Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Dispatching tasks to multiple Pharo VMs using SystemProcess

is described here.

MachineLearning in #Pharo

Want to check out MachineLearning in Pharo? Then use this awesome list of projects, books, booklets, papers, and applications related to machine learning, AI, data science in Pharo

Releaser

Releaser is a new tool for releasing nested #pharo projects residing in multiple repositories. Read more.

TimeMachine in Pharo

Funny experiment of Manuel Leuenberger about using Bloc and Pharo to get a déjà vu

Glamorous Toolkit v0.4.0

Glamorous Toolkit v0.4.0 is out. Read more.

Maizo and Pharo

Maizo - a Chemistry project developed with Pharo.

To quote research gate:

Maizo is aimed toward molecular- and reaction discovery based on big data of quantum mechanical global reaction route mappings. The global reaction data includes equilibrium structures (EQs), dissociation channels (DCs), and transition structures (TSs), which are automatically calculated by a global search on a potential energy surface using the GRRM (global reaction route mapping) method. Applications to molecular- and synthesis design are an important part of the project. Machine learning and visualization techniques as well as chemoinformatics methods are essential to acquire useful information from the large reaction data space. The team developed an RMapViewer, which was developed to visualize and analyze the GRRM outputs.  

Read the PDF on "Maizo"-chemistry Project: toward Molecular- and Reaction Discovery from Quantum Mechanical Global Reaction Route Mappings".

Pharo Git Thermite

A visual tool developed in Pharo for assessing Git commits and GitHub Pull Requests

The project is available on GitHub: https://github.com/ronsaldo/pharo-git-thermite

and now also integrates with Iceberg:
 


Read more details here.

JupyterTalk

JupyterTalk makes good progress - nice!

 Project is on GitHub: https://github.com/jmari/JupyterTalk

Exploring Pharo

There is a nice blog post about his initial experience with Pharo from Konrad Hinsen. He overall likes Pharo and especially the explorability but also has two primary points to criticize:


  1. he mentions that Pharo is not reproducible and can not be bootstrapped from its own source code 
  2. it is not easy for beginners to follow Pharo
The first point is actually invalid. Konrad seem to have missed that Pharo since two years IS ACTUALLY  BOOTSTRAPPED - so we can build a image from scratch and from our own source code. This is actualy in place and used to build Pharo now. Even smaller images (like the minimal one) beside what is provided in the default Pharo download.

People interested in this topic should read this blog post from 2014 and check the "bootstrap" folder in the Pharo github project. This is based on the PharoBootstrap work. Someone interested in this topic might also be interested in this video.

For the second point I agree as Pharo is moving fast it might not be easy to follow. Also the community is small. Due to this we can not invest our sparce resources into making things easy for newbees - but rather will continue to focus on moving forward. Especially with the upcoming Pharo 7 including better git support and the new Calypso browser many things have changed compared to Pharo 6.

But there are books available and there is the mailinglists as well as the Discord chat to ask questions and get answers. Situation is far better than in 1994 when I dived into Smalltalk and where it was not easy to get informations or even a free system to enjoy the openess and productivity of such a system.

Nonetheless - as one of the primary contributors of the Pharo project I really enjoy such blog posts. It shows we are on the right track. There is still a long way to go - but step by step it goes...

GeoSphere in Pharo

A project to compute distances, parse coordinates, etc. using Pharo.

See https://github.com/akgrant43/GeoSphere

How to use Extensions in Pharo

In Pharo it was always possible for a package to extend a class within another Package. So far it was done by putting a * in front of the method name.

In Pharo 7 this changes a little bit as you can directly select the extension from the new Calypso system browser.

Here is a description about the differences.

Mobile Apps Development with PharoJS

A new description on how to use PharoJS is available.

Friday, November 02, 2018

Dynamic creation of compiler plugins in Pharo

A new class (merged this week into Pharo 7) called "OCCompilerDynamicASTPlugin" allows for the dynamic creation of compiler plugins


Object compiler
 addPlugin: 
  (OCCompilerDynamicASTPlugin 
   newFromTransformBlock: [ :ast | (RBParseTreeRewriter replaceLiteral: 42 with: 'meaning of life') executeTree: ast. ast. ]
   andPriority: 0
  );
 evaluate: '42'.
This would give 'meaning of life'

Friday, October 05, 2018

Reshaping the Development Experience

feenk wants to "Reshape the Development Experience" with a new GT Toolkit.

The project is online at https://feenk.com/gt/


The slides from ESUG 2018 are now also available:

 

3D Print your own Pharo Lighthouse

You have a 3D printer and would like to print out the Pharo logo lighthouse? Here is how - just visit this page for all the details.

