About #isolate:

I was looking how to properly use WATransaction decoration (#isolate:) to prevent the backbutton usage, and found this message from Ramon Leon in the Seaside mailing list:

#isolate: is used to wrap what is essentially #call: to several
components in succession.  You could use isolate in a callback, if the
callback is calling another component to display, but not if it's just
setting instance variables.

The point is, all isolate does is expire any components created within
the block passed to it, when the execution of the block is complete.
Once execution has passed beyond the isolate block, the user cannot go
back to any component called from within the block.

Now I get it.

Dolphin is back

Andy Bower, of Object-Arts, announced the last sunday:

For several years now, in a climate of free and open source development tools, it has been difficult for us to create and sell our products in a maner which is commercially viable. For this reason we have decided that it would be financially impossible for us to commit to major new developments of Dolphin Smalltalk into the future. What this means is that Dolphin will continue to support Win32 under both XP and Vista but we will not be porting the IDE to .NET or any other platform. We will still offer the Community Edition for free download and the Professional version can be purchased by those who have evaluated that the Win32 product meets their needs.

Which means that Dolphin is back, and Seaside still have future on it. I've been developing with Seaside since a couple of months, and the developing experience is far far better than any of the others Smalltalk dialects. And BTW, Seaside never crashed, nor killed the VM, as happened to me with VW in previous versions (I think this is fixed now).

2008 started great!