The next release of GNU Smalltalk will include support for Seaside. This blog post is a short tutorial, which will show how to make your first Seaside component.

To follow this tutorial you need GNU Smalltalk 3.0a (which will be available from ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/smalltalk/smalltalk-3.0a.tar.gz later today) or a later version.

One of the new features in 3.0a and later is the ability to run an image in the background and control it from the shell. For example, you can try these commands:

$ gst-remote --daemon
$ gst-remote --eval '100 factorial'
$ gst-remote --kill

In the first installment, I showed how basic usage of git does not need any concept that is unique to a particular version control system. In this installment, I'll introduce more usage of git that requires learning a concept or two.

More and more projects are switching over to git or other distributed VCS. Even projects using centralized servers are doing so, because even if your project doesn't have a network of developers each with their own repository, distributed VCS have a very nice set of additional features. For example, the set of available offline operations is very complete; and as a consequence, not relying on network connection makes the system much faster even when you are not offline. Also, the possibility to quickly create and throw away branches makes it easier to do experiments.