Another good news for someone who really likes Adobe Flex/AIR and Smalltalk environments. Last time I wrote here about Glare project, and now there is an excellent example to build simple Adobe Air app with Smalltalk backend. I have only a one wish, if Glare will be available on other smalltalk platforms for example Squeak not only commercial VisualWorks, that’s gonna be something called “dreams come true”.

Here is an example to do something like on picture above.

Some time ago i have written about seaside and squeak on my polish blog - here. reason for that was because people do not always realized that smalltalk didn’t die at the same time as dinosaurs. Anyway, i’m lucky and working not only with one technology so was very happy to find something called Glare. What it is ? This is simple speaking a project that integrate smalltalk (visualworks in that case) and adobe flex. Sounds brilliant at the first look, but when i thought about it, was really confused. Why ? Smalltalk for example in Squeak or VisualWorks implementation is for development the same thing like ipod for music listening. It’s just incredible well thought. Everything is in one place, and we have IDE which is really truly intregrated. This IDE is not like NetBeans for Rails for example -  there are not a big difference to develop with simple editor or complicated IDE. But here IDE is one of the biggest advantage of using Suqeak for example. So now, when you think about it, we have two different style of thinking about web development:

1. Adobe Flex & AS3 - brilliant RIA framework with AS3, which is not the best language ever and comparing to smalltalk really complicated (+ use with puremvc, caingorm etc.)
2. Smalltalk (VisualWorks & Squeak) - brilliant language with DSL, Metaprogramming and IDE which gives us improvement kick.

One of the most exciting thing in Ruby and Ruby frameworks like Rails and Merb is Behavior Driven Development framework - RSpec. Generally BDD provides new quality in testing and documenting our code. RSpec is a brilliant example of Ruby possibilities, I mean DSL ( Domain Specific Language ). But like I said last time DSLs aren’t only Ruby but also (or maybe more) Smalltalk. We know that “Smalltalk can do nothing but build domain specific languages”, so it’s natural that we should have something like RSpec in our Smalltalk world, and we have ! It called SSpec. Of course you probably say that we have SUnit which is satisfactory, and you’re right. What is more SUnit is excellent and like everything in my favorit Squeak outstanding integrated with it. But it’s still TDD, and what we need here is BDD - next generation of testing family. So if you want to try it, go to the www.squeaksource.com/SSpec/ and download it, helpfuly will be also SSpec documentation which you can download here:

http://daveastels.com/files/sspec_manual.pdf
http://daveastels.com/files/sSpec_QuickRef.pdf

SSpec is maybe not so active and popular like RSpec but really interesting, so if you want to try BDD testing in your Smalltalk project you should use it