eclectic-pencil LogiqueWerks blog

If you are going to serve Curl pages from Apache, you must have access to the .htaccess file or otherwise be able to specify MIME types.

The support team at the Curl Developer Center suggests these:

AddType text/vnd.curl .curl
AddType text/vnd.curl.dcurl .dcurl
AddType text/vnd.curl.scurl .scurl
AddType text/vnd.curl.mcurl .mcurl
AddType application/vnd.curl.pcurl .pcurl
AddType application/vnd.curl.car .car

You may have to explain that these MIME types cannot affect any user who has not installed the Curl runtime on their PC.

You may have to explain that these are for Curl and have nothing to do with cURL from www.haxx.de

If your web hosting service does not provide for user-defined MIME types, there is likely no choice but to look for another service.

Remind them that you do not need access to .htaccess

Invite them to visit www.curl.com or to learn about the beginnings of Curl at M.I.T. many years ago.

Or invite them to do a Yahoo! search on RIA Curl

I had a note from Giancarlo Niccolai bring me up-to-date on Falcon which has now reached version 0.9.2

Falcon is a multi-paradigm language – not yet as multiply gifted as Oz, but on its way.

The plans for Falcon from here to 1.0 are very ambitious: like Io, it is a language to keep an eye on. Are you coming with?

Over at eclectic-pencil there is a post covering the details of the LogiqueWerks demo of the forth-coming Aule Browser built using the Curl EmbeddedBrowserGraphic.

Expect features to appear daily because Curl is a high productvity environment.

You view the demo online or run a demo from your desktop here.

Over at my LogiqueWerks pages there is now a demo of the Aule Browser to view online or run on desktop for Windows or linux. You must first install the Curl runtime engine – something both safe and easy (Curl came out of MIT at the same time as the w3.org and has been in use in large corporations in Japan for almost a decade.)

‘Aule’ means hall or entryway (it is ‘Eule’ that mean owl … ) and because of the ‘lobby’ concept in the Io language, I had once suggested it as a name for Io. “Simple” was taken, so ‘Aule’ it is!

I took a moment to look at my Process Explorer (MS SysInternals) after starting up Google’s GMail Desktop applet. The price? Three processes consuming about 60 MB of available memory (this is Windows, so we are talking “available” and not my paltry 2 GB of RAM.) And when I open my gmail inside my LW site-specific Curl embedded browser? I have only added 1.2 MB to the load carried by the Curl RTE. Of course Internet Explorer and FireFox do help my harddrives stay in shape with all that swapping …. or do those folks think that all we do is browse the net with no real work applications open at the same time? Oh right .. those applications are going to be built into the internet browser …

So why the difference? The plugins and the bookmarks. I have a bookmarks set which exports as 5 Mb. It is too much for Maxthon to load. It is deadly when I ask even IE8 to first add a bookmark (go make coffee or tea or take a stroll.)

But Curl can load dynamically, so watch for the bookmarking addition to our Curl embedded browsers over at LogiqueWerks.

Looking at processes running under Windows, I see that when a Maxthon browser starts up and tries to process my bookmarks folders, its memory footprint blows through 90 MB. Meanwhile IE8 opens 3 processes, each near the 30 MB mark. But when I go to bookmark something for the first time in an IE8 session, then comes the big bite: only this time it is out of my workday as I wait for my bookmarks to load. At least with IE8 I can hop over into another session.

Online bookmark services do not yet seem to be the answer (and Maxthon eventually reports that I exceed their bookmarks limit) – at least not from the time I have put into Delicious and other such offering – even those revamped for Firefox.

So I will just have to try to do better with a Curl-based or a Rebol-based or an ICON-based browser (even Tcl/Tk may be in the running for this one). When I get a prototype ready, I’ll post a note. And hope that you bookmark it …

Over at LogiqueWerks Curl SSB pages there is a demo of browser pages running without the ability to swipe text and mail it anywhere. Internet Explorer 8 comes with accelerator tools for Evernote and such which are useful – but they are not always appropriate for pages with sensitive information.
The page at LW allows you to open a Curl applet page which remains in communication with the browser but has no text selection or context popup menus enabled.
The “Examples” button on that page opens in that same desktop window; closing the window returns you to your web page as does using the hyperlinks on the Curl applet pages.
Other examples can be found elsewhere in the LogiqueWerks pages. All require download of the Curl RTE

I have not been able to do the same for my blog at Curl.

Over at my LogiqueWerks blog I posted a note on Squeak Smalltalk on the iPhone.

In that interview John McIntosh mentions Esteban Lorenzano working on a limited Squeak called Mars to run as an MVC framework on Mac Cocoa.

I will try to keep an eye on this Mars project …

As reported in an interview on InfoQ, Smalltalk has arrived on the iPhone. The irony is that until now JavaScript or Objective-C were the options for programming the Apple iPhone or the iPod Touch. But JavaScript was in part the work of the StrongTalk Smalltalk team and came out of second-generation Smalltalk or Self. And Objective-C, like Ruby or Io, is Smalltalk for programmers who, well, aren’t working in Smalltalk.
Now to see if CINCOM VisualWorks Smalltalk arrives as a commercial option for the iPhone.
In the meantime, Smalltalk continues to evolve with the revival of Slate as Clean Slate Smalltalk. We have come a long ways since the case against a VM with bytecode was the case against Smalltalk – and not very far at all.
But is Smalltalk still an option for the Whirlwind/Vortex project out at WASP?
More to follow …

For info on Seaside, click here.

For info on Squeak Smalltalk on the iPhone, click here.