Sacred ANSI standard

Follow Smalltalk ANSI standard ... or intuition. An interesting issue in the context of Pharo.

Morphic performance

Ben Coman has some nice posts on Morphic performance testing.

Squeakfest 2011

The 8th Annual Squeakfest will be held from May, 26 - May, 28 2011 at Universidad Católica in Montevideo, Uruguay. See

http://squeakfest.org

The theme for this year's conference will be "How and why to use Etoys in the education".

ConfigurationOfMagma for Pharo

If you want to work with the Magma OO-database in Pharo you should check out the updated ConfigurationOfMagma.

Scratch Day worldwide

May 21st 2011 is Scratch Day worldwide, see http://day.scratch.mit.edu

Scratch is is very nice very visual language in order to do animation and control also embedded systems. It is written in Squeak Smalltalk.

No time ...

Just read a blog post from Joachim on Checking of Runtime Dependencies. This article points to an article by Sebastian Kübeck which has interesting definition of the "I Don't have Time for That Developer". To quote:


I am sure you know those developers who respond to all suggestions for improving their situation with the same answer: "I don't have time for that". In the past, I called them hard-working developers and I even admired them a little for their patience with which they stumble over the same problems over and over again. In the meantime, I lost that admiration and I see those folks as what they really are: People that act like dogs who are busy chasing their own tails...


I think that is the reason why I like Smalltalk so much ... you can constantly improve your situation as a developer by improving anything within the system: starting from the language, the tools up to config management and deployment very easily.

SqueakSource3 Beta.1 "Easter Fire"

Tobias Pape announced SqueakSource3 Beta.1 called "Easter Fire" - a port of SqueakSource to Seaside 3 and Magritte 2. SqueakSource is a monticello code repository server which hosts your Smalltalk projects.

The SqueakSource3 code is based on the original SqueakSource source code which is used to run squeaksource.com

You can simply load it into Gemstone, Squeak or Pharo using the provided ConfigurationOfSqueakSource. You should load Seaside 3.0 first.

I tested it on latest Pharo 1.2.1:

Gofer new
squeaksource: 'MetacelloRepository';
package: 'ConfigurationOfSeaside30';
load.

((Smalltalk at: #ConfigurationOfSeaside30) project latestVersion) load.

Gofer new
squeaksource: 'MetacelloRepository';
package: 'ConfigurationOfSqueakSource';
load.

((Smalltalk at: #ConfigurationOfSqueakSource) project version: #easterFire) load.

Then start a new seaside adaptor (for instance comanche) using the seaside control panel (available from the world menu) and point your browser to http://localhost:8080/installSS

If you accept the default parameters there you should have a new instance running on http://localhost:8080/ss

Pharo web documentation tool

Camillo Bruni worked a bit on a pharo web documentation tool using Seaside. It's a derivate of ruby's yardoc.

You can download a test image and try it yourself.

Glamour chapter updated

The chapter on "Glamour" was updated in the Moose book. So if you want to use this framework to easily build browsers then go and have a look.

Smalltalk Hub

A first public demo for Smalltalk Hub is now available online, only use it for testing purposes. In the future this could be a nice replacement for Squeaksource.

Read the announcement.

It was written by ObjectFusion using the Iliad web framework and still a work in progress. The project is sponsored by ESUG.

Some of the features:
- works with Monticello files similar to squeaksource
- cool code browser and syntax highlighting for code
- includes issue tracking out of the box
- ...

But many things are missing:
- security
- ssh
- client-side scripting features
- ...

So far it is an alpha demo - although a very promising one.

Squeak for Android news

Dimitry Golubovsky has reached another milestone on the Squeak Port for Android Tablets. Read more in his announcement or on the test drive page.

Magma 1.2

Chris announced a new version of his Magma database. Magma 1.2 is running on Squeak 4.2, Pharo 1.1 and Pharo 1.2.

Test coverage with Hapao

A new screencast on test coverage with Pharo and Hapao. Nice!

The hapao website is here: http://hapao.dcc.uchile.cl:8090/pier

Seaside grows

Yet another website written in Seaside (together with GLASS). Nice!

Cuis 3.2. available

Juan released Cuis 3.2. with an enhanced Look and feel.
This integration should also make it easier for Squeak and
Pharo to integrate SimpleMorphic.

Seattle Smalltalk user group

There is a new Seattle Smalltalk user group.

Seaside Tutorial updated for 3.0

The Seaside Tutorial was updated for Seaside 3.0.

Smalltalk on Open JDK

Looks like there is a Smalltalk port running on Open JDK. Have to find out more.

Yesplan

At ESUG 2010 there was a presentation about Next Generation Event Planning in Seaside.

The product Yesplan - the event planning software written in Seaside by Inceptive.be now has a website: http://www.yesplan.be

Pharo 1.2.1. is out

We (the Pharo Project community) published another milestone - so Pharo 1.2.1. is out and available. The update number is #12345 (crazy number I know!)

You can get all the details about the release here. We have an impressive number of tests ( 7836 Unit-Tests for core, 10760 Tests for the Pharo 1.2 dev image), new tools and a new UI theme. And the system gets cleaner and cleaner!

If you want to try yourself:
- download the one click distribution (multiplatform, 26MB)
- download the image from the CI server
- or in case you are using Windows grab the installer that I just released (Win32, 13MB), including the fast CogVM

Short tip: you can easily load and run Seaside 3.0.31, the included developer workspace will tell you.

SmalltalkHub

SmalltalkHub a new project hosting application for Smalltalk and Monticello projects is going beta in a week. The project is sponsered by ESUG.

Today Nicolas published an early preview screenshot. Read more.

Metacello chapter updated

Stéphane updated the chapter on how to use Metacello package configuration system for Pharo. Click here for the PDF.

More on JTalk

Nicolas Petton talks about JTalk (a Smalltalk on top of JavaScript).

Car tracking in Smalltalk

Sven Van Caekenberghe reports about a new application "T3 Easy" (a track & trace product). It's an HTML5 web app (using client side HTML + Javascript + CSS) on top of a REST server written in Pharo Smalltalk. It consists of 4 stateless Pharo Cog VM's running behind an Apache load balancer.

The server uses Zinc HTTP Components, both for its server part, as well as for clients talking to other systems behind the scenes. Even the Open Street Map tile serving, which is pushing out many megabytes, is currently going through this server.

There is a live demo and a few classes are available as open source (IP to country mapping, ...)

April

Nice april fool: Oracle sues Starbucks over Java trademark. ;)

April Pharo Sprint in Brussels

Johan Brichau and Andy Kellens are organizing a Pharo sprint at Brussels Friday 15th of April. Get the details here.