Unification - a unification library for Smalltalk.

Unification is in computer science and logic an algorithmic process of solving equations between symbolic expressions. Now there is an unification library for Smalltalk available.

Seaside 3.1 and 3.0.10 release

Read more here.

PNtalk 2.0

PNtalk 2.0 is a modelling and simulation framework for Petri nets based on Pharo. Read more.

PunQLite - a new NoSQL wrapper for Pharo

I already reported about PunQLite, a binding for the NoSQL database UnQLite - but now it has become a full-fledged wrapper. Read more.

SqueakJS - SqueakVM on JavaScript

Bert announced SqueakJS, a new Squeak VM that runs on Javascript. Really cool!
Read more here.

It is able to run the mini.image already - try the demo. Thanks Santa!

Gravel Smalltalk for JVM

Yet another Smalltalk for the JVM I first thought - but this time a real surprise since it not only aims to be a fully ANSI compliant Smalltalk implementation but is also heading towards modern language enhancements like optional typing, namespaces and traits.

It is called "Gravel Smalltalk" and is announced as a modern Smalltalk implementation for the JVM. It is using the ability on JVM to do #invokedynamic based on the JSR 292, similar to RTalk from Mark Roos that I already reported about.

But while RTalk is not open source and available to the community the new Gravel Smalltalk is already available and licensed under the very liberal Apache-2.0 License. I also do not know how it compares to Readline Smalltalk which is also running on the JVM.

The feature list of Gravel Smalltalk sounds promising:

 - Traits
 - Optional typing
 - Patching compiler
 - Full block closures
 - Resumable exceptions
 - Namespaces
 - Mirror based reflection facilities

Since I have all Java tools installed (JDK7, Eclipse, Maven, ...) it looks like I should clone the github repo with the code, fire up maven commandline and give Gravel Smalltalk a try this weekend.

Lego MindStorms and Pharo

The new Ev3 series from LegoMindstorms allows to plug a Wifi key and connect via TCP.

So with this equipment and the new JetStorm project you can control your robot with Pharo.

Read more

Phratch 1.0beta

Phratch, the port of Scratch in Pharo has a new release.
Read more.

Objective-Smalltalk

Objective-Smalltalk is an programming language dervied from Objective-C. Website lives on

http://objective.st

It is an experimental project from Marcel Weiher. Code is on github - I havent found any info on the license.

Private Methods in Pharo

The nice thing on Smalltalk is that it is extensible without having to ask a language vendor.
Using this Camille Teruel created a small proof-of concept for adding private methods to Pharo.

Load the project "PrivateMethods" into your Pharo image. I tried with  Pharo3.0 Latest update: #30639.

Now create a new class

Object subclass: #Bar
instanceVariableNames: ''
classVariableNames: ''
poolDictionaries: ''
category: 'Foo'


Then implement a method that you mark as private using the pragma <private>

foo
<private>

^42

If you try to evaluate 

  Bar new foo

you will get the usual "Message not understood" as it is private.

But nonetheless you can call it from other private or public methods. Just implement a Bar>>bar method:

     bar

        "Call the private method"

^self foo

and evaluate

     Bar new bar

to get the answer to life, universe and everything ...

To make sure it is really private (instead of protected) just implement a subclass and call it from a subclass method. You will see it works.

Neo-Caching

Need a cache in Pharo - then have a look at this new package.

Pharocloud

Former "rackincloud.com" is now Pharocloud with new icon and new design.
Look at:  http://pharocloud.com/

Petit parsers

With the Petit parser for Smalltalk it is very easy to build parsers. There is an SQL parser, a Java parser, PHP parser, ... and a Delphi parser, one for the GraphViz dot language, and many more.

Premade images are available on the Moose CI. Nice!

Morphic 3

Another step from Juan for Morphic3 - read yourself.

Roassal 3D

The Roassal visualization engine now officially has a new member: Roassal 3D. Roassal 3d is about creating and animating 3d scenes. It is meant to visualize data. Roassal 3d recently got textures, translucence, additional layouts and various light models. It should work on Pharo 3.0, under MacOSX, Linux and Windows. Read the offical announcement. There is also some initial documentation available.

SmalltalkHub update

SmalltalkHub got an update and is now much faster. Read more.

Roassal visualisation engine on top of Amber

The Roassal visualisation engine (which is developed in Pharo) is also ported to Amber (the Smalltalk on top of JavaScript running in a webbrowser). You can already test Roassal on top of Amber in your browser: http://pestefo.github.io/roamber Just edit the examples in the workspace, execute (select all and click on do-it) it and see how the visualisation changes.

Cocotte

Mmmh .... a new page about "Cocotte" defined as Smalltalk + Javascript. Based on Amber and Node.js Not much information yet - lets see when there will be an official announcement

A Conversation with Kent Beck and Eric Ries

Interesting interview with Kent Beck - you shouldnt miss it.

BYTE Smalltalk edition

The famous Byte Smalltalk edition is available online.

IronSmalltalk

Didnt notice that the sourcode for IronSmalltalk (a Smalltalk for .NET) is available on CodePlex. So if you want to implement an own Smalltalk go and have a look.

Smalltalks 2013 videos available

The videos from the Smalltalks 2013 conference are available now

MooseDay in December

On the 19th and the 20th December 2013 there is a MooseDay combined with a Pharo sprint in France.

BeeSmalltalk is progressing

The Bee Kernel is progressing. Read more here.

Useful (hidden) features in Pharo 3.0

Nice to know these nice features - get your Pharo 3.0 installation and try them out.

Deploy Smalltalk Applications with Seaside

Nice guide on Seaside with Apache - I should check if it is still valid with the latest releases.

I18N with QCMagritte in Seaside

One possibility to internationalize a seaside application is shown here.

PUnQLite for Pharo - using the UnQLite embeddable NoSQL database engine

You may know SQLite - a small RDBMS that one can easily use since it requires only adding a simple DLL fitting into a few kilobytes. Due to its small size it is often embedded into products.

One can also use it in Smalltalk - for instance for Pharo using a simple wrapper project.

Today also the so called "NoSQL" databases like Mongo, CouchDB and others are getting attention. Often they work with documents, key value pairs, ...

There is also a "small sized" database engine for NoSQL - it is called "UnQLite". It is an Embeddable NoSQL Database Engine and therefore requires no separate server process. The sources have no dependency - it is easy to build a DLL from the provided C File.

Now there is already a Pharo binding in progress called "PUnQLite" from  from Masashi Umezawa. The binding uses NativeBoost to call the UnQLite engine.

Really nice! So if you need a small embeddable Database for your application you should check it out.