Parser performance in Smalltalk

Some insights into Parser performance in Smalltalk

Pharo totally bootstraps

Rather unnoticed but is now finally working:

Pharo images are now build from NOTHING. Not a single byte of image exists before: During build process, a very small image is first bootstrapped using a technique developed by Guille Polito during his PhD. Then the rest of the packages are loaded in a regular way.

This is how Pharo 7 (which is intended to be released around November) is now built!

Truly object oriented test

How to find out if a system is truly object oriented. In this old video Dan Ingalls explains how you can simply test this.

In Smalltalk systems like Squeak and Pharo you can do it.

GotalkInterpreter

I like Go as a programming language. It is open source, has a funny mascot and supports easy creation of executables. Still it is not the same as working with a nice Smalltalk system like Pharo.

I guess others see it the same way. That's why a simplistic Smalltalk code interpreter written in Golang is available here: https://github.com/SealNTibbers/GotalkInterpreter

To quote: Why Smalltalk Smalltalk is beautiful dynamic language with a concise and readable syntax. Also we are smalltalkers so that's why.

Stylesheet for Pharo

When writing stylesheets (CSS) for the web it is not recommended to hard code the colors in each stylesheet rule - because often it is a tedious task to adopt or change them afterwards.

Therefore often people use CSS preprocessors like LESS or SaaS or Stylus where you can define variables or other to ease the job.

If you already work in Pharo you might want to easily write your stylesheets in Smalltalk. Thats the idea behind "Stylesheet" - a project to define CSS like stylesheet in Pharo applications.

The project was now migrated from SmalltalkHub to GitHub and can be found on: https://github.com/pharo-contributions/Stylesheet

Pharo Artefact migrated to GitHub

The Artefact PDF generation library written in Pharo was migrated to GitHub (including the STHub history):

https://github.com/pharo-contributions/Artefact

Here is an old video on it:

Pharo IoT Hackathon

There is an Pharo IoT Hackathon on 19th of October 2018 in Cologne by zweidenker Pharo company. Details are here.

 

Docker and Pharo @ZWEIDENKER

The Zweidenker company gave some insights on ESUG 2018 in their usage of Pharo and Docker:


 

MetaLinks Lecture from ESUG 2018

Pharo provides advanced reflection including MetaLinks. You can find more details on all the possibilities in my Pharo wiki collection.

The slides on this topic from ESUG 2018 are available online now:


 

Pharo and IoT - ESUG 2018 slides

Hacktivismo de datos en Smalltalk

The MadridSUG (Madrid Smalltalk user group) started a new event called "Hacktivismo de datos en Smalltalk". Details are here and here

Cormas in 10 years

Cormas is an agent-based modelling and simulation platform. The project can be found on https://github.com/cormas/cormas with a webpage on http://cormas.cirad.fr/indexeng.htm

The system is currently implemented in VisualWorks Smalltalk with a port started to Pharo Smalltalk.

There is a funny video of the CORMAS guys where they see Cormas in 10 years:

 

Gemstone support for Pharo

Gemstone is a very nice object oriented database. At ESUG 2018 there was native Support for Pharo (GemBuilder for Pharo) announced. Read the details in the slides.

Do you really understand git

Another presentation from ESUG 2018 about git:


Pharo in Corner Cases of the Enterprise

Slides from ESUG 2018 presentation on doing business projects using Pharo. The title is "Pharo in Corner Cases of the Enterprise"


 

Pharo and SendGrid v3 API

The SendGrid Smalltalk project is now gradually supporting the v3 API of SendGrid email delivery service. More on https://github.com/sorabito/sendgrid-smalltalk

Pharo Script of the Day

there is a new series of posts on a "Pharo script of the day" by Hernán Morales Durand. So far the following topics were covered:

Thursday, October 04, 2018

ESUG 2018 Conference Report

is available here.

ARCOS - Augmented Reality Collabroative Operating System

Several times within this blog I reported about Croquet. It was written in Squeak Smalltalk and supported communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users. Basically it was a followup of ideas from Morphic - but all in 3D. You could create and visit portals to interactively collaborate.


 If I remember correctly it was later open sourced and ended up in OpenCobalt.NET - there are still some infos are on the Squeak wiki and a video on Youtube.



 It was also continued as OpenQwaq platform and used to form solutions for a company named 3dicc
(started by Ron Teitelbaum, David A Smith and Andreas Raab).

I also reported on the Lively Kernel project - a JavaScript based Kernel and IDE to also followup on these ideas allowing dynamic and linked worlds within your web browser. There is also a video available.

