Computer Visions: A Conversation with David Gelernter–David Gelernter is one of my “personal heroes”, as he’s probably the godfather of everything Jini and then some. I have collected all the papers of his group, it is great stuff, and his book, Mirror Worlds is still worth a read.
Ok, I might just differ with him […]

A nice list of alternatives for Ruby-on-Rails in other languages. Good to keep around if you need to do a project in your non-favorite language.
Less good: history rewriting is beginning. The author, Marcus Vonwaller, in his closing sentence:
I haven’t tried anything but the real thing (and I’m loving it) but I thought the list was […]

In Business Week, an article on Java’s perceived demise. Some nuggets I can’t help commenting on:
In the late 1990s, Yared was chief technology officer of NetDynamics, which pioneered an application server designed to boost the performance of Web sites. It was based squarely on then wildly popular Java. He went on to spend five years […]

Just read the Hedgehog Architecture document at the Croquet Project. I am really looking forward to this upcoming release–I’ve been dabbling in peer-to-peer and otherwise distributed systems, and it looks like Croquet contains a very nice framework inside which may prove useable outside of the realm of concurrent 3D worlds.
Thanks, Bert, for pointing […]

Ok, I’ll stop after this one (yeah, sure…): The Power of Smalltalk IDE’s:
DOH! When your autocompletion gives you the wrong information it makes it more than worthless, I hope I don’t get people saying ‘oh but its because the IDE doesn’t know what object you’re wanting to complete…’ cause that’ll be playing right into […]

Cedric says:

Humane Interfaces clearly violate both YAGNI and the “do the simplest thing that could possibly work” principle, so I’m quite happy to see them gaining traction
Errr…. Humane Interfaces doesn’t mean, in my opinion, that you cook up a baroque interface a priori. It does mean that when you have a choice of adding to […]

James talks about Runtime/Development Time and I can’t help adding my 2 cents. In Kolibri, we opted for a simple ‘lockdown’ instead of image stripping (or, IMO the better way, reconstructing a deployment image from the bottom up by starting with a minimal image and adding your code). It’s just not worth it.
When we […]

On the v3dot9 discussion list a discussion is currently being held on how to streamline the process of integrating bug fixes with preferrably the least amount of work (most active Squeakers are either lazy or busy. Or both). Looks like a simple Mantis-driven process with some conventions about comments both in Mantis and Monticello will […]

CQ2 is a company I regularly work with - they’re a nice bunch of guys and were very much at the front wave of XP/Agile. They’re not dogmatic about XP, however, and constantly looking for ways to improve their processes.
One of the nicest results is their combination of story cards with a planning board […]

Just a quick note–the details are in the squeak-dev posting–Kilauea just got another little component. It’s an image that runs a Magma server at startup and provides a small management interface using HttpView2 (HV). I used HV because it was sufficient for the job and is quite a bit smaller and less intrusive than Seaside–properties […]