Archive for webdev

Naiad progress 2019-12-02: online team services

Posted in Caffeine, consulting, Context, livecoding, Naiad, Smalltalk, Spoon, SqueakJS with tags , , , , , , on 2 December 2019 by Craig Latta
Naiad keeps livecoders informed of their teammates activity, and remembers all history.

topology established

Naiad is Caffeine‘s live module system. The goal is to support live versioning of classes and methods as they are edited, from connected teams of developers using Smalltalk or JavaScript IDEs from web browsers and native apps. Naiad keeps each developer informed of events meaningful to their teams and work. It’s comparable to a mashup of GitHub and Slack, and will interoperate with them as well.

The current Naiad prototype uses a relay network of NodeJS servers, each with Caffeine running in a Web Worker thread, and each serving a set of Caffeine-based client IDEs, in web browsers and native apps. The workers keep track of class and method versions, system checkpoints, and teams, using the relays to broadcast events to clients. Clients can request various services of the workers, like joining teams and making checkpoints from object memory snapshots.

These two clients are connected to the same relay server. The client on the left created a new team, by sending a message to the relay’s worker. The worker created the team, and told the relay to notify all of its peers (clients and relays). For now, clients respond by inspecting the new team.

I’ve just made the first system checkpoint, and broadcast the first team event (the creation of a team). Eventually, Naiad will support events for several services, including team chatting and screen-sharing, history management, and application deployment. I’m still eager to hear what events and services you think you would want in a livecoding notification system; please let me know! I expect the first public release of this work to be part of the second 2019 solstice release, on 22 December.

Leave a comment »

team livecoding features

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , on 10 November 2019 by Craig Latta
What IDE information would you like to share with your teammates as you work?

Caffeine can now:

  • provide an IDE as a DOM element
  • provide an IDE as a Chrome DevTools panel
  • run headlessly in a web browser worker thread, NodeJS server worker thread, or NodeJS main thread.

We have all the components we need to connect teams of livecoders, sharing information from their IDEs as they work. What information would we like to share?

proactive conflict resolution

I’d like to share information that makes code integration easier, by spreading awareness of potential conflicts as soon as possible. Imagine, for example, that you’ve found a bug in a longstanding system method, and decide to start editing it. Before the commit of your change (which may still be days or weeks away), someone else on your team also happens to start editing that method. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that both of you are interested in changing the method?

If both of you are connected to a team network, your IDEs can notify each other when a potential conflict situation like this begins, and the two of you can resolve it through discussion. Such a feature could be vital in a team where responsibility for methods and classes is clearly and completely divided between authors.

The servers in this network can provide history services, too, acting as repositories of all the versions of methods and classes that have been committed by team members. This could aid in unit testing, sharing of works-in-progress, and deployment.

How would you use it?

How would you like to use such a system? How would your needs change when acting as a developer, or as a manager? I’m writing a specification now, and would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks!

1 Comment »

Caffeine updated for Pharo 7

Posted in Caffeine, consulting, Context, livecoding, Smalltalk, SqueakJS with tags , , , , , , on 29 September 2019 by Craig Latta
Pharo 7 running on the SqueakJS virtual machine in Chrome, debugged by Squeak in a DevTools panel

I’ve updated Caffeine to run Pharo 7; please try it out! There was one virtual machine bug (primitivePerformWithArguments wasn’t manipulating the stack correctly), and I had to turn off a few Pharo features (like libGit support, which uses LibC, something I haven’t faked in the virtual machine yet).

Many thanks to the Pharo hackers in the RMOD team at INRIA Lille, for hosting me at their sprint on Friday, 27 September 2019. It was great hanging out and coding with you all. We’ll get that Pharo Apple Watch screenshot soon. :)

5 Comments »

%d bloggers like this: