Archive for July 20th, 2005
I saw Avi Bryant talk about Seaside yesterday. Seaside is quite a neat framework. TonyG and Andy have been playing with it for some time.
Avi mentioned that Seaside’s continuation-based model of web application development is in some sense the anti-RESTful - there is a lot of state kept on the server. It occurred to me though that this doesn’t have to be the case. Implementation details aside, in most cases continuations can be quite compact and hence one should be able to to round-trip them between the client and server, thus removing the server-side state. That is, essentially, the approach taken by WASH/CGI.
What really makes Seaside interesting is the way it allows composition at the page level, and extends this seamlessly to AJAX -style web applications.
It seems like we are only a small step away from RESTful AJAX-style continuation-based web applications.
July 20th, 2005
matthias
A few days ago, I mentioned the idea of building a Scheme machine atop the existing Squeak VM and image. I’ve started some work in that direction: I’ve built (yet another) S-expression reader for Squeak, with associated data types and a unit test suite, and I’ve started building an interpreter that I intend to use to explore different ways of overlaying a Scheme-like environment on the existing Smalltalk environment. Once something settles down, a compiler to Smalltalk bytecode can be built.
Apropos the bytecode, I installed VMMaker in my image to look for a tail-call bytecode. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be any such feature implemented at the moment, although it may not be much work to implement it. I’ll be interested to see how the Squeak community reacts to a tail-call implementation: with luck, it will be accepted into mainstream VMs.
July 20th, 2005
tonyg
A few months ago, I pulled SuperCollider 3 from CVS and built it. Just yesterday, while replacing the strings of my guitar, I needed a guitar tuner and so turned to SuperCollider to build one. Finding the help text somewhat skeletal, I updated my CVS checkout and rebuilt the application. The documentation has been significantly fleshed out and the software now sports a fancy new icon as well as what looks like a port to windows. I’m looking forward to exploring it in greater depth.
July 20th, 2005
tonyg