Update: Peter mentioned several items of interest in a follow-up email. With his permission, I have updated the end of this post with two separate tidbits of info I believe are well worth the click and/or scroll :D
[Original Post]
Peter Fisk, developer of Vista Smalltalk, gave a presentation last Wednesday to what I believe was a local Ottawa Smalltalk user group (will verify this with Peter.) the Ottawa Smalltalk Users Group at Carleton University. David Buck attempted to record the presentation, but apparently had some problems half way through. Not to fret, however, as he has created a compelling screencast of Vista Smalltalk running a XAML-based application inside of IE7 which includes various applications that help showcase some of the capabilities of using Vista Smalltalk as a browser-based solution for application development.
Couple of things to point out,
* Vista Smalltalk has built in support for Jabber/XMPP. Couple this with Windows Communication Foundation (the .NET 3.0 runtime library’s are required for VST to run) and you have one heck of a strong communication platform for hucking XML messages from one node to the next. The implications in regards to usage of VST for AJAX-like applications should be quite obvious.
* The XBAP-enabled runtime for Vista Smalltalk will be added to the latest release of the nuXle.us project (I finished the latest release on Tuesday, though there are still a few more pieces to add to the mix, so chose to hold off announcing it until I have a chance to finish building and testing these last few pieces.) and will be ready for download just as soon as I have had a chance to finish out all of the testing. You can find a listing of whats available now and what is to come at the projects ExtensibleForge.Net home.
* Don’t think VST is a cross-browser/cross-platform solution? Think again. ;)
Will update accordingly with a new post when its finished out and ready to go.
Until then, please enjoy the above screencast. *WELL* worth the five minutes invested!
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[Update:1],
In addition to the AJAX-style applications in the screencast demo, Peter mentioned some interesting tidbits that I thought I would pass along,
The interesting stuff is when you can do things like:
– send all or part of a user interface (via Xaml)
– send messages directly to remote objects
– use generated lists as Smalltalk expressions (like Lisp)
and then followed with,
The fun is just starting.
I think I would most certainly agree with Peter’s evaluation :) :D
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A direct copy/paste from Peter’s most recent email,
I have just finished updating the “TmsTicTacToe” demo to use Smalltalk expressions expressed as lists. This allows any language that can produce JSON format to communicate with Vista Smalltalk objects. I’ll post the details on my blog tomorrow.
I want to make it easy for other languages (Php, Python, Ruby, etc) to interact with Vst clients.
SWEET! :D
For those not subscribed to Peter’s blog — Repent!!!
Thanks Peter!