Kontolino technology stack

Joachim talks about the technology stack behind Kontolino which is using VASmalltalk, Seaside, GLORP, Apache, DB2.

Cryptographic Libraries for Pharo and Squeak

are listed here. Check them out.

Amber 0.12.0 released!

Read more here.

Pharo UI building with Spec

There is a nice post on how to get started with Spec UI building in Pharo.

Pharo Compiler cleanup

More details about the compiler cleanup work going on in Pharo from Marcus.

So long and thanks for all the fish...

When I do JEE stuff with Java I typically use Glassfish - easy to install and use. Now there is an interesting move from Oracle regarding the commercial support for GF. The commercial offering is just dropped - that news is already commented people from the community.

That does not mean Glassfish will soon be dead, but it may change from a professional appserver to just a developer tool (same story as "Geronimo"?). Interesting...

Virtual Smalltalk images

A presentation about Oz.

Getting started with Cuis

Another presentation from Smalltalk2013 about Cuis.

Control nanosatellites from Smalltalk

Control nanosatellites from Smalltalk, here it goes.

Pharo: Objects at your fingertips

A new presentation for those who know OOP but not Pharo is available.

Dead simple intro to Metacello

Read more.

Pharo is yours

Pharo is yours presentation from Smalltalks 2013 conference.

Moose 4.9

Moose 4.9 is released. It now uses Roassal completely (Mondrian is removed).

Kontolino Seaside App

Another online application based on Seaside web framework goes live: Kontolino. Joachim can tell you more.

Smalltalk Devroom at FOSDEM2014

Again this year there is a Smalltalk Devroom at FOSDEM2014. Read the Call for Participation

Advanced Reflection in Pharo

Slides of the "Advanced Reflection in Pharo" lecture from Marcus Denker

Scratch for Arduino

Nice - there is a Scratch for Arduino

Beyond changes files ...

Epicea - an advanced way of recording code changes than the current ".changes" mechanism. Read more

Roassal 3D lights

Roassal 3d supports different modeling of lights. Screenshots here.

PV is choosing Pharo Smalltalk

Another project that agreed on using Pharo Smalltalk for its future.

Pharo Shop online

There is a new Pharo shop online. Go shopping if you like.

Pharo and RaspberryPi

Running Pharo on RaspberryPi is slowly progressing ... there is now also a CI job to build the Stack VM (non JIT/non Cog version). Lets see when it is ready ...

Mustache templates for Pharo

Mustache is a popular templating engine that is supported in many programming languages. Now there is also a Pharo port from Norbert.

Bootstrap for Seaside3 project (Release 0.1.0)

I published the "Bootstrap for Seaside" project and announced it on the Pharo and Seaside lists.

Features are:

• nearly feature complete regarding components (Nav, Navbar, Jumbotron, Buttons, Alarms, Layouts, ...)
• uses the latest Bootstrap libraries (http://getbootstrap.com)
• covered by more than 160 tests
• completed with an example browser that shows Bootstrap components and according Smalltalk code
• available at STHub (http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~TorstenBergmann/Bootstrap)
• documented (see mentioned project website on STHub) with docu support for PharoOnlineHelp and catalog
• controlled by CI (https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/job/Bootstrap/)
• easily loadable using config browser in Pharo 2.0

You can easily load it in a fresh Pharo 2.0 as "Bootstrap" from the config browser. It loads Seaside3

as a dependency. After loading evaluate

  ZnZincServerAdaptor startOn: 8080 

to start the webserver and go to http://localhost:8080/bootstrap to browse the samples. Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:

   

Feel free to use it for your next Pharo/Seaside/Bootstrap based web project

Athens on Amber Smalltalk demo

Matthias Springer is showing a demo of his "Athens on Amber Smalltalk" work from the GSoC 2013.

New Mars examples - MarsPackageBrowser and MarsTestRunner

Carla shows some more progress on the Mars project. Watch the screencast here.

Launching Pharo on Ubuntu

Launching Pharo on Ubuntu is now much easier again. Thanks Damien, I also like the overview page.

AOP for Pharo

You like AOP (Aspect oriented programming) in Pharo. Then have a look at PHANtom (PHaro Aspect laNguage). Also check out it's reimplementation.

Redline Smalltalk on JavaOne

If your are at JavaOne conference and see a guy with a Smalltalk T-Shirt. Then this is James Ladd promoting Smalltalk in a Redline Smalltalk show.

LightningMDB

The Lightning Memory-Mapped Database (LMDB) is a new database library written by Symas Corp. for the OpenLDAP Project.
You can read about it's nice feature set here.

It looks like Jan van de Sandt is working already on a Smalltalk driver. Nice!

Pharo Bugfixing Process

There is a new video that helps explaining how you can submit fixes and enhancements for Pharo.

Remote Inspectors

Looks like the Amber-Pharo bridge has remote inspectors working. Nice!

Getting "Deep into Pharo" book

Beside on Lulu the new "Deep into Pharo" is now also on Amazon.

"OS" and "OS-Windows" project for Pharo on STHub

I just announced "OS" and "OS-Windows" project for Pharo. Hope it is useful for others too and community will help to move better external support in Pharo forward. Project and code lives on:

http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~OS/OS-Windows

If you have Pharo 3.0 installed just open "Tools" -> "ConfigBrowser" and install "OSWindows".

You should follow the examples given in the documentation that you can find on the project page. Just scroll down there.

Pharo3.0 now with Metacello2

Starting from today Pharo 3.0 includes Metacello2.

Beside many improvements you can now also make your project configuration class (which usually is named after your project "ConfigurationOfProjectName") a subclass of the predefined class ConfigurationOf.

   ConfigurationOf subclass: #ConfigurationOfExample 
           instanceVariableNames: '' 
           classVariableNames: '' 
           poolDictionaries: '' 
           category: 'ConfigurationOfExample' 

So no need to include metacello bootstrap methods on each configuration.
Did I mention that you can now also work with FileTree and GitHub? ;)

Dr. Geo with Athens

The Dr. Geo Canvas now also uses the Athens renderer or Pharo and looks much better. Here is a screenshot.

News from Mars

News from the Pharo mars project - read more here.

QDBlog

QDBlog is "a Quick&Dirty Blog written on Seaside. Made to be as simple as possible.". Code is on STHub: http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~mikefilonov/QDBlog You can also see it in action here.

Autotest for Pharo

Autotest is a live testing tool (similar to Ruby Autotest, but the Smalltalk way, more dynamic). Autotest automatically runs tests related to the method you edit. Code and video are here.

