The first proposal on remote Smalltalk development environment been posted in the Russian Smalltalk User Group mailing list in February, 2010. The proposal has met an acclaim of the community members, and… nothing happened then.
I have returned to the idea of the SLIME/SWANK analogue for Smalltalk in the end of December, 2010, on GNU Smalltalk sprint. During that weekend the core communication protocol has been drafted, and the first repository commit has been made.
Then I started working on the server part for GNU Smalltalk. That time I have used NetBSD as primary operating system, and found some issues with GSt’s socket functioning there. I have started to debug it and… found a bug in the kernel.
The Shampoo development continued some months later, the productivity has reached its peak April/May and the work was stopped again in July, 2011. During this period the most of the work was been done: the communication protocol has been implemented in GNU Smalltalk, the Emacs mode has started functioning.
In autumn, 2011, the code has been imported into Pharo for the further port development.
In 2012, the code of the both ports has been polished, the Emacs mode has got a major refactoring (i.e. rewritten almost from scratch), and some bugs have been fixed. And now it is here.
Shampoo Emacs mode uses some portions of code adopted from the other open-source projects:
http://emacs-jabber.sourceforge.nethttp://smalltalk.gnu.orgI would like to thank the appropriate developers for these awesome tools.
Dmitry