On Monday the whole Seaside group arrived - Myself, Alan Knight, Martin Kobetic, Tamara Kogan, Michel Bany as well as the whole star team - Suzanne, Arden and James. Also, master of documentation Bruce Boyer and master of ObjectStudio8 - Andreas Hiltner.

Monday was spent reviewing our porting efforts to date - the results of which are almost usable in the latest VW-DEV builds. I stuffed up the prerequisites of the Seaside bundle so you can't just load it straight - but it's pretty close. That should be fixed next build. This is Seaside 2.8 that we're porting. We're looking at providing Seaside 2.7 as a stepping stone between 2.6 and 2.8 as well.

Michel's prior manual builds will stay in contributed to give users time to migrate from that to the supported versions in the new seaside directory. As it is now - the porting process is automated. We inverted Michel's approach of exporting from Squeak such that VW now connects to squeaksource's monticello repository and imports the code in to VisualWorks and then publishes the like-version to store.

It sucks in the change comments, reconciles against the true versioned parent as per monticello's information, maps classes to namespaces, sets up imports and prerequisites.. and much more. I'm intending to release the SqueakImporter to public store at some point in the future to perhaps aid efforts like porting Pier from Squeak to VW.

One of the important things in the importer is the ability to filter out statements, classes, categories of classes, so on and so forth as the import progresses. This is in the latest version of FileOut30 which is part of the latest VW-DEV builds as well.

The Squeak bundle has had some attention and may not be 100% right now, but we're still working on making it as good as we can. Why did we change it? - Basically to reduce the number of class/namespace collisions in VW as well as make it possible to run Seaside in ObjectStudio8. That's still not working, but we've taken good strides toward achieving that.

Michel ported the SeaChart demo app from Seaside 2.6 to Seaside 2.8 yesterday and published it back to squeaksource - so naturally we're importing that now too. I hope we'll get that in to the next build too - time permitting.

Today Michel went through 3/4ths of his tutorial/presentations on Seaside with us. It's very well written but needs a few updates to match Seaside 2.8 - without a doubt we're looking to reuse these slides. They're great. After that, I broke the extended group up in to three teams and we all made a simple wiki application.

The exercise was to bring together what people had learnt and to share the knowledge around with developers there who weren't so familiar with Seaside. It turned out well, most of the code between implementations was very similar. We didn't have time to hook it up to Glorp in that session, but expect to see some glorp integration starting to appear over the next couple of months.

I'll be at OOPSLA in Montreal if anyone is going and wants to talk Seaside with Cincom. Two things that are in the build now - Seaside running on top of Opentalk-HTTP and Internationalization integration (per-process locales and translation of UserMessages - a VW framework).