Seaside on STHub

Seaside moved to SmalltalkHub, new Metacello configurations are available.

inBug - Visual Analytics of Bug Repositories

inBug is a nice project to work with issue tracking software from within Smalltalk. Watch the page or have a look at a presentation about it (also here).

Moose 4.8 released

Moose 4.8 is released with impressive enhancements:

 - Rendering is possible on Morphic canvas or the new Athens canvas (which is driven by NativeBoost)
 - Visualizations are now based on Roassal
 - the new chart engine Graph-ET is integrated
 - ...

Read the details here. Note that Moose 4.8 is based on Pharo 2.0 - so you can either download from the web or easily from the Pharo config browser.

SecretOffice++

SecretOffice++ is a secure personal information management software enabling you to conceal your secret appointments, tasks, notes, contacts, journals and files. It was presented at ESUG2013 and is written in Smalltalk. Requires Outlook - so I was not able to try it out. But there are some screenshots on the website.

NativeBoost version of the OpenDBXDriver

There is now an NativeBoost version of the OpenDBXDriver for database access from Pharo Smalltalk. This helps in moving from old Squeak FFI to new NativeBoost. Rocio Amaya explains how it was created.

Pharo Sprint in Buenos Aires - this saturday!

10 Pines host a Pharo sprint this Saturday in Buenos Aires. Read more!

Shopping with Pharo robots

Pharo is used for orchestration of Robots working as helpers in a shopping mall. Read more.

ST-72

You want to play with Smalltalk-72? Then read this blog post to play with Dans system running in Squeak. Also the manual can be found on the net.

Pharo CI infrastructure

If you contribute a project to Pharo you can use the CI infrastructure to test. This page explains how to do that.

Please use Pharo Online help

I can only repeat myself: please use my new "Pharo online help" to document your packages instead of the old "in-image" Pharo help.

How to write benchmarks in Pharo

Natalia writes about "How to write benchmarks in Pharo". Nice summary!

ESUG 2013 media

This link helps you to find ESUG media (slides, videos, twitter news) easily.

ESUG 2013 - Boris Shingarov on "Towards a Smalltalk VM for the 21st Century"

"Towards a Smalltalk VM for the 21st Century" from Boris Shingarov is presented at ESUG-2013. The presentation is online.

First ESUG 2013 presentations

First videos from ESUG presentations are online available.

DicThesaurusRex

DicThesaurusRex - a spelling correction and thesaurus for Squeak Smalltalk. Read more.

FileTree in Pharo 3.0

FileTree is now part of Pharo 3.0 image. It allows to store Smalltalk code in the usual file system structure. So beside the usual Smalltalk versioning systems you can also use Git, Mercurial or Subversion. You can read more about FileTree in this presentation from Dale.

Trapped in Amber

"Trapped" is a new library for Amber Smalltalk to create bidirectional data-binding UI for Amber.

Maybe you heard about data binding in AngularJS (a library in the JavaScript space) - the "trapped" project is a little bit similar. There is also a demo available.

Deep into Pharo

The deep into Pharo book is out. Check it out here: http://rmod.lille.inria.fr/pbe2/

Smalltalk beer

Nothing more to add: https://twitter.com/marcusdenker/status/375694229873643520/photo/1

Oz - Object spaces

Oz - Object spaces for Pharo Smalltalk will be presented at ESUG 2013. Here is a nice summary about it together with a video.

VASmalltalk 8.6

Instantiation releases VASmalltalk 8.6. Check out this video to find out more.

CampST on ESUG 2013

New pictures from CampSmalltalk at ESUG 2013

A Spur gear for Cog

Eliot writes about new memory management for Cog virtual machine. Read more here

Graph-ET - charts for Pharo

Graph-ET is a project to draw charts with Pharo. It is a library at the top of Roassal to draw curves, histograms and graphs. It will be demonstrated at ESUG this year.

Watch this video to see more.

or look at the code at

MCHttpRepository

location: 'http://smalltalkhub.com/mc/DanielAvivNotario/Graph-ET/main'

user: ''

password: ''

DrGeo user guide in english

The Dr. Geo user guide is available in english. If you want to learn geometry with Smalltalk then check it out.

NesTalk or Mario Bros running on Pharo Smalltalk

NesTalk is a NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) emulator running on Pharo Smalltalk. It is a pure smalltalk implementation written from scratch allowing you to run MarioBros on Pharo Smalltalk as this video demonstrates.

Code is on http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~zeroflag/NesTalk

You can follow updates on the authors twitter account.

Phratch

Phratch is more than a port of Scratch to Pharo, read more why. Also have a look at this video.

Java within Smalltalk/X

Running Java within Smalltalk - no Problem with Smalltalk/X. See this video from Jan Vrany.

Aida 6.6 Web Framework Released

The Aida 6.6 Web Framework is released. Read more here or just load it using the Config browser in Pharo 2.0 and point your browser to http://localhost:8888 when loading is finished

FixedDecimals in Pharo

Want to use FixedDecimals in Pharo. Then watch this video.

Pharo ECOOP Slides

Slides from Pharo tutorial at ECOOP 2013: The slides used at the Pharo Tutorial at ECOOP are available online

HTML5 ServerSideEvents with Zinc and Smalltalk

Server-Sent Events is a new HTML5 technology that is used to send data from a server to a client, over HTTP, on the initiative of the server. You can work with them now also in Zinc for Pharo. Read more in Svens post.

Did you know ...

that Squeak for RaspberryPi now has actual official support for the faster ARM optimised BitBLt code. Amongst other things it will help speed up Scratch a little.

Recover a broken image with Oz

Nice to know about it: how to recover a broken image with Oz.

Aconcagua - Units for Smalltalk

Aconcagua is a units package for Pharo. You can load it using the config browser in Pharo 2.0 and here is a paper explaining it. Also have a look at this video.

Dropbox and Amber

A new project to use Dropbox from Amber Smalltalk.

Rackincloud - Seaside and PostgreSQL support

rackincloud.com offers Seaside hosting - it now also supports the PostgreSQL database for Pharo. Watch this video to see how easy it is to setup.

Travels with Smalltalk (by Dave Thomas)

Surely outdated and part of Smalltalk history - but nonetheless I never stumbled upon this until today and still find it interesting to read.

Using NativeBoost in Pharo

While I spend some time wrapping more and more Windows API's for NativeBoost Laurent has done
something similar for X11.

He has also written a nice chapter on NativeBoost for the Pharo for the Enterprise book and wants to create a Pharo window manager for X11 next.

Punycode in Pharo

When working with internationalized domain names you may know the "Punycode" encoding (RFC 3492). There is a new project dealing with this on SmalltalkHub.

