
Ruby's Roots: Smalltalk Comeback and Randal Schwartz on Smalltalk
Smalltalk, a language that has had a big influence on Ruby, is making a comeback. We take a look at the current situation and talk to Randal L. Schwartz about Smalltalk.
Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community

Smalltalk, a language that has had a big influence on Ruby, is making a comeback. We take a look at the current situation and talk to Randal L. Schwartz about Smalltalk.

In this interview, Avi Bryant talks about the Smalltalk web framework Seaside, DabbleDB, using Smalltalk images for persistence instead of an RDBMs, GemStone and more.

In this interview, Avi Bryant talks about working on GemStone's MagLev, a Ruby implementation built on the GemStone S64 VM. Avi explains the reasons for MagLev, the merits of GemStone's persistence and distribution features, and the future with multiple Ruby implementations.
The long awaited MagLev Ruby implementation, based on GemStone Smalltalk, is now available in a public alpha release. While not quite ready to run Rails, it does support frameworks like Rack and Sinatra. MagLev comes with full support for GemStone's mature distribution and persistence features.
Gemstone has released Gemfire Enterprise 6.0 featuring a cluster resource controller that continuously monitors resources in the distributed data fabric. GemFire enables applications to sense changing performance patterns and proactively provision extra resources and trigger rebalancing of predictable data access, throughput, and latency without the need to overprovision capacity.
Gemstone's Maglev Demo at RailsConf sparked a lot of interest. A new project experiments with bringing this kind of transparent clustering to JRuby using Terracotta. We talked to Fabio Kung who's been experimenting with this approach.
In a recent blog post, Martin Fowler, a renowned software thought leader, observed at last week's QCon that the deep freeze in thinking about databases in application architectures is thawing. The world has been stuck using RDBMS databases for every application use case, but the time has come to also consider RISC RDBMS or distributed document-oriented databases.
At RailsConf on Friday, Avi Bryant and Bob Walker of GemStone revealed plans for the MagLev project. MagLev will run Ruby on Rails within GemStone's distributed object technology. The MagLev VM, although only partially implemented, so far outperforms MRI 1.8.
OODB vendor Gemstone works on a Ruby VM called MagLev. Working with Seaside's and DabbleDB's Avi Bryant, Gemstone bases the Ruby runtime on their Smalltalk VM to offer performance and powerful persistence features. We talked to Avi Bryant and Gemstone's Bob Walker about the technology behind MagLev and the plans for it.