.146, then you need to follow these instructions first.

We have seen a couple of bugs in the server itself that are related to Continuations, so we plan on publishing a new version of the appliance in a couple of weeks once we’ve got stable fixes for the bugs (hopefully before ESUG).