Squeak-dev February 2000

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163 participants
655 discussions

[ENH] Stream input in words/lines/paragraphs as string/object
by Stephen T. Pope 28 Feb '00

28 Feb '00

Adds a number of string-reading methods such as nextLineString and nextWordObject (evaluates the next word) to PositionableStream. -- stp Stephen Travis Pope stp(a)create.ucsb.edu -- http://www.create.ucsb.edu/~stp

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Re: Pluggable Web Server!?! Why was this so hidden?
by Gerardo Richarte 28 Feb '00

28 Feb '00

While on this topic... has anybody done any benchmarks on PWS and/or Comanche performance, compared to Apache? My personal, intuitive point, is: While Squeak's performance on Socket serving and File accessing may be slower (is it true), using squeak for modules (a.k.a. cgi-bins) may be faster, compared to perl, php3, asp performance (this 3 languages are interpreted, not compiled to native. And are the 3 languages most used for web development) Can somebody tell me if I'm right? or at least if what I said looks right? I would like to do some performance tests in the near future, but I want to know if sombody has already done it. Performance Bye! Richie++ -- A390 1BBA 2C58 D679 5A71 - 86F9 404F 4B53 3944 C2D0 Investigacion y Desarrollo - CoreLabs - Core SDI http://www.core-sdi.com -- A390 1BBA 2C58 D679 5A71 - 86F9 404F 4B53 3944 C2D0 Investigacion y Desarrollo - CoreLabs - Core SDI http://www.core-sdi.com --- For a personal reply use gera(a)core-sdi.com

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RE: [CCC] Object class comment
by Peter Crowther 28 Feb '00

28 Feb '00

> From: John-Reed Maffeo [mailto:rlpa80@email.sps.mot.com] > Dwight Hughes wrote: > > Object is the root class for almost all of the other classes in the > almost all?? for which is it not? IIRC, see the class comment for ProtoObject. - Peter

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Re: [CCC] Object class comment
by John-Reed Maffeo 28 Feb '00

28 Feb '00

Dwight Hughes wrote: > > ----------------------------------------------------------------- > Object is the root class for almost all of the other classes in the almost all?? for which is it not? > class hierarchy. It provides default behavior common to all normal > objects, such as access, copying, comparison, error handling, message > sending, and reflection. Also utility messages that all objects should > respond to are defined here. > > Object has no instance variables, nor should any be added. This is due > to several classes of objects that inherit from Object that have special > implementations (SmallInteger and UndefinedObject for example) or the VM > knows about and depends on the structure and layout of certain standard > classes. > > Class Variables: > DependentsFields an IdentityDictionary > > Finally, because Object is the root of the inheritance tree, methods are > often defined in Object to give all objects special behaviors needed by > certain subsystems or applications, or to respond to certain general > test messages. > > ----------------------------------------------------------------- > > -- Dwight

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Re: RE: How Do You Do Business Apps? (Morphic Design Philosophy)
by Bob Arning 28 Feb '00

28 Feb '00

On Mon, 28 Feb 2000 11:31:23 -0500 "Norton, Chris" <chrisn(a)Kronos.com> wrote: >Could we please include some information about recovering from failure >situations to the top of the Readme.txt file that "ships" with a clean >Squeak image? > >This information is invaluable, especially to the newbies that sometimes >make disastrous mistakes and then save them. An alternative, much better in some ways and perhaps a little less handy in others is the web. The "Getting started" window already has a link to the swiki and that opens very nicely in Scamper, so the rest is easy. Once upon a time I created the Newbie Home Page with the idea that those new to Squeak could write up the things that represented bumps in the learning curve and how they were surmounted. Perhaps that is a good place to resume noting these little gems that some take for granted and others have never heard of. It's a project anyone can get involved with and which kept current as Squeak continues to evolve. Cheers, Bob

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Re: Visual Basic? HyperCard? An early morning ramble.
by Lawson English 28 Feb '00

