The Hitchhiker's Guide to ...

Interesting presentation from Cincom's Martin Kobetic on a new stream implementation. I like the streaming with blocks...

There is a twitter account for the Pharo Smalltalk project now. Read more here.

There is a new chapter on exception handling available (from Stéphane).

It is intended for the second edition of the free book "Pharo by example".

Another new application that is based on the Seaside web framework is http://www.ibizlog.com. It is based on Pharo.

Gary Chambers is the creator of the Polymorph project - a skinnable UI look currently supporting Watery, Vista, Old Squeak and Windows 2k look.
It is available for Squeak and the default for the Pharo image.

Gary (or GazzaGuru) works in a company called Pinesoft and he posted some new screenshots of their latest application built with Pharo. Read more here and here.

BTW: If you want to customize the Squeak VM for an own Smalltalk based product I've created a short howto which is (thanks to Andreas) now available on squeakvm.org

First a short story:

While travaling this summer I met two IT teachers in a german train discussing about an interesting piece of software their kids have found on the web. They wanted to use it in school since the kids love it. They complained that there was not enough time in school to check out interesting new things like this and that the regular german study plan contains only the boring stuff so kids mostly turn away from programming. To them it was a revolutionary approach and kids loved playing and working with this software (mostly after school). It was not a game - it was a software to build, explore and simulate ideas and share them using projects.

To my surprise they talked about Scratch and after a while I was part of the conversation. I explained that it was built using an open source software called Squeak in a programming language called Smalltalk, told that that there is more to discover and pointed them to www.squeak.org, the OpenCroquet 3D environment and the german squeak e.V. (an organisation to make Squeak also known in school). They definitely wanted to checkout all the websites I wrote down on a small piece of paper...

And now the news:

Meanwhile Scratch has more and more interest from people all over the world and is now also featured in an article in the “Communications of the ACM”. Squeak new knows more about this.

Back when I was a student I asked several Smalltalk vendors to provide a version of their Smalltalk to put on a CD so people could start learning it. The GSUG Smalltalk CD was born which we handed out on conferences. VisualAge was not included since it was too large for one CD.
Later this concept was used for an ESUG CD too.

Times and hard disk space have changed and now James reports that Marten Feldmann has put together a virtual box image with several Smalltalk versions. Go check it out.

SmalltalkJVM - another project to run Smalltalk on the Java VM is now called Redline Smalltalk. The project was created by James Ladd, you can read more here and watch the progress on twitter.

Andreas is experimenting with an event driven Squeak VM prototype.

Ernest is playing with Seaside again and created a Smalltalk to navigate through documentation and source code. Read more here.

With the SqueakVM running on the iPhone you can now use both Squeak and Pharo to develop iPhone applications. If you want to know more about the Pharo path in iPhone development you should visit the Smalltalks 2009 conference, especially the talk about Deimos.

Eliot gives some details on the threaded Squeak VM he is working on and how it is inspired by David Simmons work. You may know David from Smallscript/S# - a very impressive system that unfortunately is not an active project anymore (as it once was) and never made it to the market.

Hernan invites to the Smalltalks 2009 conference.