 You can read more about this on Wikipedia and try the example from the article (using the german word "Bücher" which means books):

PunycodeConverter new encode: 'Bücher' results in 'xn--Bcher-kva' 


PunycodeConverter new decode: 'xn--Bcher-kva' results in 'Bücher' again

Redline Smalltalk at JavaOne

Redline Smalltalk is presented at JavaOne. See here.

Pharo 2.0 speedup on loading MC packages

After Pharo 2.0 came out the community started with Pharo 3.0 which is still being worked on.

Independent from that many bug fixes for 3.0 were also backported to 2.0 and released as Pharo 2.0 Summer release.

 If you grabbed the initial Pharo 2.0 or the Pharo 2.0 Summer release you may have noticed that code loading is not as fast as it was in Pharo 1.4. The main reason for this noticable slowdown was the introduction of the Ring package and proper packages (RPackage).

This has changed since yesterday with yet another update #20619. By using a cache the speedup on loading MC packages is now 3x or more. So either update your image or just get a fresh copy of Pharo 2.0 from the file server. You will notice that loading Seaside or other packages from the Configuration browser is now much faster!

Stamp, another STOMP implementation

You work with message-oriented middleware (MOM) - then have a look at Stamp and its docu.

Sunburst visualization

A nice video on the Sunburst visualization implemented in Pharo by ObjectProfile.

Pharo VM repository moved

Read more.

Rubric in use

Tudor Girba provides a screenshot with the new Rubric text morph integrated into Glamour. Nice!

UI Painter progressing

The UI Painter for Spec in Pharo is progressing. It is now possible to generate a spec.

Early History of Smalltalk

The "Early History of Smalltalk" in HTML format.

The future of programming

A really fantastic presentation about the future of programming.

Pharo 2.0 Summer release

The Pharo 2.0 summer release is out. Read more.

Rackincloud.com Seaside hosting

Rackincloud.com provides Seaside hosting. Watch the video here. Some more details are here.

Curved Space Explorer for Squeak

Here is the video and here is the guide on how to install it.

Mars on Pharo

marsonpharo.wordpress.com is showing results of the GSOC project on Mars - platform independent UI bindings for Pharo

Dr. Geo II Review

Nice Dr. Geo Review, just read it

Cuis 4.2. is out

Juan announced Cuis Smalltalk in version 4.2.

Why Smalltalk is better than Excel

Georg Heeg demonstrates The Analyst (one of the early, important projects done in Smalltalk-80) at STIC 2013. If you want to know more watch the short video.

Snapshotcello

Snapshotcello - a little utility that enables you to freeze a snapshot of a given Metacello configuration based on what is already loaded in your current image. Read more here and here.

Installing Pharo in many flavors

Guillermo Polito wrote a blog post on the various ways you can install Pharo onto your system. Read more.

Pharos

Working with robots in Smalltalk. Then check this page.

ESUG 2013 registration

ESUG 2013 registration is now open

BioSmalltalk published in Bioinformatics Journal

The BioSmalltalk project (a new environment system for pure object-oriented bioinformatics programming) is now published in the Bioinformatics Journal. Read more or directly read the PDF article. The project lives here.

Roassal 3d progressing

More screenshots from the progress on the Roassal 3D work. Click to zoom:


 

Building and deploying your first web app with Pharo

Sven wrote a nice tutorial on how to build and deploy your first Pharo webapplication. It does not use any of the known Smalltalk webframeworks (like Seaside, Aida, Iliad, ...) - it requires only the Zinc HTTP components that are already part of the Pharo image.

He also explains how to deploy the final result to the cloud.

Chapter on Blocks

The "Deep into Pharo" book now also contains a chapter about Blocks. Download is here.

Spec docu

Some links to Spec docu

Redline Smalltalk Eclipse plugin

The Eclipse plugin for Redline Smalltalk moves forward as this screenshot proves.

Athens on Amber

Athens - the Smalltalk graphic framework that is now also part of upcoming Pharo 3.0 is also available for Amber Smalltalk.

So you can write your graphics code in Pharo first and run it later in Amber directly within a webbrowser.
A demo is here. You have to move the splitter in the middle of the helios IDE to see the "do it" button.
Nice!

Hopefully Amber and Pharo will continue to stay as much as possible compatible - then you can freely choose the appropriate platform for writing server side (Pharo or Amber on node.js), rich client (Pharo) or webbrowser (Amber) code in Smalltalk.

Playing with Helios in new Amber

Now that the new Amber 0.11.0 is released I'm sure you want to play with Smalltalk and the new Helios IDE of Amber in your webbrowser. For those who need some instruction:

 - open the Amber homepage:  http://amber-lang.net
 - press F12 in your Google chrome browser to get the debgging tools, now click on the Javascript console
 - evaluate "amber.loadHelios()" and press enter - now Helios is being loaded
- when loading is finished press CTRL + Space to open the Helios IDE

You can open Browser, TestRunner, Workspace and play with it.

Gradualtalk

Gradualtalk is a gradually-typed Smalltalk, which is fully compatible with existing Smalltalk code. Image is based on Pharo Smalltalk and the type system is deactivated by default. 

Amber 0.11.0 released

Amber Smalltalk 0.11.0 released with more fixes, more commiters, more tests, ....
This release includes also the Helios IDE (which is not yet the default but can be opened via JavaScript).

You can either download it or install it via NPM (the node.js package manager).

Small Smalltalk

Looks like Juan is shrinking the Cuis Smalltalk image by 25%.

Pharo Launcher

A first release of the Pharo Launcher is available.

Object swapping fun

Impress your OO friends from other languages and run this in a Pharo environment:

Color black become:Color white

Hat tip to HwaJong Oh for the idea

NeoCSV

Some docu for NeoCSV

Pharobook chapters

New chapters on Roassal and Mondrian are available.

SourceCity for Pharo with CI job

SourceCity is a 3D visualization tool for analyse object-oriented systems. There is a new Jenkins CI job to build a "SourceCity" image right from the metacello config.

So you just need to download the image and run with the usual Pharo VM. To create a visualization just evaluate:

            SourceCity exampleRpackage

Note that SourceCity is meanwhile open source with MIT license. Code can be found on SmalltalkHub.
Read more about the project here (page is a little bit slow) or here.

Roassal with Sunburst visualization

There is also some progress on a Sunburst visualization for Roassal. Click the image to zoom the screenshot:


      

Roassal with 3D support

The Roassal visualization engine for Pharo now also supports 3D. Here is a screenshot, click to zoom.

 

 You can also view an older video to get more infos on how to use Roassal.

Pharo inside iPad again

Read more here.

