One of the improvements in GNU Smalltalk 3.1 was the optimization of block operations on Streams. Basically, methods such as #next: and #nextPutAll: were rewritten to use fast collection operations instead of copying data element by element to the stream. Since #replaceFrom:to:with:startingAt: (the basic Smalltalk "move" operation) ultimately boils down to a memmove call, this is extremely fast.

But was this the end of the story? Today, after getting some inspiration from Nicolas Petton, I decided to try profiling Seaside and Swazoo.

We are proud to announce the release of Iliad version 0.7!

New features include:

- The ability to bookmark AJAX applications
- Important optimizations (Thanks to Paolo Bonzini and Stefan Schmiedl)
- A new XHTMLElement api which follows closely XHTML tags and attribute names, the old one has been moved to deprecated
- A new RSS elements hierarchy
- The javascript layer has been rewritten from scratch
- More widgets in the UI package
- View methods in applications are now called controller methods (this is what they really are about)
- New methods in Widget for control flow like #replace:* methods
- More unit tests
- A lot of cleanup and bug fixes

SandstoneDb, a simple ActiveRecord style presistence for Smalltalk, is now available for GNU-Smalltalk.

All the tests pass, but you'll need the latest Git version of GST in order to use it, since a new primitive needed by SandstoneDb has been added.

git clone git://github.com/NicolasPetton/sandstonedb.git

Many thanks to Sébastien Audier for doing almost all the porting job!

Now if you want to make a break after hours of development you can play with
Tetris under GST with GTK+ and Cairo ;)

imagik.fr

You can grab it under the VisualGST SVN

Iliad examples are now available online.

Enjoy!