jottings from the Eclectic Pencil

I have a note over at my Curl blog that Web Velocity is now available. So “Borges” for Ruby should look out even if running on rubinious …

Actually, CINCOM’s framework will likely see adoption in the enterprise (in recent years, financials) and Ruby on Rails remain the small ISV temptation that it already is … and no, Smalltalk is not dead: just look at the CINCOM client list.

Nor is PROLOG dead. One of the vendors simply chooses to mention their software and their clients, not their language. Competitive advantage, I suppose. What Seaside has done for Smalltalk we may yet see Logtalk do for PROLOG.

As for Curl, there should be an announcement soon …

I had a note from Giancarlo Niccolai bring me up-to-date on Falcon which has now reached version 0.9.2

Falcon is a multi-paradigm language - not yet as multiply gifted as Oz, but on its way.

The plans for Falcon from here to 1.0 are very ambitious: like Io, it is a language to keep an eye on. Are you coming with?

Over at my LogiqueWerks pages there is now a demo of the Aule Browser to view online or run on desktop for Windows or linux. You must first install the Curl runtime engine - something both safe and easy (Curl came out of MIT at the same time as the w3.org and has been in use in large corporations in Japan for almost a decade.)

‘Aule’ means hall or entryway (it is ‘Eule’ that mean owl … ) and because of the ‘lobby’ concept in the Io language, I had once suggested it as a name for Io. “Simple” was taken, so ‘Aule’ it is!

I took a moment to look at my Process Explorer (MS SysInternals) after starting up Google’s GMail Desktop applet. The price? Three processes consuming about 60 MB of available memory (this is Windows, so we are talking “available” and not my paltry 2 GB of RAM.) And when I open my gmail inside my LW site-specific Curl embedded browser? I have only added 1.2 MB to the load carried by the Curl RTE. Of course Internet Explorer and FireFox do help my harddrives stay in shape with all that swapping …. or do those folks think that all we do is browse the net with no real work applications open at the same time? Oh right .. those applications are going to be built into the internet browser …

So why the difference? The plugins and the bookmarks. I have a bookmarks set which exports as 5 Mb. It is too much for Maxthon to load. It is deadly when I ask even IE8 to first add a bookmark (go make coffee or tea or take a stroll.)

But Curl can load dynamically, so watch for the bookmarking addition to our Curl embedded browsers over at LogiqueWerks.

Over at my LogiqueWerks blog I posted a note on Squeak Smalltalk on the iPhone.

In that interview John McIntosh mentions Esteban Lorenzano working on a limited Squeak called Mars to run as an MVC framework on Mac Cocoa.

I will try to keep an eye on this Mars project …

With the release of Curl 7.0 there is now an additional resync facility as noted by Chris Barber.

Here is what the documentation says:

resync-file (accessor) Class: ComponentMetaData Package: CURL.LANGUAGE.COMPONENT

getter public sealed resync-file:#String
setter public sealed resync-file:#String

Set component resynchronization time from specified file.

When specified in the meta-data for an applet or script this attribute defines the URL of a file whose when-last-modified time will be used to set the value of process-resync-as-of.

When setting this value through this setter, the value must contain an absolute URL or an exception will be thrown. When setting via the applet or script declaration a relative path may be used or the empty string may be used as shorthand for the main applet or script load file.

Over at my Curl blog I added a post on return, the Curl macro.

What I could have added were the tags of some of my bookmarks in my Curl Documentation Viewer, such as

never-returns
unreachable
EmptySource
OpenPackage

But I think that Curl templates are a very handy way to implement alternative technical ebooks: what is needed is for a technical ebook publisher such as Springer to adopt Curl as an alternative offering.

Regardless, I must get over to Lulu about that Curl ebook …

If you are interested in pattern-matching languages but never learned SNOBOL, you might try the IDE by Rafal M. Sulejman.

If you are using linux, just make a few edits to the tksliderc file to flip the slash delimiters and set the path to your SNOBOL4. I also replaced the gvim entry with gedit but had to give an editor parameter of –new-window as it refused to add a tab to a running instance. A very handy feature is “Save Transcript” which for starters will save the hot-key guide when you first start the IDE.

If you like python or converge, you will be at home with the indenting. And there is SNOBOL for python in SnoPy.

I can only hope that someone extends the editor with XOTcl. SNOBOL patterns are also available for UNICON, one of the OOP variants of ICON, the language which evolved from the SNOBOL5 project.

It would appear that SNOBOL was the first language accidentally released as open-source (part of the story preserved in the Griswold papers here in MPLS at UMN.)

The story of SNOBOL and performance can be found by a google on SPITBOL over at duckduckgo.com

For another OOP-variant of ICON (this one with UNICODE) see the objecticon project ( a name choice as regrettable as ICON and UNICON as any web search will reveal.)

For a pythonic variant of ICON, see converge. For the latest on-going contribution of ICON to programming languages, see Fibers in Ruby 1.9

I was not aware that there was another binary alternative in Binary JSON or BISON. But I have found two places where developers outside ActionScript might want to take a look: the Glare framework for AMF with Smalltalk and the python AMF code.

Regardless, the Curl framework is using an abstract DataObject class with two subclasses: StandardDataObject and DynamicDataObject. It was interesting to see that one DataObject factory method uses
from-traits
    traits:DataObjectTraits
as traits are not much discussed in relation to Curl.

The supported types are bool, null, String, int, double, DateTime, DataObject, Array, ExtendedArray, ByteArray, AMFXmlDocument with the latter being just a wrapper for a String of XML. An ExtendedArray used to obtain a DataObject from a ByteInputStream or to put to a ByteOutputStream with its AMFSerializer and AMFDeserializer children.

Here is the default constructor for the DataObjectTraits:

{StandardDataObjectTraits.default
    name:String,
    members:StringArray,
    dynamic?:bool = true,
    externalizable?:bool = false
}

so this look very approachable. But it has nothing to do with Traits as in Squeak or Scala. Traits were introduced to help structure the refactoring of code in a way in which categorizing methods could not. Traits are classes which are not intended to have instances but which can implement methods. That is a very natural thing in Curl, but without a refactoring browser, their usefulness as an explicit cosntruct is dificult to demonstrate (an Eclipse plugin might be in the offing.) The Curl 7.0 introduction of a library access modifier should make naming classes with Trait more meaningful.

Now to get BlazeDS running on my Apache localhost.

Over at LogiqueWerks there are 2 new links on my Curl 7.0 page: a live page running unit tests against Curl project in a test runner UI (just click the RUN button) and the project beiing tested: a simple SSB (site-specific browser.)

I have come to rely on Mozilla Prism for the sites at which I make daily changes: but I know that Curl offers a an enterprise SSB alternative to GreaseMonkey. And I can see a Curl GTD browser that makes TiddlyWiki seem lame in comparison. Let 42 useful browsers bloom!