Jun for Smalltalk - new release 795

There is a new release of Jun for Smalltak - release 795 as of 2013/07/03

New class builder in Pharo 3.0

The latest updates of Pharo 3.0 contain a new class builder. Check out

  PharoClassInstaller example

 for an example.

 This will end up in the support of "slots" - a slot is a meta-object for accessing a field in an Object. This makes class building also more explicit - for instance you can define the layout when building a class (PointerLayout, ByteLayout, ...)

So instead of having an instanceVariables array you can now have real layout objects. The implementation also includes field modifications which can track changes required to migrated instances (adding/removing fields, shifting position, ...).

Read more about Slots here.

ESUG Report 2012

The ESUG Report 2012 from Niall is available.

Playing with Cairo and Athens in upcoming Pharo 3.0

The next Pharo version (Pharo 3.) which is in preparation now has Athens and Cairo integrated for better graphics. If you want to play with it just read this.

Innovation Technology Awards - ESUG 2013

Have you written innovative stuff in Smalltalk? Then continue reading here.

Pharo will change the world in 3.0

Pharo will change the world (morph) in version 3.0 ;)

Slides on Pharo

There is a new slideshare account with slides about Pharo: http://www.slideshare.net/pharoproject Read more.

Tekka for Squeak and Pharo

Tekka is a simple and mode-less Japanese input method in Squeak/Pharo environment. Just scroll down on this page and have a look at the videos.

Text2 for VisualWorks

VisualWorks Smalltalk provides a new Text widget. Nice!

Redline Smalltalk on JavaOne

RedlineSmalltalk will be presented at JavaOne JVM Languages track - CON7805 in SanFrancisco (September 22–26, 2013).

Optimizing Pharo to C speed with NativeBoost FFI

as the title says - read more.

Custom icon themes for Pharo / Eclipse icons

As you may know you can change the UI theme in Pharo.

Just click "System" - "Settings" to open the settings browser and select the user interface in the appearance section. Beside the "Pharo" theme there are also themes called "Vistary" (if you like Windows) or "Watery"/"Watery2" (if you are used to Mac).

You can even implement own themes (as Doru demonstrates with his "White theme").

In the upcoming Pharo 3.0 you can even provide an own custom icon theme.Esteban demonstrates this with this goodie that allows Pharo to look like Eclipse since it uses the same icons as the Eclipse Java IDE.

                   

Click on the screenshot images to zoom. Very useful if you want to show someone fluent in Java the wonderful world of Smalltalk.

Better rewriting rule tool

There is a GSoC Project to provide a better rewriting rule tool. If you are interested you can follow its progress on this blog or find the code here.

Cade - graphics framework for Pharo

There is Cade - a graphics framework for Pharo using Athens. Here is the link including a demo video.

Balloon stickers

In need of some Smalltalk marketing - then get some stickers.

Benchmarking with SMark

Read more here.

Presenty

Presenty is a user interface framework for Pharo based on MVP (Model view presenter). Read more about it on Denis blog. Code is on SmalltalkHub.

STIC 13 - VA Smalltalk Roadmap

First video recorded by James from this months "STIC 13" conference, Wigwam resort, Phoenix Arizona (June 9-12). Expect more to come in the next days ...

Barcodes in Smalltalk

Didnt know Barcodes are so easy to implement in Smalltalk. So I started with EAN13 barcode together with unit tests.

Project lives on: http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~TorstenBergmann/Barcode

You can also load it using the config browser in Pharo 2.0 now. It is already usable - thanks to the power of Pharo.

Short Guide:

 To instantiate: BarcodeEAN13 value: '2109876543210'
You can get the binarySequence of a barcode:

(BarcodeEAN13 value: '2109876543210') binarySequence

calcuate the checksum (last digit):

 (BarcodeEAN13 value: '2109876543210') computeChecksum

 or visualize the barcode:

  BarcodeEAN13 example asForm asMorph openInWorld

 or to write to a file:

   PNGReadWriter putForm: BarcodeEAN13 example asForm onFileNamed: 'sample.png'

  Now includes EAN8 as well

Units in Smalltalk

I uploaded a "ConfigurationOfUnits" to the MetaRepoForPharo20. With this the "Units" framework is easily loadable from the Pharo 2.0 config browser.

Here are some examples from the Unit framework:

(10km + 10km) gives you 20km

You can also convert easily

  (10km + 24m) as: 1m

gives you  10024 metres.

It is also simple to compare:

  1hour < 10 seconds

which gives you false.

Otomatic

Playing with sounds in Squeak Smalltalk.

Log4s for Pharo

Log4s - a logging framework for Smalltalk was open sourced with MIT license by Instantiations. It runs on Pharo 2.0.

Some details about it can be found in this presentation.

libsodium Binding for Pharo and Squeak

libsodium ( a portable shared-library version of the NaCl cryptography library) can now be used from Pharo and Squeak. Read more.

Magritte for Morphic

Magritte is a framework allowing you to easily build seaside apps by adding meta informations to domain classes that can be used to easily build the UI.

Now there is also support for Morphic available. Just watch the video.

Tab widget

Benjamin implemented a better Tab widet for Pharo. Code is on SmalltalkHub and it was today integrated into Pharo 3.0.

Nice!

 

Circular Menues

Pharo will soon support circular menues. Here is a video demonstrating this feature.

Web with Pharo Conference 6 June 2013 @ Lille

The program from yesterdays Pharo web conference is already on twitter:


Lets see when the first videos appear on the web.

Tektronix Smalltalk Document Archive

This page contains annotated links to primary documents related to the development of Smalltalk products at  Tektronix in the 1980′s. 

Amber Smalltalk on the iPhone

Sebastian Sastre is playing with Amber - so here is Amber Smalltalk running on the iPhone. Click the image to enlarge.

The Power of Clean Code

Pharo gets better and better - Sean DeNigris demonstrates this with a short video.

STIC 2013

The Smalltalk Industry Council STIC'13 Conference will be held next Sunday thru Wednesday, June 9-12 at the Wigwam Resort near Phoenix.

SqueakFest 2013 in Uruguay

As the title says. Read more here.

SourceCity is OpenSource now

SourceCity is a 3D visualization tool for analyse object-oriented systems. It is now OpenSource with MIT License! Read more.

Rubric demo for Pharo

Alain Plantec gives a first demo of Rubric (a deep refactoring of TextEditor) for Pharo in a new video:

http://vimeo.com/67400546

Code lives on SmalltalkHub.

Websela

Another way to make a websites with ST is Websela. You can use Monticello packages to send changes to the website.

Device prototype with Smalltalk from 1991

This device was a prototype for a pen computer called the "ActiveBook". Software part was done with Smalltalk.

