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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Sydney Smalltalk and Ruby User Groups
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
We (myself and the WithStyle guys - Michael Lucas-Smith and Rowan Bunning) spoke to the Sydney Smalltalk and Ruby user groups this evening. I gave a brief update on the products, and then spoke about BottomFeeder. That was well received - lots of good questions and feedback. Again though - the penetration of syndication is less than everyone seems to think.
Next, Michael and Rowan gave a talk on WithStyle. Rowan gave some background on the work they are doing rich interactivity of desktop apps in the model of web apps. Lots of cool stuff with Rich UI interaction va the use of the With Style engine. Michael is going to do a demo - I'd suggest a quick visit to their website to join their developer program.
Good question from Bruce Badger - some would say that JavaScript "solves" this problem - what say you? Rowan's answer is that JavaScript and the browsers really haven't lived up to that promise. I'd add that lots of people - and firewalls - turn it off. Back to Michael - "We are going to break out of the browser" - we need rich internet applications (ed: like, say, BottomFeeder). They plan to support:
CSS with XML
Pollock integratin (with CSS styling!)
XForms
Advanced Widgets
Skinning with CSS
Why CSS - have a look at CSS Zen garden. Now he's off to do a demo. But wait - we're in one - his presentation is in WithStyle. Showed us the example browser, and now he's showing the WYSIWYG XML editor. This is very cool - you can edit the content w/o having to muck around with the XML itself - and it's smart enough to have an open back end (i.e., you can save to arbitrary CMS systems).
Lots of cool things integrated - CSS2 and CSS3 (almost there). ECMAScript integration with Smee from David Pennel. They've got an HTML Window (which I have to integrate into Bf...). Now he's going to show us how to build a presentation app. It's a fairly simple matter of a few methods, or a few files. This demonstrates the integration of XML Events and of Smalltalk scripting - it's a very cool integration.
They are now doing nightly builds and a developer program - you can sign up, get on the mailing list and grab the builds.
Questions: How do you deal with the onset of Avalon and its (someday) ubiquity? Answer - trying to be a rich client solution, not a web browser specific answer.
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