Porting SWT to trunk / Pharo - Report 1

I'm working on port SWT (Smalltalk Web Toolkit) to the latest versions of Squeak and Pharo.

SWT was developed and used extensively on Squeak 3.8 and I'm trying now to port it to 3.10 trunk and Pharo (Closures enabled images).


The process of install and run SWT on an image may change depending if the image has the web tools installed (Comanche, Seaside) or not.

On an image with the web tools installed, the process is very straightforward, only matter of install the packages from the repository.

On an image without the web tools, the steps are the following:
Install from squeaksource:

1. KomServices-gc.19
2. DynamicBindings-GiovanniCorriga.10
3. KomHttpServer-GiovanniCorriga.50
4. Modify the class MessageSends adding the methods #value: and #evaluateWithArguments (methods coming from Seaside).

I added these methods on a category *swt-nonseaside when the image don't have Seaside installed.

The installation of SWT and friends is so easy, only point the squeaksource repository: 

MCHttpRepository
    location: 'http://www.squeaksource.com/SWT'
    user: ''
    password: '' 

and install in order: 


JSON  
Lock   
Asteroid     
SWT     
When the installation ended, some issues appear (Are the issues I'm working on).



They are:
  


1. On the web tests of ST2JS are 3 tests failing and only 1 [*] on the ST2JS Test Runner.





 


2. Starting up Asteroid and going to the default url (http://localhost:9999) the first browser connect and works ok, but trying to connect more browser windows, all remains disconnected.


3. Anyway the most of sample applications works ok, except from some encoding issue.



[*] Really exists 2 failing tests but the first one, #testSimplest is only a matter
that the javascript get generated in different order than the one compared in
the test:

The signaled line need to be arranged on the comparation as is generated now with new Squeak/Pharo and it's all.

Well, this is the current status of the port, but I will not be working on this in the next few weeks, because I need to come back to the work for money :)

Sorry with the bad formatting, but I'm tired of fight with these questions on blogspot (The wysiwyg editor show a thing and render another and I don't have time to edit pure html). May be is time to change my blogging platform.

SWT on Smalltalks 2009

Smalltalks 2009 was held on November 19-20-21 on University of Buenos Aires. Was my first time there and hope not the last!.

All the conferences I attended were great and more great was the people I knew, all very friendly with me and Alejandro (We traveled together).

We enjoy all the conferences and tutoriales and also all the nice talks with the people of FAST and the other attendants and guests. In particular was an honour to us the possibility of give a technical talk about SWT (Smalltalk Web Toolkit) and between the people present we count Dan Ingalls!

Thanks to all the attendants to our talk, thanks to FAST by the possibility of be giving the talk, thanks to our friends Edgar, Francisco and Alex by the excellent companionship sharing the room of the hotel.

Also a big thanks to the distinguished guest that shared all their knowledgment with us, specially to James Foster, Stephan Ducasse (see pic) and Dan Ingalls.

We hope to be again sharing good Smalltalks talks on 2010!

Some more pics here.

Smalltalks 2009

We will be sponsoring Smalltalks 2009, an important conference about the Smalltalk technology in different areas of application.

The conference will have two sections:
    * Scientific Research
    * Software industry

and will count with distinguished guests as Dan Ingalls, Stephane Ducasse, Alex Warth, Tim Mackinnon and James Foster.

Also, and modestly, I will be giving a talk (together with Alejandro Aguirre) about SWT (Smalltalk Web Toolkit), the technology we used to develop several projects, for example: Ceibo.

If you are interested in smarter ways to develop software shouldn't miss this event!