Archive for console

Caffeine :: Livecode the Web!

Posted in Appsterdam, consulting, Context, Naiad, Smalltalk, Spoon, SqueakJS with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 22 June 2017 by Craig Latta

CaffeineFor the impatient… here it is.

Back to the Future, Again

With the arrival of Bert Freudenberg’s SqueakJS, it was finally time for me to revisit the weird and wonderful world of JavaScript and web development. My previous experiences with it, in my consulting work, were marked by awkward development tools, chaotic frameworks, and scattered documentation. Since I ultimately rely on debuggers to make sense of things, my first question when evaluating a development environment is “What is debugging like?”

Since I’m a livecoder, I want my debugger to run in the web browser I’m using to view the site I’m debugging. The best in-browser debugger I’ve found, Chrome DevTools (CDT), is decent if you’re used to a command-line interface, but lacking as a GUI. With Smalltalk, I can open new windows to inspect objects, and keep them around as those objects evolve. CDT has an object explorer integrated into its read-eval-print loop (REPL), and a separate tab for inspecting DOM trees, but using them extensively means a lot of scrolling in the REPL (since asynchronous console messages show up there as well) and switching between tabs. CDT can fit compactly onto the screen with the subject website, but doesn’t make good use of real estate when it has more. This interrupts the flow of debugging and slows down development.

The Pieces Are All Here

With SqueakJS, and its JavaScript bridge, we can make something better. We can make an in-browser development environment that compares favorably with external environments like WebStorm. I started from a page like try.squeak.org. The first thing we need is a way to move the main SqueakJS HTML5 canvas around the page. I found jQuery UI to be good for this, with its “draggable” effect. While we’re at it, we can also put each of Squeak‘s Morphic windows onto a separate draggable canvas. This moves a lot of the computation burden from SqueakJS to the web browser, since SqueakJS no longer has to do window management. This is a big deal, since Morphic window management is the main thing making modern Squeak UIs feel slow in SqueakJS today.

SqueakJS provides a basic proxy class for JavaScript objects, called JSObjectProxy. Caffeine has an additional proxy class called JSObject, which provides additional reflection features, like enumerating the subject JS object’s properties. It’s also a good place for documenting the behavior of the JS objects you’re using. Rather than always hunting down the docs for HTMLCanvasElement.getContext on MDN, you can summarize things in a normal method comment, in your HTMLCanvasElement class in Smalltalk.

Multiple Worlds

With a basic window system based on HTML5 canvases, we can draw whatever we like on those canvases, using the SqueakJS bridge and whatever other JS frameworks we care to load. I’ve started integrating a few frameworks, including React (for single-page-app development), three.js (for WebGL 3D graphics development), and morphic.js (a standalone implementation of Morphic which is faster than what’s currently in Squeak). I’ll write about using them from Caffeine in future blog posts.

Another framework I’ve integrated into Caffeine is Snowglobe (for Smalltalk app streaming and other remote GUI access), which I wrote about here previously. I think the Snowglobe demo is a lot more compelling when run from Caffeine, since it can co-exist with other web apps in the same page. You can also run multiple Snowglobes easily, and drag things between them. I’ll write more about that, too.

Fitting Into the JavaScript Ecosystem

To get the full-featured debugger UI I wanted, I wrote a Chrome extension called Caffeine Helper, currently available on the Chrome Web Store. It exposes the Chrome Debugging Protocol (CDP) support in the web browser to SqueakJS, letting it do whatever the CDT can do (CDT, like SqueakJS, is just another JavaScript-powered web app). The support for CDP that I wrote about previously uses a WebSocket-based CDP API that requires Chrome to be started in a special way. The Caffeine Helper extension provides a JavaScript API, without that requirement.

I also wrote support for generating Smalltalk code from JavaScript, using the esprima parsing framework, and vice-versa. With my debugger and code generation, I’m going to try developing for some file-based JS projects, using Smalltalk behind the scenes and converting to and from JavaScript when necessary. I think JS web development might actually not drive me crazy this way. :)

Please Try It Out!

So, please check out Caffeine, at caffeine.js.org! I would very much appreciate your feedback. I’m particularly interested to hear your use cases, as I plan the next development steps. I would love to have collaborators, too. Let’s build!

