Author: grant

An Introduction to Seaside

From the page on An Introduction to Seaside:

Seaside is a Web development framework implemented in Smalltalk. It allows the easy creation of powerful Web applications using high level abstractions on the application components and on the underlying hypertext transfer protocol.

While I have not read this book, I did take a dive into Squeak Smalltalk and heard a wonderful 4 hour presentation on Seaside by Avi Bryant. Seaside takes a novel approach to web application development that looks quite fun.
This book looks like a great read!

Dynamic Languages Symposium 2008

The Dynamic Languages Symposium 2008

is a forum for discussion of dynamic languages, their implementation and application. While mature dynamic languages including Smalltalk, Lisp, Scheme, Self, Prolog, and APL continue to grow and inspire new converts, a new generation of dynamic scripting languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, Tcl, and JavaScript are successful in a wide range of applications. DLS provides a place for researchers and practitioners to come together and share their knowledge, experience, and ideas for future research and development.

OpenCOBOL 1.1-pre released

OpenCOBOL

is an open-source COBOL compiler. OpenCOBOL implements a substantial part of the COBOL 85 and COBOL 2002 standards, as well as many extensions of the existent COBOL compilers.
OpenCOBOL translates COBOL into C and compiles the translated code using the native C compiler. You can build your COBOL programs on various platforms, including Unix/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
The compiler is licensed under GNU General Public License.
The run-time library is licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License.

Version 1.1-pre has recently been released.
Thanks to the hard work that folks put into great tools like this we all have a great way to get a taste of something with which many of us are very unfamiliar!
(via PLNews)

Halyard 2D/3D multimedia engine

[Dartmouth’s] Interactive Media Lab (IML) builds shrink-wrapped educational software for medical professionals and first responders. [They] have teams focusing on media production, script-level authoring, and low-level engine development.

They have released their engine, along with their object system, as open source.

Their system is pretty interesting in that they tackled a lot of problems on their own; and even after solving problems they still had to figure how to get the users to use the new code! Read about it in the write-up on CUFP 07.

Working with DrScheme 372

DrScheme is a delightful environment for working with Scheme. It is has the right balance between power and ease-of-use that makes it perfect for just about anyone. Its goal is to be an excellent vehicle for both working with Scheme and facilitating learning via its teach-pack facilities. While DrScheme works pretty really well “out of the box”, you ought to dig deeper into the documentation and configuration options. Over the past year or so I’ve used DrScheme exclusively for editing Scheme and found that there are a few key-bindings, settings, tools, and ideas that were very helpful to me.
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