VA Smalltalk V8.0.1 is now available

[wembley]

Instantiations is pleased to announce general availability of VA Smalltalk v8.0.1. Highlights of the new version include:

• Seaside 3.0 alpha5: Support for Seaside Core, jQuery, Scriptaculous and RSS
• Enhanced Web Services: XML tools now correctly generate a map-file from a schema
• Continued Tabbed Browser Enhancements: New tabbed browsers for Applications, Class Edition, Methods and Method Edition Browsers; tooltips added for tabbed browser toolbars; word wrap now supported for tabbed browser text
• Windows 7: Support has been added to the
• VA Smalltalk IDE for the Microsoft® Windows 7 operation system
• Windows "cdecl" Calling Convention: DLL entry-points defined with the Windows "cdecl" calling convention can now be called
• Improved Error Diagnostics for Memory Allocation: An immediate exception is made for heap memory allocation errors, allowing better diagnosis of memory allocation problems.

[daswartz]

Instantiations is pleased to announce general availability of VA Smalltalk v8.0.1

John, Congratulations to the team. These are nice enhancements.

Now for the future:

I unhappily note that 64 bit VM support is not in the roadmap! (Unless "Currency with respect to operating systems, databases" is codewords for 64 bit support.) I believe several of us noted "real" 64 it support is important to us during the virtual conference last spring.

I run Smalltalk on a machine (Solaris) with 64 Gig of main memory. Why am I spending time rearchitecting my application because it is approaching 2 gigabytes worth of objects in memory?

Doug Swartz

[marten]

I run Smalltalk on a machine (Solaris) with 64 Gig of main memory. Why am I spending time rearchitecting my application because it is approaching 2 gigabytes worth of objects in memory?

Doug Swartz

Well, see it the other way : when you do this refactoring: spreading your application over several 2GB independent images you can also get the additional power of multicores !!

On the other hand 2GB is not very much these days - we are now developing C# programs, using IN-RAM databases and we also get in the direction of 2GB, but well we might switch to .NET/64 platform and get rid of these limitations.

Marten

[wembley]

Doug -

The 2 (or 3) GB limit is a Windows 32-bit limitation. On 64-bit systems, I believe the limit is 4GB (the maximum that can be addressed by a 32=bit pointer).

[marten]

Doug -

The 2 (or 3) GB limit is a Windows 32-bit limitation. On 64-bit systems, I believe the limit is 4GB (the maximum that can be addressed by a 32=bit pointer).

Yes, you are right. According to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778%28VS.85%29.aspx:

32-Bit Windows:

User-mode virtual address space for each 32-bit process: 2 GB or "Up to 3 GB with IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE and 4GT"

64-Bit Windows:

2 GB with IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE cleared (default)
4 GB with IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE set


User-mode virtual address space for each 64-bit process


Not applicable


With IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE set (default):

x64: 8 TB

Intel IPF: 7 TB

2 GB with IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE cleared

[klaus]

Hello,

when we load the config map "z.ST: Server Smalltalk(SST) - Seaside a second time, this fails every time in #WAFlowMain class -> #initialize with a WAAttributeNotFound exception, trying to put #WAFlowMain at #mainClass.

Code: Select all

initialize
   WAAdmin applicationDefaults
      at: #mainClass put: WAFlowMain;
      at: #actionPhaseContinuationClass put: WAFlowActionPhaseContinuation

Kind regards

Klaus

[jtuchel]

Klaus,

interesting.
I get it when I load the corresponding test map z.ST: Server Smalltalk (SST) - Seaside Testing.
But I must admit I didn't load seaside twice into an image.

Since Cintinuations aren't supported (yet) on VAST, I was a bit puzzled by the fact that any WAFlowMain stuff gets loaded anyways...

Seems Instantiations either has to seperate all Flow stuff out of their load order more cleanly
...or make the VM support Continuations

cu

Joachim

[klaus]

Hello,

Seaside without continuations seems to be like a little bit pregnat.. I plead for continuations as soon as possible.

Regards

Klaus

[jtuchel]

Klaus,

I think it depends. Continuations can be helpful and mighty, but they can also make life very difficult when you want to use AJAX heavily.
I also see the danger of a web app implemented with Continuations behaving quite diferently from "normal" web applications.

To my knowledge, Instantiations is working on supporting Continuations, but it's not done yet.

I'd prefer to see a nice support for Unicode for web apps rather than lots of effort put into Continuations....

cu

Joachim

[marten]

Instantiations is pleased to announce general availability of VA Smalltalk v8.0.1. Highlights of the new version include:

• Seaside 3.0 alpha5: Support for Seaside Core, jQuery, Scriptaculous and RSS

Ok, having a closer look at Seaside for the first time I have some pretty beginners questions:

The documentation for 8.0.1 mentioned, that there is no Unicode support - does this mean, that I can not have German umlauts (as an example) in my generated HTML-pages, or what do I have to do to get these (by using Seaside). Otherwise this would be pretty useless outside the US or UK ?

Any additional information/experiences about packaging a headlless Seaside application ?

Thanks,

[a3aan]

Instantiations is pleased to announce general availability of VA Smalltalk v8.0.1. Highlights of the new version include:

• Seaside 3.0 alpha5: Support for Seaside Core, jQuery, Scriptaculous and RSS

Ok, having a closer look at Seaside for the first time I have some pretty beginners questions:

The documentation for 8.0.1 mentioned, that there is no Unicode support - does this mean, that I can not have German umlauts (as an example) in my generated HTML-pages, or what do I have to do to get these (by using Seaside). Otherwise this would be pretty useless outside the US or UK ?
..
Thanks,

We use something like

Code: Select all

app preferenceAt: #charSet put: 'iso-8859-1'

to configure our components and

Code: Select all

html document addLoadScript: ((html jQuery ajaxSetup)
            scriptCharset: 'iso-8859-1';
            contentType: 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=iso-8859-1'

to configure javascript.

Hope this helps,
Adriaan.

[jtuchel]

Adrian, Marten,

please keep in mind that the Euro symbol is only present in ISO-8859-15. But same here, we set the accept-charset to this character encoding and have very little problems

see here: http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com/2009 ... a-5-makes/
and here: http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com/2009 ... haracters/

(as long as nobody writes into our data storage using another charset, like a shared database in use by a Unicode app and our Seaside application).

cu

Joachim