Fanciful Magic

Busy, Busy, Busy

I haven't been blogging much because I've been too busy. My stint on the java team at work is coming to a close. It's been a lot of fun and the team is truly awesome. But, I believe now more than ever that the language you program in affects the way you think. I've been spending all of my free time on Squeak projects. Here's some of the things I've been working on:

• Lazy Collections - Just released. Sending select:, collect:, reject: to a collection doesn't automatically perform the operation, but keeps the block and original collection around. Great if your cascading these calls because it doesn't create a temporary collection for results. I've updated it and hope to put it up on SqueakMap.


• AsyncObjectWrapper - Another small project. It wraps around any object and makes the public calls to the method run in its own process. It can run in async mode or sync mode (waits to return). I'm still playing around with this and it's just a bit of fun with Smalltalk, multiprocessing, and stacks.


• Web Content Manager - I want to add content to my website more easily. Thus, this project is going to allow me to have a nice looking web site and make it easy to update.


• Refactor DialectStream in Squeak. Ew. I wanted to change how the auto formatter in Squeak laid out my code and found a mess. This one is at the lowest priority. But, it would be fun to clean that stuff up. The code isn't that bad, it just needs a little cleaning up so that's easier for everyone to add their own auto-formatter to Squeak for their code.


• JDWP support in the Java project. JDWP is the Java Debugger Protocol. I got a great start on it. I'm about 25% through it and it looks like the rest of the java stuff. It will just take some time. Should be fun to find out where reality diverges from the spec. I haven't found a java spec yet to be 100% right. But, to their credit, the gotchas have been miminal and easy to fix. After that, it's RMI support to the java package! It's getting huge! What started out as a simple way to debug serialization streams has turned into a project that can read in java class files and disassemble byte codes. Lots of more work to be done. The eventual goal is to run java in Squeak!


• Super Secret Project. I can't talk about this one, but it's my top priority. It's going to rock!


• And finally, setting up a linux box to play with.

I've been Squeaking a lot and having huge amounts of fun in my free time. I hope to release some of this stuff soon. Time permitting of course...=)