Steve on Smalltalk

Stephan B. Wessels is a long term follower of Smalltalk and contributor to Squeak. On his blog "Plum street" (which has a nice design BTW) he shares some thoughts on Smalltalk and software development in general. A must read.

ESUG 2009 starts

ESUG 2009 conference in Brest, France will start tomorrow. Adriaan provides first pictures on his website from the Camp Smalltalk.

Avi Bryant on Trendly, Ruby, Smalltalk and Javascript

Interesting interview with Avy. Did I mention that (beside dabbledb.com) he already built a new website called trendly.com?

He also announced Clamato this week (a smalltalk dialect for javascript).

Smalltalk in the Navy

According to this news the Navy is using Qwaq virtual worlds which is built using Squeak Smalltalk ;)

Some infos are also up on the company website.

More on Magma

Following my lates post about Magma High availability there are more news from Chris:

"Magma R42 is now running in production at a
tier-1 mobile carrier performing real-time, nationwide call control
for a crucial location-aware voice and SMS application.

Magma passed the operator's high-availability requirements and
disaster-recovery fail-over test on the first attempt."

Aida 6.0

Janko announced version 6.0 of the Aida web framework and application server.
It now runs on Squeak, Pharo and VisualWorks.

Dolphin Smalltalk Next Generation

Were getting closer to September ... would be interesting if the community will get more informations on the announced DNG (Dolphin Smalltalk Next Generation) beta release - (see here) about the DNG startup workshop in Tarvisio, Italy.

What is Dolphin Smalltalk Next Generation: easily said it is Dolphin Smalltalk (a very interesting Smalltalk derivate for windows) now running on the LSW virtual machine from Frank Lesser. AFAIK the first version will be a Dolphin 6 running on the new VM including with support for FFI and a pluggable JIT.
The new image should also be split up into many self contained "mini-images" (SLL's).

The last info I got was from here and there.

Interesting times ...

Smalltalks 2009 Conference Argentina

Andres announced "Smalltalks 2009" - the third Smalltalk Conference of Argentina.
Read more here.

Magma High Availability

Chris announced release 42 of Magma, a multi-user object database written in Smalltalk. Beside Squeak this new release now also runs on Pharo which was already discusses on the Magma mailinglist.

But it is more interesting that a single logical repository can now be served from multiple servers simultaneously (each with an own copy). This introduces high availability which is explained in detail here.

Hardware programming the easy way with Smalltalk

An interesting demo video on how to control hardware using
the Squeak EToys scripting system by interfacing with
a microchip (PIC16F877A MCU).

SqueakFest News

You want to know how Smalltalk is used in Nepal or get some news about Eliots new virtual machine for Squeak. Then visit the squeakland site with new videos from the Squeakfest Brazil and USA.

Remote Control on Seaside images

When you want to remote control a headless seaside webserver image
(pharo or squeak based) you may want to choose VNC. There is a package already available called RFB (Remote Frame Buffer).

Miguel tweaked it a little bit these days. Read more here and here.

Cog status and FFI directions

Some update on the status of the Cog VM from Eliot. Nice.

Custom applications with Smalltalk

Before deploying a custom application/product written in Smalltalk
(here Pharo and Squeak) you may want to adapt your Smalltalk environment or even build a custom virtual machine. No fear ... it's easy.

I've written a short HOWTO that is now up on squeakvm.org.

There were others who tried to learn about Squeak's deployment possibilities -
like Jens Moenig with his Sudoku solver and Geneator which was also packaged as executable. But I hope this short docu will help others to easily build products with the current state of these free and open source Smalltalk implementations.

BTW: The Squeak Win32 VM now also has support for large cursors ... so when you write a game even the cursor is changeable.

OpenVG - vector graphics for Squeak and Pharo

You want to use vector graphics from Smalltalk? Igor Stasenko
announced the availability of OpenVG for Squeak and Pharo.

How to use it:
- download the pharo Win32 installer and run it
- in the monticello browser (World menu -> Monticello Browser -> Repository) add http://www.squeaksource.com/OpenVG as HTTP repository and load OpenVG-Base, OpenVG-Tests and OpenVG-Demo

- download the plugin (OpenVGPlugin.dll) and save it in the virtual machine/installation directory
- download the library for the engine to use (for instance libOpenVGSH.dll for the ShivaVG OpenVG engine) and save it in the virtual machine/installation directory

Now you can evaluate:

OpenVGAPI loadLibrary: 'libOpenVGSH.dll'.
OpenVGAPI initContext.

"Next, run some tests"
VGUTests new display.

"Next run a tiger demo"
VGTigerDemo runDemo

Pharo 1.0 beta

Time moves on and now the 1.0 beta image for the Pharo project is released.

I've built a win32 setup for easy installation. The installer is now also available at http://pharo-project.org/pharo-download