28 Feb '00

On Mon, Feb 28, 2000 6:44 AM, Bob Arning <mailto:arning@charm.net> wrote: >On Mon, 28 Feb 2000 07:07:56 -0500 "Jay Carlson" <nop(a)nop.com> wrote: >>My favorite is when you select the wrong level of morph to manipulate---like >>the text, rather than the scrolling view that surrounds it. The first time >>I did this, I said "wow! look at all the generality in the system!". The >>second time, it made me wonder "is there some way of automatically locking >>substructure that an app isn't dealing with?". The third time I just got >>annoyed. I'm still trying to get my head around Paragraph, so these kinds >>of changes in Morphic are beyond me for the moment. > >Jay, > >I don't think this change would be particularly difficult to implement. What's tricky is knowing which >morphs the user might wish to have locked out of all the morphs that exist in the world at a given >time. Locking everything in a bowser, e.g., is not hard, but if the user wants some parts of the >browser locked and others not, the devil is in defining which is which. Do you have further thoughts/ >examples of what those might be in your case? HyperCard did it by locking according to class. I.E., you could manipulate buttons OR text fields, but not both simultaneously by clicking on them. If you selected the button editor, all buttons would hilite in some way to give you visual cues of where to click. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- "If everyone lived with a sense of wonder, their lives would be filled with joy." -Last words of Doug Henning, 5/3/47 - 2/7/00 -------------------------------------------------------------------------

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RE: How Do You Do Business Apps? (Morphic Design Philosophy)
by Norton, Chris 28 Feb '00

28 Feb '00

Hi Folks. You might remember that Bob, Doug and others posted these points about Squeak's recovery features a month ago (in response to my frustrated mumblings). Once again I'll ask the question: Could we please include some information about recovering from failure situations to the top of the Readme.txt file that "ships" with a clean Squeak image? This information is invaluable, especially to the newbies that sometimes make disastrous mistakes and then save them. Thanks! ---==> Chris > -----Original Message----- > From: Doug Way [SMTP:dway@mat.net] > Sent: Monday, February 28, 2000 1:11 AM > To: squeak(a)cs.uiuc.edu > Subject: Re: How Do You Do Business Apps? (Morphic Design Philosophy) > > > On Sun, 27 Feb 2000, Bob Arning wrote: > > > On Mon, 28 Feb 2000 "Mike Thomas" <miketh(a)ptmnet.com> wrote: > > > > > >How do I find what I have added/changed? Sometimes after an extended > > >session you forget and save the image. > > > > The top three items in the useful expressions list are: > > > > Smalltalk recover: 5000. > > ChangeList browseRecentLog. > > ChangeList browseRecent: 2000. > > > > These will tell you just about anything you want to know about what > > you have been doing. > > Also, probably the most organized way of looking at classes/methods that > you've changed is to use a Change Sorter... select "open..." then "simple > change sorter" from the World Menu. By default, all of your changes will > appear in a "changeset" called something like Unnamed1. You can then save > these changes to a separate file, etc. Also see the other items in the > "changes..." submenu. > > - Doug Way > EAI/Transom Technologies, Ann Arbor, MI > http://www.transom.com > dway(a)mat.net, @eai.com

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RE: How Do You Do Business Apps? (Squeak/Pro Proposal)
by Warren Postma 28 Feb '00

28 Feb '00

Quoth Duane: >I hope that people won't take the following comments too personally. Actually I thought they were hilarious. > Consider that perhaps some of those "modern" GUI concepts are 20 > years old and that it just _may_ be possible that one can build > better, different GUIs, and that something like Morphic can be coaxed > into providing some of the elements in that direction. So I should build my GUI around Morphic's piano-keyboard morph or a rotating smily face I can draw with the paint tool? Nice demos and educational stuff, but Morphic is hardly useful for any real work. And let's look at MVC for a moment. It has two (count em, 2) widgets: Rectangles, and Text. Some of the rectangles do things [scrollbars] but they are still just rectangles. Heck, even my Commodore 64 had a better GUI in 1985. If you're proud of Squeak's usefulness for "serious development", I'd just like to know what sort of serious development you mean. :-P > Consider also that there are several serious, professional developers > doing world-class work using Squeak, just not very openly, and not > precisely in the way you'd expect. What do you consider World Class professional work? I can see using Squeak for teaching smalltalk, and for research, and Alice sure is neato, but what serious [paid?] professionals are you talking about? Are there *ANY* commercially useful applications written in Squeak? Are there *ANY* applications written in Squeak that are used by non-programmers? Take 95% of the software in use today, and ask yourself if you could do that in Squeak, and if so, why are none of the "parts" those applications require built into Squeak? Squeak is not a consummate developers tool, it's an interestingly portable research platform, with less seriously useful features than Smalltalk/V had in the early 1990s. >business computing vision of 1985 And Squeak looks like a direct descendant of the ST-80. So maybe Squeak needs about 20 years of updating, do you think? Warren