Artefact 1.0 - PDF framework for Smalltalk

Artefact 1.0 is released - a project implementing a PDF framework for Smalltalk.

Project and code live at on SmalltalkHub. Read more about the features in the announcement.

To easily try out download Pharo 2.0, open the config browser and load the "Artefact" project.
Then check the class PDFDemos. If you evaluate "PDFDemos runAllDemos" you will find a "pdf" directory with all the PDF samples generated.

Happy Birthday Smalltalk-80!

30 years and still strong!

Smalltalk Debugging facilities for web development

A debugger is not only something a developer uses to hunt for bugs. It is also a tool that makes a developer more productive.

In Smalltalk the debugging experience is really impressive. As someone once said:

"I love Smalltalk. I love coding in the debugger, being able to archive processes and restore them exactly later if they encounter exceptions, the amazing reliability. The economy of expression and the brilliant class library."

Soon Amber Smalltalk will bring this debugging experience also to web development. Have a look at this demo video.

Some Smalltalk history

A picture provided by Allan Wirfs-Brock with the following comment:

 "And this was how you coded a fast Smalltalk virtual machine in 1985"

 

Reflectivtity for Pharo

Reflectivity for Pharo is out - this tool allows you to annotate AST nodes with "metalinks". Read more.

STIC 2013

Only a few days until STIC 2013 starts.

HPI Seaside Tutorial updated

The Seaside tutorial from HPI Potsdam is updated and there are two new chapters about testing and web feeds.

Interview about Amber

Phillipe Back interviewed Nicholas Petton, creator of Amber Smalltalk.

SOMETHINGit

A project to write sound programs using Haskell and Smalltalk.

Avocado

A "Self programming" like environment within the browser is here.

Experimental White Space theme for Pharo

Pharo supports UI theming and there is now a new experimental "White space theme" from Tudor.

Web with Pharo

Inria is organizing a conference around the web and pharo the 6 June 2013 at Euratechnologies, Lille. Read more.

peer.js and Amber Smalltalk

There is a new binding to peer.js for Amber. You can find the project here.

To trap a better mouse

Ian Piumarta (Squeak Unix VM maintainer, long time Squeaker and Smalltalker) who is working for Viewpoints Research Institute will speak Wednesday May 29, 2013, 3:30 pm at Room W1008, West Building 8W, Ookayama campus, Tokyo Institute of Technology about "To trap a better mouse".

Amber Smalltalk progressing

The Helios IDE of Amber Smalltalk is progressing. Read more.

Suggestions in Pharo 3.0

The upcoming Pharo 3.0 provides "suggestions" in the code editor. Here is a demo video.

High-Level Musical Concepts in µO

There is a new paper available about Musical concepts represented in Smalltalk code.

Bootstrap

Using ObjectSpaces one can bootstrap a Smalltalk system ... read more.

Kinematic Templates in Smalltalk

The Kinematic Templates interaction technique suggests adjusting the user's mouse input to it tends to match a drawing template. That allows the user to draw in free-hand mode and obtain a "beautified" version of it's hand drawing.

There is an implementation for Pharo. Read more or watch the video or read the paper.

Redline ST IntelliJ plugin

There is now a preview video for the IntelliJ IDEA Redline Smalltalk plugin available.

Gnome2 look for VW

A look redesign for VisualWorks matching Gnome2 is now available.

Experiments with ObjectSpaces

Experiments with ObjectSpaces.

Your own SmalltalkHub

If you want to implement a feature in SmalltalkHub then just use your own private SmalltalkHub instance to implement.

Gemstone

Leaving VMWare Gemstone is now independent again moving Smalltalk products forward:

 http://gemtalksystems.com

BabyMock 1.0

BabyMock is a visual mock object library for Pharo Smalltalk. Read more here or read the docu on SmalltalkHub.

Amber Smalltalk Helios IDE with integrated documentation

The new Helios IDE for Amber Smalltalk now provides integrated documentation.
Nice!

 

files.pharo.org

The Pharo fileserver got a new interface: http://files.pharo.org

Creating Time-based One-time Passwords with Pharo

Nice article about creating Time-based One-time Passwords with Pharo.

Elasticsearch with Smalltalk

Elasticsearch claims to be a "flexible and powerful open source, distributed real-time search and analytics engine for the cloud". There is now a Pharo binding available for it from Paul.

Sqnappy - a Squeak/Pharo binding of the snappy compressor library

Snappy is a compression/decompression library. Its does not provide best compression - but is very fast. Now there is a Squeak/Pharo binding to the compressor library available. Read more here.

ESUG 2013 Call for Participation

You can find more infos about this years ESUG on James blog or from Stefs initial post.

Scratch conference 2013

There is a scratch conference (Citilab Barcelona) running 25-27 July, 2013

Smart Suggestions for Pharo

The idea of "Smart Suggestions for Pharo" is to have suggestions based in the text selected or the cursor position in the code editor.

Read more about and see some screenshots here.

Pharo and Ubuntu

Easy installation of Pharo on Ubuntu progresses. Nice!

Processing MJPEG streams with Pharo Smalltalk

Nice samples of how to view and capture MJPEG streams with Pharo Smalltalk.

ObjC bridge for Pharo

Esteban is working on an ObjC bridge for Pharo. Here is a first demo video comparing graphics within the world canvas and outside of the usual Morphic World using the bridge.

Pharo 3.0 and Opal compiler

After Pharo 2.0 came out the development on 3.0 immediately started.

Pharo 3.0 already has many new updates and today it also integrates Opal (a new compiler).
If you want to know more about Opal then read here or look at this presentation from the Deep into Smalltalk summer school.

Still Opal is not the default compiler - but step by step...

The rationale behind Spec

the new way to define composable UI's in Pharo is summarized here and there is a tech report also available.

PharoConf Videos

Three videos from PharoConf

• Building UIs with Spec: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P98-qpLUvQQ
• Data Migration with Moose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SGHV1lCry0
• Pharo Roadmap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xRVzzjgPu8
• FileSystem-Git: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qld2mDIbg4

More to come (like Taming MongoDB from Pharo) on the Pharo Days video channel.

Athens Tutorial

Want to use the new Athens graphics package? There is a new tutorial that you can run from within the image. This video from James shows how to use it.

Profiling using Spy framework

Alexandre Bergel is demonstrating some profiling and visualization of the Spy framework. He uses package "HelpSystem" - stuff that I wrote back in 2010. Interesting point of view on things I did myself in the past. Looks like I should apply these visualizations to the new Online Help system as well to get even better results. Thanks!

Interactive Smalltalk

A really nice video from Esteban that demonstrates the interactive nature of Smalltalk development and scripting facilities - here with Pharo. The demo is using Storm (a small game engine).

