Nobody who writes Web applications would claim it's easy. The MVC programming paradigm can help ease the burden a bit, but widely available programming languages and frameworks have made such a choice difficult at best. An essay on Advogato bemoaning the blurred lines of development between browser and server got me thinking about the tool I'm using for my Web app development these days, NOLOH. Despite the fact that it's written in the ugly PHP language, NOLOH is an elegant and highly leverageable framework. NOLOH in Python (coming in the distant future) would be even better, but for now at least NOLOH even beats Python-based Django and Smalltalk-based Seaside.

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The worlds of Squeak and JavaScript collided in the mind of Smalltalk genius Dan Ingalls and produced the most amazing development platform I've seen in years and years: Live Kernel, an open source "experiment" from Sun Labs.

My good friend Laurence Rozier of The Meshverse Journal fame pointed me at this new project. It's truly amazing.

All Dan did was to take the brilliant direct-manipulation paradigm and class architecture of Morphic (which originated in the vastly intriguing world of the programming language called Self and then morphed [if you'll pardon the expression] into Squeak Smalltalk) and implement it in pure JavaScript! Wowza!

The tutorial alone is amazing. Even if you're not a programmer, even if you have no idea what Morphic or Squeak or Self are, you should check it out. The impact of this could be to the Web what Adobe's AIR promises to be on the desktop.

It is a fun time to be alive in the Meshverse!

My good friend Laurence Rozier slipped me some pointage to a cool video demo of Croquet, a great collaborative open source development universe built on Squeak Smalltalk.

Julian Lombardi has done a bang-up job of creating a video commercial for Croquet that shows you a large part of its potential.

Great stuff.

My good buddy Laurence Rozier dropped me a quick note tonight to point out that another dialect of Smalltalk has gone the way of the Dodo bird. Dolphin Smalltalk, which I never liked and used only briefly, is being discontinued by its passionate developers a decade after its launch as a Windows-only tool.

Smalltalk, as anyone who's read this blog for very long knows, is my favorite language, my secret vice, my "If only I could do whatever I want to do," programming tool cum IDE. Dolphin never interested me because: (a) one of the main points that drew me to Smalltalk was its cross-platform design and nature; (b) Dolphin was not only platform-specific, it was specific to my least favorite platform; and (c) I just never saw it get any traction.

For a hobbyist coder like myself, Smalltalk has become all but invisible. VisualAge Smalltalk, once a product of IBM, has been taken over by my old colleagues at WindowBuilder, but the $7k price tag is out of my range.

Another robust Smalltalk was VisualWorks Smalltalk which grew out of ParcPlace Systems and is now handled by Cincom. I assume it's pretty pricey but I could never get their team to give me a price, so I can't be sure. They do have a free offerin, though, for non-commercial use. I've tried it and I don't hate it but it doesn't seemed to have improved its user experience since the days PPS had it.

Squeak is my favorite Smalltalk but it's just about useless for serious app development because its UI is, as Rozier said it so well, "in UI hell." It has spawned two major forks: Sophie, an ambitious attempt to make the creation of Web-delivered interactive multimedia accessible; and Croquet, an even more ambitious 3D world/operating system.

The folks who promote Smalltalk tend to be educators interested in how it can be used to help kids learn to program (which is the language's historical launch platform) and a handful of dedicated Smalltalkers who remain commited despite the language's evident drawbacks.

Oh, well, enough pining away. I need to get back to the OO PHP work that pays the bills. Sigh.