Now it seems there is a fully new web based implementation of these historic ideas available. It is called ARCOS - Augmented Reality Collabroative Operating System and if you check it out you will find many similarities.

Fully written in JavaScript and based on LivelyKernel but with a similar UI as in Squeak Croquet. If you check out the source code you will even find that the classes are prefixed with a "T" - which was back in the time the prefix for TeaTime (a specific framework for Croquet).

You can try it instantly in your browser using the following link or watch the following videos for a demo:


Thursday, September 20, 2018

Caffeine.js and WebVR - Smalltalk in 3D

Craig is continuing on his caffeine Project - which uses SqueakJS for a binding to JavaScript. He plays with WebVR and it is nice to see Squeak Smalltalk running in the browser in 3D.

A demo is here:

https://caffeine.js.org/a-frame/

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

PharoJS V22 available

PharoJS V22 is available on SmalltalkHub.

From the release notes: RELEASE V22 Added statistics package. Generates statistics about Pharo classes used by an app and the size of generated JS code Fixed default app folder parent to fit the modification in github repo = non-pharo code moved to HTML folder


This is like the last version done on Pharo 5 and SmalltalkHub as Noury will switch to GitHub now.

Thursday, September 06, 2018

Geranium - agent-based simulator in Pharo

Geranium is an agent-based simulator with a dedicated DSL, for analyzing energy consumption in residential urban environments. The model takes into account structural, social and micro-climate characteristics. It is written using Pharo and here is a video session:




Code is on https://gitlab.com/npapoylias/Geranium and a project page can be found here.

You can also check the following PDF with a presentation including some more details.

ESUG 2018

Next week ESUG 2018 Smalltalk conference will start. You for sure will find infos and news on

https://twitter.com/hashtag/esug18
https://twitter.com/hashtag/esug2018

Monday, September 03, 2018

HoneyGinger in Pharo

I already reported on HoneyGinger in the past.

This is a new demo movie for HoneyGinger, a fluid dynamics engine written in pure Pharo.

Wednesday, August 29, 2018

git-migration and Tonel for Pharo

If you want to migrate projects from SmalltalkHub (or any MCZ-based repo) to GitHub to profit from new git integration in Pharo then use Peters "git-migration" tool.

The tool is now using the Tonel format to store the code. Tonel is a file-per-class format, that means a class and all methods are stored in a single file. This is faster than having a file for each method but also prevents some trouble with git on Windows due to number of files and subdirectory depth.

Amber Smalltalk and npm

Amber Smalltalk and accompanying libs do not use bower any more, everything is based off Node package manager (npm) only now. Read more.

If you have an old command line interface (old amber-cli from previous installations) then uninstall it first.

GeoHash for Pharo

Pharo package to decode/encode Geohashes to/from latitude and longitude (geolocation).

Available on GitHub: https://github.com/simonfranz/smalltalk-geohash

Using Docker with Pharo

Two small tutorials on how to use Docker and Pharo: - Tutorial one - Tutorial two

Pharo Newsletter Summer 2018

is available here.

CuisSmalltalk Live templates

A prototype of LiveTemplates for Smalltalk - implemented in CuisSmalltalk. Shows how quickly and easily one can adopt a Smalltalk IDE.

RDF for Smalltalk

Christian Haider made his code available to deal with RDF/XML file. Check out his Resource Description Framework (RDF) page. It is currently for VW - but I guess porters are welcome.

Clap Teaser

Clap - is the Command line argument parser for Pharo. The project is available on GitHub now including a teaser to demonstrate some features.

A quick memory game using Pharo’s dynamic spec builder

Spec is a UI framework used in Pharo. It not only allows to declare static layout but you can also dynamically use it.

Here is a new medium article explaining some of it's features using a memory game as a demonstration. Nice!

Test-driven development for generated portable Javascript apps

some more infos on PharoJS

Improved Playground

Feenk is improving the Playground

A mini scheme in Pharo

Now as a PDF and HTML. Looks like more of the Pharo books are converted to be available in both formats.

Exemplifying software in Pharo

An article on working with example based programming using Pharo.

Controlling a Turtlebot using PhaROS: Goals planning and Automatic docking

Read more details here or watch the video:

Monday, July 16, 2018

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

KerasWrapper - AI for Pharo

KerasWrapper is a project providing bindings from Pharo to Keras (which is implemented in Python). You can transparently play with the high-level neural networks API and visualize results in Roassal directly.

The github repo is on https://github.com/ObjectProfile/KerasWrapper

Monday, July 09, 2018

Improvekit

Found a page on the web and a twitter account from a company in Buenos Aires also doing ST development. From the screenshots they seem to have choosen Squeak as IDE and Morphic for the UI ...