Pharo Resource page

James Robertson is offering a "Pharo Resource page" with links to his videos about Pharo. Nice!

Smalltalk and GSoC 2013

The Smalltalk projects were again accepted for the Google Summer of code!

Physical Etoys 2.1 released

Read more here.

First 13 minutes of PharoConf

First 13 minutes of Pharo conference are available as video. Others are in preparation.

Pharo package for Ubuntu

There is now also a special Pharo package for Ubuntu, so you can easily install it. Read more.

Amber Smalltalk Game

A nice demo of an in-browser game developed in Amber Smalltalk is available
since today. Click here to try or read here.

If the demo runs in your browser click on "class browser" to see the code.

Alan Kay interview

Again an interesting interview with Alan Kay.

Quicksilver

Quicksilver is a tool for the interactive exploration of hierarchical graphs. Code is on SmalltalkHub.

Gofer new
smalltalkhubUser: 'Quicksilver' project: 'Quicksilver';
package: 'Quicksilver';
load

It requires Moose and can be used to create Roassal visualizations like this from a filesystem.

Athens Vector graphics tutorial for Pharo

Athens is a new vector graphics API for Pharo. There is now an in-image tutorial from Igor you can use to get used to it. Really nice!

Trying Parasol with Selenium in Pharo Smalltalk

Johan Brichau answered my question from my last post: about the difference between the "Parasol" and "Webtester":

• WebTester was written for Selenium RC (aka Selenium 1) using an old protocol
• Beach-Parasol is written for Selenium Webdriver (aka Selenium 2) using the JSONWire Protocol and can be seen as a replacement for WebTester

So I gave Parasol a short try today:

• a fresh Mozilla Firefox was already installed on my machine
• Parasol still requires old Pharo 1.4, so even when I prefer Pharo 2.0 I downloaded it again
• I installed the current version selenium-server-standalone-2.31.0.jar of Selenium which can be found here

On Windows (64Bit) I start the JAR with a batch to tell the Java component about the firefox location

java -jar C:\selenium\selenium-server-standalone-2.31.0.jar -Dwebdriver.firefox.bin="C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"
pause

Now in Pharo 1.4 image I installed Parasol using:

Gofer new
    url: 'http://ss3.gemstone.com/ss/Parasol';
    package: 'ConfigurationOfParasol';
    load.
((Smalltalk at: #ConfigurationOfParasol) project version: #development) load: 'dev'.

WAKomEncoded startOn: 8080.
Deprecation raiseWarning: false; showWarning: false.

Took a while since it loads Seaside. After anything is set up I can easily script the webdriver/Firefox from a Smalltalk workspace. Here is an example:

"Start the driver and open wikipedia" 
driver := BPRemoteWebDriver new.
driver get: 'http://en.wikipedia.org/'.

"click on search"

(driver findElementByID: 'searchInput') click.

"enter some text"

driver getKeyboard sendKeys: ('Pharo' , (String with: BPKeys return)).

"query some text from the webpage"
Transcript show: ((driver findElementByID: 'mw-content-text') findElementByTagName: 'p') getText.

driver quit

So it is easy to write SUnit tests or automate some tasks you do on the web using Pharo. With the help of F12 in the webbrowser it is easy to find out about element ids, ... in HTML, so one can easily navigate through pages.

I worked with Selenium in Java and other languages already in the past. Parasol is not as comfortable as with the Selenium IDE recorder - but it works and using Smalltalk usually makes one more productive.

It is nice to see that I can now also control the Firefox browser to automate things and write webtests directly from within Pharo Smalltalk.

Parasol - web testing using Smalltalk

There is a project called "Parasol" allowing you to do web testing using Smalltalk. It uses Selenium.

Still dont know what the difference to "WebTester" is - which is another project for webtesting I already blogged about.

Pharo and GitFS

There is a GitFS available for Pharo. It is a work in progress and there is already some docu.

Fuel and Tanker demo session

First videos from PharoConf 2013 appear on the net. One video is about Tanker - an experimental package loader. It uses Fuel to do serialization and deserialization and will allow for faster loading.

Didnt know about the debugger menu item to serialize the stack to a .fuel file. Allows to serialize an error stack in case of problem and materialize the stack in another image to reproduce.

Nice - try that with other technologies out there ;)

Code for Fuel is already in Pharo 2.0. The Tanker project is on SmalltalkHub.

Back to the command line with Pharo Smalltalk

Pharo 2.0 allows you to easily deal with the command line. This is very useful if you want to script some daily tasks or your CI builds.

You can pass arguments to the image and also register own command line commands. Just check out the class comment in class "CommandLineHandler" and check its subclasses.

Creating an own handler is easy: just subclass CommandLineHandler with a custom class:

CommandLineHandler subclass: #TimeCommandLineHandler
 instanceVariableNames: ''
 classVariableNames: ''
 poolDictionaries: ''
 category: 'Custom-CommandLine'

Implement a class side method to return the command name:

commandName
 ^ 'time'

and implement an instance side #activate method:

activate
 self activateHelp.
 
 FileStream stdout 
  nextPutAll: '[time] ';
  nextPutAll: Time now asString

Now call it from the command line

    $PATH_TO_VM myImage.image time

and it will print the current time on stdout. Note that the #activateHelp will activate the --help option which displays the class comment of your custom handler class.

Also note that it is now possible to write in colors in a terminal from Pharo as this photo shows (click to enlarge):

 

Get Pharo easily

If you want to install Pharo on your platform you can go to:

         http://files.pharo.org

and download the specific distribution for your platform from the platforms directory. For instance "Pharo2.0-win.zip" for Windows, "Pharo2.0-mac.zip" for Mac and "Pharo2.0-linux.zip" for Linux.

There is also a "Pharo2.0-portable.zip" if you change platforms often (just put it on a USB stick). Also note that Pharo 3.0 is already available there as well - so if you want to help with fixes and changes feel free to do so.

If you visit

      http://get.pharo.org

there is another way to install it. This page includes the Zero conf script allowing you to easily
install Pharo using the command line. For Pharo 2.0 this is:

    wget -O - http://get.pharo.org/20+vm | bash

And you can use:

    wget --quiet -O - get.pharo.org | bash

for the current stable release of Pharo and the PharoVM.

Pomodoro for Pharo 2.0

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method. There is now also a simple timer implementation for Pharo 2.0 available.


You can load the tool right from the config browser and it allows easy scripting from Smalltalk:

   "Provide an action when pomodoro is finished"
   Pomodoro timerFor: 20 minutes 
            whenFinishedDo: [ self inform: 'Pomodoro finished']

Read more about the details here.

