Squeak People diary for cdegroot

3 Dec 2005

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 20:44:35 -0700

This is the last diary entry here - from now on I'll be blogging on my website

8 Nov 2005

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 02:12:44 -0700

It's late, but a new version of Nags is on-line. By Ken's^H^H^Hpopular demand, it now sports filtering on columns where it makes sense.

Nags should now be usable - modulo some testing - by the board and teams, so I hope that we can go into dogfood mode. Especially because I'm hoping to encounter database performance issues. I opted for the simplest solutions in the storage schema, sometimes downright stupid, and I am wondering how long Magma will take before protesting and how well schema migration stuff will be 'frameworkeable' so later projects based on Kilauea (the new name for Smam - thanks Chris!) will have some support in this area.

Feedback is welcome, especially in the form of Nags todos :)

6 Nov 2005

Sun, 06 Nov 2005 21:47:27 -0700

And another Nags release. Some big advances in usability - showing closed issues, searching through todo and comment text, cleaner layout of the details screen, indication of sorting, batched list for when the database gets even larger. Also, todo's now keep history so you can see when they were closed and/or reopened (and by whom).

As a side-effect, I created a package 'Tric-Seaside Components'. Doesn't have a lot yet, I put a subclass of WATableReport in there that controls a batcher. Seems a common case to me. More may follow. And the Smam version in there has code generation, starting a new project is now a matter of seconds.

5 Nov 2005

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 00:58:59 -0700

Wow. That was a busy week. On Monday, we released Kolibri 1.0 - sorry, still no decent English version. During the week, Stephane and I worked hard to get a lot of hard updates applied to 3.9a, but with the result that there's now something that works with ToolBuilder, contains Andreas' PlusTools, so the big cleanup can begin :).

I programmed in VAST for the last three days - an existing system needs a web front-end, and all there is is WebConnect. On the face of it, it looks all nice and visual with the Composition Editor, but tonight coming back to Seaside and doing some work on Nags was really relaxation. Boy oh boy what a difference... And what a pity that VAST doesn't support continuations.

2 Nov 2005

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 21:16:27 -0700

Ok, another little project based on Mantis - Anvil (see my private MC repository for code). It logs all class and method changes in a Magma database. The final result should be a sort of simple versioning system, hopefully compatible with Monticello, where all your images (and possibly others' images) log every change in a central database - no more losing change files :-).

If you've ever worked with Envy, you'll find that I'm hardly doing anything original here...

Hard problems to tackle: identify what open version a given image is working with...

30 Oct 2005

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 22:00:38 -0700

More Nags - Friday I had a spare 15 minutes, so I rode to BK, ordered chicken wings and a medium Coke, and added functionality to close issues in 5 minutes or so. Yesterday I was at a Scouting weekend, bored for 10 minutes, so I added groups functionality.

It's nice to see that Mewa and my thin 'framework' over Seaside, Mewa, and Magma didn't need to be touched for these changes. The site still looks butt-ugly, but it really starts to get a bit of shape.

Next will be not so visible: I want to add my timetravel stuff (for no good reason than to show off ;-)) and try to apply some suggestions expressed in Seaside+Magma using code that Brent sent me.

Test version of Nags

28 Oct 2005

Fri, 28 Oct 2005 00:28:58 -0700

Ok, I put the first (test) version of Nags - Not A Groupware System - on my test environment which means that until further notice, I'm now Officially a Magma Convert[tm]. Apart from Seaside and Magma, Nags uses Mewa, a package by Adrian Lienhardt that automatically generates Seaside screens for viewing and editing domain objects based on metadata. I like it because it is simple and lightweight so I can extend it as I go.

All code that is not specific to Nags has been factored out to a package dubbed SMAM (Seaside, Mewa and Magma) for the time being. It has documentation and you can setup your own package by simply following a howto - it mostly involves, at the moment, subclassing three classes and implementing 4 methods. SMAM's fileout currently is a bit over 5k, Nags weighs in at a whopping 11k. Not bad for a web app including persistence...

If you have suggestions for Nags, send them to me so I can evaluate what would be most useful. Nags first and foremost purpose is to aid the SqF board and the Teams with 'project management'...

Code is in the SqueakPeople project on SqueakSource.

27 Oct 2005

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 00:05:41 -0700

Salvaging some code from the The InternetOne application server. The first package is Time Travel, based on Patterns for things that change with time".

We used it for *all* persistent attributes, which meant that we stored the whole history of everything in the database. It made stuff like order state (just change the state - the audit log can be visited by traveling back in time), invoice prices (just point with a time-frozen link to the price list) trivial, and the amount of extra storage in the database was surprisingly low.

You can find the MC file here.

I plan to integrate this in a bit souped-up version of Mewa soon.

21 Oct 2005

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 00:27:10 -0700

I just released a little hack, called the QualityControl package - look on your local SqueakMap for more details.

The idea is to make it as easy as possible to find stuff that can turn out to be serious problems. And make is as easy as possible to fix these issues. Easy, by the way, is not only user-interface-wise but also time-wise: it doesn't help me a lot if I press a button before release and that button sets of calculating the Meaning of Life, The Universe, and Everything.

At the moment there are some tests I already was using in Kolibri and one suggested in Tim's recent post about senders of unimplemented messages.

Yeah, I know I'm setting out to rebuild SmallLint. But I want a one-button-push-subset of SmallLint, so to say, that most people agree on is at least worth checking. Plus, it runs Unit Tests and is PackageInfo Aware[tm] (so you now have a trivial way to run all tests in a package). In Kolibri, I actually fire off SmallLint and run the Bugs... category, but this involves some dirty code so I'm hesitant to put that out to the world :).

Keep tuned, I'm sure people will give me feedback on this...

10 Oct 2005

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 13:29:24 -0700

SqueakPeople's replacement in Seaside is taking shape. I added OmniBase persistence to the demo last weekend (http://de-1.tric.nl/seaside/sqp/list), which causes the image to start eating CPU time regularly. As soon as I have fixed this, I'm going to attempt to render all SqueakPeople content inside Seaside (using Bicephale, probably) so we can switch to Seaside for all read actions.

The first enhancement has been implemented already - the demo has a SqueakPeople password reminder :-)