[squeak-dev] The Weekly Squeak Summary No. 20: Aug 17, 2008 - Jan 31, 2009

Dear Squeakers,

welcome to this edition of The WeeklySqueakSummary, an irregular
traffic-dependent report on what's going on in the world of Squeak
based on the WeeklySqueak blog. Again, too many weeks have passed
since the last issue, but the number of items given below is still
rather small... is that good? Let's produce more news, preferably good
ones!

Highlights of the past weeks:

I'm not sure whether it's a good or a bad sign that some Gartner
analyst has come to the conclusion that Smalltalk is a good thing
[11]. Given what havoc analysts are capable of creating, it's probably
a double-edged sword. One can take out of this whatever one wants, I
think.

Anyway, on to more pleasant things.

About IDEs and GUIs: Trygve Reenskaug's DCI paradigm (read the reports
on his home page, it's worth it!) comes with an IDE concept, which he
has implemented in Squeak [6]. The Dependency Browser [12] allows for
keeping track of one's classes and their interactions. Mars [20] gives
you a native (read: Cocoa) GUI for Squeak on Mac OS X, and the Maui
GUI tool kit has been updated [19]. Oh, and IBM rediscovers their
likening for Smalltalk, integrating it with Eclipse [15] - I sincerely
hope the project won't be cancelled given the raging recent layoff
epidemic.

Alien FFI [18] is a lean and mean FFI implementation, coming from
Newspeak, and having been ported to Squeak. SqueakDBX [2] is a
relational database access layer.

Squeak is available for the iPhone [7] (makes me wish I had one), and
Pier has been updated [9].

The past weeks' news items:

[1] New Screencasts on DrGeoII
    http://news.squeak.org/2008/08/20/new-screencasts-on-drgeoii/

[2] SqueakDBX: beta release for OpenDBX plugin
    http://news.squeak.org/2008/08/22/squeakdbx-beta-release-for-opendbx-plugin/

[3] Squeak projects at Camp Smalltalk
    http://news.squeak.org/2008/08/25/squeak-projects-at-camp-smalltalk/

[4] ESUG Innovation Awards 2008
    http://news.squeak.org/2008/08/28/esug-innovation-awards-2008/

[5] ESUG '08 - Seaside Sprint
    http://news.squeak.org/2008/08/30/esug-08-seaside-sprint/

[6] BabyIDE - A New Interactive Development Environment
    http://news.squeak.org/2008/09/06/babyide-a-new-interactive-development-environment/

[7] Squeak on the iPhone - available for download!
    http://news.squeak.org/2008/09/11/squeak-on-the-iphone-available-for-download/

[8] Subversion integration for Squeak
    http://news.squeak.org/2008/09/16/subversion-integration-for-squeak/

[9] Pier Content Management for Seaside
    http://news.squeak.org/2008/09/24/pier-content-management-for-seaside/

[10] Squeak BOF at OOPSLA 2008
     http://news.squeak.org/2008/10/07/squeak-bof-at-oopsla-2008/

[11] 'Smalltalk is cool again', says Gartner
     http://news.squeak.org/2008/10/11/smalltalk-is-cool-again-says-gartner/

[12] New Dependency Browser for Squeak
     http://news.squeak.org/2008/10/22/new-dependency-browser-for-squeak/

[13] Squeak and Seaside BOFs at OOPSLA '08
     http://news.squeak.org/2008/10/25/squeak-and-seaside-bofs-at-oopsla-08/

[14] "Squeak: Learn Programming with Robots" now free!
     http://news.squeak.org/2008/10/28/squeak-learn-programming-with-robots-now-free/

[15] Smalltalk on Eclipse
     http://news.squeak.org/2008/10/31/smalltalk-on-eclipse/

[16] Monticello 2 podcast
     http://news.squeak.org/2008/11/04/monticello-2-podcast/

[17] Exploring history using Squeak multimedia
     http://news.squeak.org/2008/11/23/exploring-history-using-squeak-multimedia/

[18] Aliens coming to Squeak
     http://news.squeak.org/2008/12/08/aliens-coming-to-squeak/

[19] Building user interfaces in Squeak
     http://news.squeak.org/2008/12/24/building-user-interfaces-in-squeak/

[20] Squeak goes to Mars
     http://news.squeak.org/2009/01/08/squeak-goes-to-mars/

[21] Soup for Squeak
     http://news.squeak.org/2009/01/19/soup-for-squeak/

You can find this and much more on The WeeklySqueak blog, the newsblog
dedicated to the world of Squeak:http://news.squeak.org/

Subscribe to the WeeklySqueak RSS feed: http://news.squeak.org/feed/

Happy squeaking,

Michael