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RE: How Do You Do Business Apps? (Morphic Design Philosophy)
by Dan Shafer 28 Feb '00

28 Feb '00

As I travel around speaking at and attending conferences and listening to developers, I'm finding that more and more of them are in fact using Web browsers as the UI to their apps. There is, of course, a great deal of merit to this approach, though it is not without its own problems, principally related to how to achieve anything like a fluid interface in the browser given its inherently static nature. DHTML is poorly supported cross-browser and Java on the client has no credibility. So how do we do Squeak "applets" that allow us to extend the browser UI in some interesting and meaningful ways without getting into platform-specific look-and-feel issues? I'm just starting to dig deeply into Squeak, have become something of an addict, but haven't yet encountered the answer to that question. -------------------------------------------------- Dan Shafer, Founder, Chairman, CTO, The WeTalk Network dan(a)wetalknetwork.comm - http://www.wetalknetwork.com Helping change the world through rich online communities -------------------------------------------------- -----Original Message----- From: Peter Crowther Peter.Crowther(a)IT-IQ.com Sent: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 12:12:22 -0000 To: squeak(a)cs.uiuc.edu Subject: RE: How Do You Do Business Apps? (Morphic Design Philosophy) > Just as a side comment, I'd like to point out that it is very easy to > provide a "business" user interface with a web browser. Absolutely. And it's cross-platform on the client. I'm no longer developing any standard Win32 applications within our organisation; it's all browser. - Peter ______________________________________________________________________ Get Visto.com! Private groups, event calendars, email, and much more. Visto.com. Life on the Dot. Check it out @ http://www.visto.com/info

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RE: How Do You Do Business Apps?
by agree＠carltonfields.com 28 Feb '00

28 Feb '00

> I haven't really gotten to the point where I'd say Squeak, > MVC or Morphic is > a lot of fun. I think it could be fun, and that's why I'm > sticking with it. > I may yet also end up learning Tk (tkinter) because at least > I could get > some trivial apps to run on both Windows and Mac. Perhaps Tk/Tkinter has come a long way in the past two years, but it was highly unstable (at least on the Macintosh), and looked quite different on Windows and Mac. The primary difficulty, of course, is the almost incoherent manner in which Tk's requirement of a topView visible window is reconciled with the Macintosh notion of a Menu Bar. I was just pushing over the limits of that hurdle when I first discovered Squeak. I completed a multi-media cross-platform application I was hacking over Python/Tkinter in Smalltalk just a few weeks after loading Squeak. I don't think I'd ever consider using Tk again outside the context of a script. > Beyond that, the parallels between Squeak/MVC/Morphic and > Tcl/Tk are many: > > 1. ugly but have fans who are vociferous in their support, > probably because > both are tightly bound to a particular language and style of > programming. > 2. both lack any kind of easy to use gui-builder > functionality, which makes > it hard for anyone new to adopt them > 3. both lack most of the more modern widget types > 4. both seem to have adopted the native-look-and-feel of an > X-Terminal from > the early 1980s, and neither one has been updated to be > capable of 'native > look and feel' on Mac and Windows. I respectfully dissent with many of these remarks. All I can say is that Mr. Postma should probably spend some more time with each, and then reconsider his views in view of what he has learned. As to ease of adoption, I think spending more time actually trying to adopt, or meaningfully comparing productivity with a specific competitive "with-GUI" system would be beneficial. If you determine it isn't worth the time now, by all means come back in six to twelve months or so and see what we have then. As to the sources of the ST-80 "look and feel," I suggest rereading some computing history. On the other hand, if a GUI-Builder is what Mr. Postma needs, I remind all that this is an open-source project, and we are all free to provide one.

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