The Ruby-Squeak Symbiosis

Having an IDE that I can use for multiple languages is cool. Initially I was unable to get Ruby support to install in Aptana because it said I needed some feature I’d never heard of:

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It’s been nearly 2 years since I started this blog and there’s only 1 post! What happened? Well, too many things to account for here, but in a word Interpretations. Here are a few specifics:

• Dan Shafer really got me looking at Rails and Ruby - the idea of a Smalltalk-like development tool that could be deployed widely on low-cost web-hosting accounts was very appealing.
• After lots of experimentation with Rails, I decided that WordPress was the best solution for what I needed as the current text-based, page oriented web paradigm winds down. Ditto for my use of Seaside btw - both are great object-oriented frameworks but I’d been there, done that already. Before the bubble had burst I’d led the development and deployment of an object-oriented web framework called Community Catalyst and learned that the higher level capabilities are more important that the implementation framework - hence WordPress.
• I began implementing my Morphtron Programming Framework in Ruby(hopefully I’ll get some of that code up here this week) but was very frustrated by the lack of an environment(including but not limited to a native Ruby IDE ). Morphtron is an evolution of the Free Dynamic Object Model(FreeDOM) I’d created in the mid-90’s for Smalltalk and Javascript.
• I spent some time looking at wxRuby and wxSqueak thinking wxWidgets might be a way evolve a common environment where I could take advantage of the powerful, well supported internet capabilities of Ruby without appearing to leave the Squeak environment. The immaturity of these toolkits made for very slow goings though.
• Driven by Second Life’s mega growth, my Croquet and Meshverse Journal blogs began to take up more and more time so since I wasn’t really using Ruby …
• During the past few months I’ve had more than my fill of “can’t do” and “can do with caveats”) experiences in Squeak - particularly having to do with REST, cURL, SSL and other bedrocks of the current web. Like XMPP/Jabber for example. Yes there are Squeak implementations I’ve been using for quite some time for BOPSpace but they are in dire need of refactoring,  SSL support etc. So I decided to revisit Ruby and realized that I could use it to do most of the heavy lifting.

These files currently implement the core behavior of the Squeak Dictionary class. By core I generally mean public methods not specific to UI support. This will change. Collection and Set are included for future evolution. Examples are available in the testxxxx.rb files.