In February 2015 I spoke about Bert Freudenberg’s SqueakJS at FOSDEM. We were all intrigued with the potential of this system to change both Smalltalk and web programming. This year I’ve had some time to pursue that potential, and the results so far are pretty exciting.
SqueakJS is a Squeak virtual machine implemented with pure JavaScript. It runs in all the web browsers, and features a bi-directional JavaScript bridge. You can invoke JavaScript functions from Smalltalk code, and pass Smalltalk blocks for JavaScript code to invoke as callbacks. This lets Smalltalk programmers take advantage of the myriad JavaScript frameworks available, as well as the extensive APIs exposed by the browsers themselves.
The most familiar built-in browser behavior is for manipulating the structure of rendered webpages (the Document Object Model, or “DOM”). Equally important is behavior for manipulating the operation of the browser itself. The Chrome Debugging Protocol is a set of JavaScript APIs for controlling every aspect of a web browser, over a WebSocket. The developer tools built into the Chrome browser are implemented using these APIs, and it’s likely that other browsers will follow.
Using the JavaScript bridge and the Chrome Debugging Protocol, I have SqueakJS controlling the web browser running it. SqueakJS can get a list of all the browser’s tabs, and control the execution of each tab, just like the built-in devtools can. Now we can use Squeak’s user interface for debugging and building webpages. We can have persistent inspectors on particular DOM elements, rather than having only the REPL console of the built-in tools. We can build DOM structures as Smalltalk object graphs, complete with scripted behavior.
I am also integrating my previous WebDAV work, so that webpages are manifested as virtual filesystems, and can be manipulated with traditional text editors and other file-oriented tools. I call this a metaphorical filesystem. It extends the livecoding ability of Smalltalk and JavaScript to the proverbial “favorite text editor”.
This all comes together in a project I call Caffeine. had fun demoing it at ESUG 2016 in Prague. Video to come…
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