Just found out that my presentation tonight on Seaside will be broadcast on U-Stream!  Live from 8pm to around 9:30pm Pacific Time (GMT-7, if my calculations are correct).  So, if you can't get to northern LA directly, now you can just jack in, and harrass me from thousands of miles away!

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Aran Deltec of the Thousand Oaks Perl Mongers has moved rapidly to enable me to make a last-minute presentation of my "Seaside: Your Next Web Framework" tomorrow night.  Details are available from their mailing list note.  It's an open invitation if you're in the greater LA area, although you may find it easier if you're already north of the hills.

Randal is one of the most well-known names in the Perl.  He's contributed many modules on CPAN [note: not true], avocates Perl [note: until this year!], and is one of the leaders in our community. Please come - if not for learning of Seaside, then at least to soak up some Schwartzyness.

Hope to have some of that Schwartzyness at hand, I guess.  Now, where did I pack that?

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I just got finished presenting Seaside at Freescale Semiconductors (a spin-off of Motorola as I understand it) here in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.  I used a slightly revised version of the presentation I made a week ago at MySpace, and as expected, the level of interest was high and the questions were good. I'm told that while they've traditionally used Perl for the web apps, they're looking at Grails and other solutions right now, so this might be another case of perfect timing.

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Seaside90

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After FISL, I spent a week in Rio to kick back and visit my friends of the Rio Perl Users Group (commonly known as "Rio.pm").  I offered to give a talk in exchange for hanging out for a meal, and they asked me what I would want to talk about. Of course, I said "Seaside", as in, giving the same talk I gave at FISL.

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As I'm chatting in the #squeak channel this morning, I was reminded that I had adapted Kent Beck's Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns for a half-day Perl coding tutorial.  In fact, I referenced this book in a Perl Column I had done for Linux Magazine. If you know both Smalltalk and Perl, you might get a kick out of that.

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James Robertson and David "K" Buck interviewed me for the Industry Misinterpretations podcast.  It was a lot of fun, and I got to talk about my history with Smalltalk, my views on open source advocacy (coming from my Perl background) and my future predictions for Seaside and Smalltalk.  Can't wait to hear it when it gets posted!

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So, I was lamenting the other day that #do: on a non-collection didn't just iterate over the single item.  Of course, that might have been a bit too much DWIM, but in Perl, I frequently would "alias" a complex value for a series of steps, as in:

for my $thing (some complex expression yielding a specific scalar) {
  $thing->do_this(@these_args);
  print $thing->asString;
}

(some complex expression yielding a non-collection) do: [:this |

  this oneMeth.

  this twoMeth.

  Transcript show: this; cr

].

(some complex expression yielding a non-collection) in: [:this | 

  this oneMeth.

  this twoMeth.

  Transcript show: this; cr

].

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Perhaps we need a community website for Seaside like the rather wonderful and quite successful Perlmonks.

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Welcome to my newest blog!

If you know me already, you probably know me as "Just another Perl hacker".  While it's true that I've been involved with Perl in a big way for nearly all of its 20 years, I've actually been coding in Smalltalk even before that!

My first experience with Smalltalk was reading all of the Smalltalk articles in that famous Byte Magazine... you know, the one with the colorful balloon on the cover.  I kept thinking "wow, this looks like a cool language... maybe some day I'll get to play with it for real."

I didn't have to wait long.  My group at Tektronix (Engineering Computing Systems) was exploring the "next gen" computing platform in 1982.  As part of our research, Teklabs loaned us a Magnolia: a 68K-based machine running the official Smalltalk80-Release1 image.  I spent countless hours playing with the machine, teaching myself Smalltalk, and being fascinated at how every bit of the code was available.  I learned how the windows were being drawn, and how the mouse reacted to events.  I even tried to understand how the compiler created the bytecodes, but that was a bit beyond me at the time.

My former Tek boss called me up from his new company, Servio Logic.  I joined them in 1983 as a system administrator, and one of my tasks was to maintain... a Xerox Dolphin.  See, this startup wanted to create an new kind of industrial-grade database that could be programmed in a high-level object language rather than SQL. They had chosen to create a Smalltalk-like language, but I remember nudging the lead developers into restricting the syntax into Smalltalk syntax.  I had imagined that some day, this Smalltalk thing would catch on, and it'd be nice to move code transparently between the GUI and the database.  And that's the choice they took to create the Gemstone database, later changing the company name to match the product.

After leaving Servio, it would be a long time before I'd see Smalltalk again, except referenced in articles.  I think I played with an Apple Lisa that ran ST80, but it would have been only for a brief time.

Then, along came Squeak.  As I was already a Mac user, Squeak fascinated me.  I downloaded the OS9 (8? 7?) compatible early images, and started playing around, and felt like I was coming home again.  I've been active on the Squeak mailing list since near the beginning, although shocking a few people from time to time who thought I would only do Perl.  I even used Squeak at a Web conference in 99 to demonstrate rapid website prototyping, so it wasn't like Perl was my only gig even then.

Throughout my Perl career, I constantly referred to Smalltalk, saying that "you don't really know objects until you've used a real object language, like Smalltalk."  And I turned many people on to Squeak to experience it firsthand.

But as luck would have it, my former boss at Servio (now Gemstone), Monty Williams, called me up a few months ago to nudge me about the new product they were announcing: a price adjustment for the Gemstone/S products (free for small installations!), and a packaging of Gemstone with Seaside to create a rapid develop-and-deploy environment for fancy web applications ("GLASS").  I had not seen Seaside before, and the more I looked, the more I liked!

I did a trial development with one of my clients to replace a Perl-based web app with a Seaside-based app, and we both liked what we saw, so I'm continuing development of that. But yes, this means that I've finally popped my commercial Smalltalk "cherry": I'm being paid for coding in Smalltalk.  And only 25 years after my first "do-it"!

Over the past couple of months, I've decided that I would introduce Seaside consulting and training into the offerings of Stonehenge.  I really think that anyone that is looking at Ruby On Rails for a startup should consider Seaside as well.  But part of the barrier to having Seaside as a choice is having enough support, and that's where I can enter as Stonehenge.  We already have a confirmed track record in producing industrial strength trainings and consulting services for Perl, so migrating into Smalltalk and Seaside should be a natural fit.  And given the much-more-OO-nature of Perl 6, it's also a natural crossover with new materials for Perl 6 as well.

So, I've created this blog, to hopefully post with some regularity about things I'm discovering about Seaside or Smalltalk or Squeak, and maybe solicit feedback about what's most needed and wanted for my company directions.  Feel free to comment here, or email me privately at merlyn@stonehenge.com.

Thanks for reading!

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