On January 12th, it was announced at The Boston Media-Grid Summit that the Immersive Education Initiative has selected Croquet as one of three official “next generation” immersive education platforms. The Immersive Education Initiative is an international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia companies, and foundations that are working together to define and develop open standards, best practices, platforms, and communities of support for virtual reality and game-based learning and training systems. The Initiative will now direct both funding and programming resources towards the development and deployment of open source Croquet technologies and open source Croquet-based educational applications. Selection criteria for this important honor included the following: 1) support for the Windows and Macintosh operating systems; 2) availability as open source code; 3) vendor-neutral client and server architectures (no vendor lock-in); 4) stable and reliable runtime implementations; 5) integrated text chat and voice chat; 6) high resolution graphics; 7) multi-user support for collaboration; 8) highly customizable avatars that support high resolution graphics and body animation (gestures); and 9) support for user-created content. The other two immersive education platforms selected were Sun’s open source Project Wonderland client and the now open source Second Life client.
The new guy in town is Seaside.
Seaside arrived several years ago with little fanfare because it runs on Squeak, a relatively new version of Smalltalk. As you may know, Smalltalk is an “old” language that most of us have only heard the old-timers get sentimental about when they talk about the Good Old Days of the Computer Science Frontier.
It turns out that the Old is New again. It’s time to break camp and move on to the NeXT Level.
Hey, you don’t want to miss the Ground Floor again, do you? Give Seaside look.
In fact, Seaside predates Rails by more than 2 years.
In “On OOA and Simplicity (Part 1)”, Samuel Falvo says:
In short, it’ll take you, the programmer, substantially longer to implement a properly OO solution to any problem in Java than it would in Smalltalk. What this means is that a company will shell out more cash for proper OO solutions in Java than they would in Smalltalk. Period. The economics and the laws of physics agree on this one.
Squeak Smalltalk is wholly unlike any other open source programming tool you’ve worked with – and mostly in good ways. Unfortunately, it’s the bad ways that make the first impression. This hands-on tutorial will help you get past the unfamiliar and the unwieldy so that you can take advantage of the elegant and productive environment that lies underneath. We’ll cover what makes Smalltalk so wonderful: the “turtles all the way down” approach to language design, the highly integrated code browsers, object inspectors, and debuggers, the accessibility (and hackability) of every piece of library code, the built-in refactoring and unit testing support, and the extreme dynamicity and portability of the environment. But we’ll also address the practical concerns that keep people away from Squeak: how to get rid of the pastel colors and bitmapped fonts so that you can stand to look at it; how to get your source code into version control so you can collaborate with others; how to find documentation and examples; how to integrate with the OS and with C libraries; how to manage deployment.
Randal L. Schwartz (Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc.)
Squeak Smalltalk is the latest language to be supported on the iPhone platform. We talked to John M McIntosh who ported Squeak to the iPhone and also released software built with Squeak (and its…
