Reviving the IRTC in Smalltalk
One of my fond memories of years past was reviewing the frequent submissions to the Internet Ray Tracing Competition (IRTC), being consistently stunned at how Dave Buck's povray could be used to generate some remarkable photorealistic images, even back in the early days when 10 Mhz was a fast machine.
When I interviewed Dave for a recent FLOSS Weekly, I discovered that the IRTC had fallen into limbo, and was saddened by that. But apparently, my wish to have it revive was enough of a nudge for Dave to look in to it, and a few weeks later he announced that the IRTC was going to be revived. Even better, the new website would be written in Seaside, and that I had volunteered to help him with it. (No, he didn't ambush me... we had discussed this in email the previous day.)
Last night, Dave and I started chatting for the first time about the project. I managed to download the latest VisualWorks NC version, and get it up and running, and got connected to Dave's repo. Within 20 minutes of wandering through the code to understand what had been written so far, I found a common Seaside misunderstanding (calling #renderContentOn: a subcomponent rather than #render:), and pointed it out to Dave, so the relationship has already been useful. We also talked about the need for class comments, especially since WAComponent's comment is where I learned about the #render: mistake.
What I find exciting about this is that I have a solid project to get VW experience in, and since we'll be using Glorp, I also get to learn Glorp with a practical project. I believe the code will be dual licensed (both MIT and LGPL), so this will also be a great example for others to use of a reasonably interesting and complex Seaside application.
Thanks to Dave for letting me apprentice with him (including the patience to explain VW to me, one crazy step at a time), and have the opportunity to contribute to a visible project!