IRC Pharo

The old IRC channel #pharo-project about Pharo is now closed. So if you want to chat about the Pharo environment use the new #pharo channel on freenode.

Moose 4.8 on Pharo 2.0

Moose moved to Pharo 2.0. All tests are green and the team recommends to use Pharo 2.0 in the future.

One-click is dead

Even when then new Pharo 2.0 is delivered as a one-click on the homepage, in the future we will see OS specific packages for Win, Linux, Mac, ...
The platform specific builds are already in place.

Squeak 4.4. for RiscOS

Squeak 4.4. is now available for RiscOS too.

Pharo 2.0 released

Jay - Pharo 2.0 is out! More details can be found here.

Amber 0.10 released

Amber 0.10 is out (combined with a new website). Read more!

VertiMeta

VeriMeta tests all the package of one metacello version in a semi-auto fashion. Read more here or watch this video.

Why Smalltalk Wins the Host Languages Shootout

Read more in this PDF or try out Helvetia.

Zero Conf with Pharo

Just read about it.

Cross dialect Smalltalk CI

Do you want to use cross dialect Smalltalk (Pharo, Squeak and GemStone) continuous integration service? Then have a look at "builderCI" from Dale which is using GitHub and TravisCI.

Moose 4.7 is available

Moose 4.7 is out.

Pharo consortium

The Pharo consortium has it's page up and running: http://consortium.pharo.org

Pharo on iPad

Pharo running on the iPad with iOS 6.1.2. Nice!

OOP - a critical approach

Some years ago I had email exchange with Huw Collingbourne about programming and Smalltalk and  Smallscript/S# in particular. At this time I helped my friend David Simmons a little bit with some early Smallscript releases.

Huw runs the http://www.bitwisemag.com and he had a tutorial on Smalltalk with Squeak and one about Dolphin Smalltalk.

Huw also published an interview with David as the creator of Smallscript. Smallscript (as some of you may know) is still closed and not released into the wild for various reasons. It is still one of the most fascinating software technologies and dynamic scripting environment/language I was able to get my hands on.
But I dont want to write about Smallscript here.

Huw Collingbourne is instructor on programming languages, he wrote books about Ruby and is director of technology at SapphireSteel Software (known for their Ruby IDE).

I found an interesting post about Smalltalk and other programming languages in the context of object oriented programming from Dec 2012 written by Huw:

  https://www.udemy.com/blog/object-oriented-programming-a-critical-approach/

Read it. It should make you think and again remind you that the IT world made no real progress with recent languages and software technologies regarding objects.

Day by day I see so many people write code or writing about OO code (in blogs, papers, ...).
Not all really understood about OOP and its key concepts.

People learn languages like Groovy, CoffeScript or Scala today, the next day they learn Dart or the next language. Sometimes only the syntax changed. But they never looked at OOP, they never looked at its origins in Smalltalk or Lisp because these technologies are "too old" and not mainstream. But they should - it will help fighting complexity and help when the code grows.

Only a few of them ever took the time to look at Smalltalk. And a few of the few people really continued to look and understand that Smalltalk is not really a language. It is a dynamic object system with the language just built in. Even a class is an object and therefore has a class. It can dynamically changed, created or removed and garbage collected like any other object. If you need new control structures just add them as new methods. It's turtles all the way down and the power is in the simplicity: Objects and Messages.

Worked with several languages and environments I learned to know about both worlds. On one side the text file based, often static compiled world (mostly combined with a horrible grammar) that constraints writing good OOP and on the other side a dynamic live environment where you can lively interact with all the objects around either by using code or direct manipulation.

Smalltalk is still the mother of OO languages - you can not get any closer to OOP than within its environment. And it is also opens the door to metaprogramming - something I will write about later here.

I can only recommend it - grab a free copy and learn about it. You will not regret it even if you continue to work with more mainstream technologies.

Network Time Protocol in Pharo

Want to sync server times? You can check your local clock agains other servers using the NTP protocol. Sven provides some sample code in his Neo repository. Since the network time protocol (RFC2030) is based on the UDP protocol you now also have a nice example on how to use UDP datagrams.

BioSmalltalk screenshots and integrated help

BioSmalltalk provides some screenshots of their Pharo based application. Way cool: it uses my HelpSystem which (as the site states) they could integrate in less than an hour work. Nice! But nonetheless I now provide an online version

Pharo Online Help with Markdown support

The Pharo Online Help now has support for the markdown format. I also made a tutorial available on how to use it. Code is on SqueakSource3, but will soon move to SmalltalkHub.

You can try in a clean Pharo 2.0 image, load it using the configuration browser.

Smalltalk Jobs

There is a new site for worldwide Smalltalk Jobs: http://SmalltalkJobs.com

PBE 2 as PDF

Want to read "Pharo by Example 2" book as a PDF. Here you go. Update: Now the book PDF is built by the CI Server and you can find the chapters here.

Marea: Swapping Objects

A new paper was published on Marea, an object graph swapper for Smalltalk. Read more here or directly go to the PDF.

pdx.st meeting

There is a Portland Smalltalk User Group meeting happening on Tuesday, January 29, 2013 from 7–9pm

Pharo Compiler - Opal

The work on the new compiler ("Opal") is progressing. Read more.

ZincSSO and DropBox

It is now also possible to access DropBox from Smalltalk (Pharo) using Zinc.

Smalltalk and CouchDB

If you want to develop an application with Smalltalk (Pharo) and CouchDB, then continue reading this paper.

It includes a port of the Mustache web template library which is easy to use if you work with JSON. Look here for a syntax example.

Code lives on SS3 and will soon move over to SmalltalkHub (at least the project is there already, still empty).

Loom

There is another new tool from ObjectProfile called "Loom - Threads Monitor Tool" which is available for Pharo and VisualWorks.

ZincSSO update

There is an update for Zinc SSO for Pharo together with two new demos: - http://sso.stfx.eu - http://sso.doit.st See details here.

FluidSynth and Khoros for Pharo

FluidSynth is a real-time software synthesizer and there is a project called "Khoros" that is based on Pharo to use it. Here is a screenshot and another one. Some details are here.

SmalltalkHub 0.9

SmalltalkHub.com got an upgrade today - nice!

InternalReprogrammability

Martin Fowler writes about "Internal Reprogrammability" in the context of Smalltalk and Emacs.

AsmJIT

Want to work with assembler even in high level languages? Then have a look at "asmjit" - a complete x86/x64 JIT Assembler for C++ Language. There is a port to Smalltalk at http://www.squeaksource.com/AsmJit.html It is already used in Pharos NativeBoost project.