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Context status 2015-01-16

Posted in Appsterdam, consulting, Context, Naiad, Smalltalk, Spoon with tags , , , , , , , on 16 January 2015 by Craig Latta

Hoi all–

Context is the umbrella project for Naiad (a distributed module system for all Smalltalks), Spoon (a minimal object memory that provides the starting point for Naiad), and Lightning (a remote-messaging framework which performs live serialization, used by Naiad for moving methods and other objects between systems). I intend for it to be a future release of Squeak, and a launcher and module system for all the other Smalltalks. I’m writing Context apps for cloud computing, web services, and distributed computation.

Commits b7676ba2cc and later of the Context git repo have:

  • Support for installable object memories as git submodule repos.
  • Submodule repos for memories for each of the known Smalltalk dialects, with Naiad support pre-loaded. I’m currently working on the submodules for Squeak and Pharo.
  • A web-browser-based console for launching and managing object memories.
  • A WebDAV-based virtual filesystem that enables Smalltalk to appear as a network-attached storage device, and mappings of the system to that filesystem that make Smalltalk accessible from external text editors (e.g., for editing code, managing processes and object memories).
  • Remote code and process browsers.

There’s a live discussion site and a mailing list. The newsgroup is gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.squeak.context.

Thanks for checking it out!

Craig

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new Context active filesystem layout

Posted in Appsterdam, consulting, Context, Naiad, Smalltalk, Spoon with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 22 December 2014 by Craig Latta

When you start the Context app, you start a webserver that provides a “console”. Viewed through a host web browser, the console describes what Context is, and enables control of the memories it knows about. The webserver also provides an active filesystem via WebDAV. This lets you interact with the console from a host terminal or text editor, in a manner reminiscent of a Unix procfs (content is generated live-on-read). Here’s a typical filesystem layout, and what you can do with it:

/
   README.html

   memories
      3EAD9A45-F65F-445F-89C1-4CA0A9D5C2F8
         session
            state
            performance
         classes
            Object
               metaclass
                  (etc.)
               methods
                  at:
                  (etc.)
               slots
                  all
                     (etc.)
                  inherited
                     (etc.)
                  local
                     (etc.)
               subclasses
                  (etc.)
         processes
            the idle process
               ProcessorScheduler class>>idleProcess
                  source
                  variables
                     thisContext
                     self
                     (etc.)
               [] in ProcessorScheduler class>>resume
               (etc.)
            (etc.)
         workspaces
            hello world
               source
               result
                  7

The README.html file is what the console displays initially. It has a directory sibling memories, containing a subdirectory for each memory the console knows about. Each memory is named by its UUID. In the session directory, there are files which give information about a memory. The state file looks like this:

# This memory is running. You can send it one of the following
# commands: snapshot, suspend, or stop. To do so, write this file with
# the desired command as the first word after this comment. Subsequent
# comments give other information about this memory, like host
# resource usage and virtual machine plugins loaded.

(type command here)

# host resource usage
#
# bytes used:        437,598
# bytes available: 1,328,467

# virtual machine plugins loaded
#
# FlowPlugin

In this way, a file in the active filesystem provides access to a read-eval-print loop (REPL). The user gives input to the console by writing the file; the console gives feedback to the user (including documentation) by generating appropriate content when the file is read.

The performance file looks like this:

# instructions per second: 382,184,269
# messages per second:      12,355,810

This gives general profiling information about the virtual machine.

The subdirectories of the classes directory correspond to the memory’s classes. Each one has subdirectories for its methods, subclasses, and metaclass. The methods directory has a file for each method of the class. This provides the ability to browse and change source code in the memory from a host text editor.

The processes directory has a subdirectory for each running process in the memory. Each process directory has a subdirectory for each context of that process. Each context directory has a REPL file for the source code of the context’s method, and a subdirectory for the context’s variables (including the context itself), each of which is an inspector in the form of a REPL file. In this way, much of the functionality of the traditional Smalltalk debugger is accessible from a host text editor.

Finally, the workspaces directory has subdirectories for multiple “workspaces”, where one may evaluate expressions and interact with their result objects. Each workspace has a source file, another REPL file which contains instructions, the expression to evaluate, and, on the next read after write, the textual form of the result. In addition, in a result directory, is a file named for the textual form of the result, containing a REPL inspector for that result object.

These tools are useful both for newcomers to live object systems who are more comfortable with a text editor than the Smalltalk GUI, and for those accessing systems running in the cloud, for which traditional GUI access might be awkward or prohibitive.

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