Smalltalk Industry Council Gets New Executive Director

As the new Executive Director of the Smalltalk Industry Council, I’m going to try to keep a more active participation in the Smalltalk community. One way is to use this new fangled blog thing that James Robertson keeps talking aboug… http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/sticBlog/blogView
On that same topic, this today’s posting:

A key part of my vision for promoting Smalltalk is a STIC supported, and community authored, Smalltalk news web site. I see it as a Smalltalk centric ersion of slashdot.org, a site that provides a short summary of interesting current content in other forums.

For those of us old enough to remember, comp.lang.smalltalk was at one point the central gathering place for all things Smalltalk. We’d debate coding styles, design patterns, dialect preferences … everything. It got so busy, that at one point a subject naming convention as adopted to make it easier to select postings by dialect: the subject would be prefixed with [VW], [VA], [GS], etc.

Over time, people left to use other, more focused forums: Yahoo groups, mailings lists, blog feedback threads, and so on. Personally, I find it a challenge to keep up with Smalltalk activity that is outside of the tools I use. James Robertson’s blog acts as a nice notification system for other
forums, but that’s only one person, with a personal scope.

I’d love to have a web site that I could go to and see what’s up in the Smalltalk space. A site that was updated regularly enough to stay interesting (ideally daily). It’s not something one person can do. STIC can arrange to host the site, but we’ll need community support to keep it current; individuals that would monitor a forum and post periodic entries on interesting threads, with links to the original content.

We’re still working on the site hosting. Soon we’ll be asking for volunteers to help provide content. Please give it some thought, and consider getting involved.

Bob Nemec
Executive Director
Smalltalk Industry Council
www.stic.org

VAST Seaside Challenge

Eric Clayberg at Instantiations recently issued this challenge:

Seaside is a framework for developing sophisticated web applications in Smalltalk.

http://seaside.st/

Many folks consider it to be the killer app for Smalltalk, much like Ruby on Rails is for Ruby.

Currently, Seaside is available for Squeak and VisualWorks. It has not been ported to other dialects such as VAST. We would like to see it ported to VAST. To that end, we are issuing a challenge to the VAST user community to port Seaside to VAST. To make it worth your while, we are offering a reward of a full license to VAST and all of our add-on products (a $9,595 value) to the first *five* people who successfully and independently port Seaside to VAST (we want to make sure that anyone who gets it working is rewarded, not just the first to finish).

The Seaside web site states that “Many Smalltalk VMs do not support the stack-copying techniques Seaside uses to implement backtracking”. According to the site, this includes VAST. Assuming that this is true, you may need to be creative and come up with slightly different implementations based on what VAST can do. The most important criteria is that the public API surfaced by Seaside works as specified. Tutorial examples should also work unmodified.

http://seaside.st/Tutorial/

-Eric Clayberg
Sr. Vice President of Product Development
Instantiations, Inc.

http://www.instantiations.com/vast

Refactoring and Smalltalk

This article from The Register talks about refactoring and VisualWorks Smalltalk.

Smalltalk: Requiem or Resurgence?

This article on Dr. Dobb’s discusses if Smalltalk is now in resurgence. Read the full article