Pharo TechTalk: Tensorflow

Next TechTalk session is on 12th July 2018 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM (UTC+02:00) - read more.

If you want to participate - join the #techtalk channel on Pharo's Discord server. You can get an invite here.

Tuesday, July 03, 2018

Pharo ZeroConf

A short video I created to demonstrate the Pharo ZeroConf scripts:


 

Monday, June 25, 2018

StCAD - now open source

'StCAD' is a basic 3D CAD framework implemented in VisualWorks Smalltalk. It can be used for 3D motion simulation and other. Details on the framework can be found here.
It is now open sourced with MIT license. The author Aik-Siong Koh hopes Pharo users will port it to Pharo. Read the details.

The download is provided as a ZIP.



Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Friday, May 18, 2018

Alternative Pharo-contributor tool explained with videos

https://github.com/astares/pharo-contributor now provides two videos demonstrating how this tool can be used as an alternative to easily contribute to latest Pharo 7

Video 1:

 

and Video 2:

 

Tuesday, May 08, 2018

Intelligent System Construction

Video from latest tech talk of PharoClub: Intelligent System Construction by Alexandre Bergel


 

Friday, May 04, 2018

PrismCodeDisplayer for Seaside

A wrapper for PrismJS for Seaside web framework. Read more here or check the demo here.

TelescopeCytoscape for Seaside

Telescope is an engine for efficiently creating meaningful visualizations using Seaside and Pharo. Now there is a connector for CytoscapeJs for Seaside. Read more here and a demo is here.

Reproducible moldable interactions using Pharo and Bloc

A new inspector model in Pharo that records developer interactions as first-class entities and uses them to reduce repetition: this is part of "Reproducible moldable interactions" master thesis. You can directly jump to the PDF here. Note that the solution presented is implemented in Pharo using Bloc UI infrastructure.

Pharo - "Containers" for collections and data structures

"Containers" - a project for alternate collections and data-structures for Pharo Smalltalk is now on GitHub. Read more

ChartJs for Seaside

a binding of ChartJs for Seaside (the web framework running on Pharo). Read more
or try the demo here. Note that the demo link is different from what was originally announced.

Willow-Mixpanel

Willow-Mixpanel is now part of the ba-st Web Stack family. Read more.

Grafoscopio Sucess Story

Grafoscopio is a moldable and versatile tool for that allows to mix prose, data, code, visualizations into interactive reproducible documents, raging from single notebooks to complete books. There is new success story availabe for it available on the Pharo homepage.

Iceberg 0.7.5

the git tooling for Pharo is vailable and integrated into latest image of Pharo 7

Monday, April 23, 2018

Using P3 to connect Pharo to CockroachDB

One can now also use the P3 driver (PostgreSQL driver protocol 3.0) from Sven to connect Pharo also to CockroachDB. CockroachDB is an open-sourced software project (relational database management system) that is designed to store copies of data in multiple locations in order to deliver requested data when needed. It is described as a scalable, consistently-replicated, transactional datastore. The database is scalable in that a single instance can be run from a laptop while building an app, then scaled to thousands of commodity servers as a business grows.

Read more.

Pharo and XML

Monty has a nice blog about Pharo and XML

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Iceberg 0.7 explained

Iceberg - the Code Versioning Tool for Pharo with a binding to git now has a reworked model and UI. Esteban gave an intro to it in a techtalk:


 

GraphQL

REST services are easy to implement in Pharo - especially with "Teapot" and my simple "Tealight" extensions for it. Read the Tealight project page with some documentation and examples to get an idea about it.

If you worked with or heard about REST then you might also come across GraphQL. It's a technology initially developed at Facebook.

In GraphQL, the shape of the response is built up on the server side to match the shape of a given JSON query.

So while in REST when you ask for a "book" item you receive a predefined JSON response with all attributes of the book. In GraphQL you might ask only for the books title or in another case for the books title and author at the same URL and receive an appropriate response.

Now there is also an initial library for GraphQL available for Pharo and VisualWorks.

Really nice!



Programming Neural Networks in Pharo - Preview

Agile Artificial Intelligence with Pharo - a new book is in the pipe. You can already have a preview.

Friday, March 16, 2018

Pharo to Anki

Using Pharo to create Anki decks that help to deliberately practice Japanese grammar by visualizing.


Thursday, March 15, 2018

Instance inspection in Pharo

The Pharo Inspector on classes now has “instances” view. I added this a a few days ago and forgot to send a message to the list so anyone knows. Looks like I should blog more about my contributions again.

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Pharo-sentry v0.2.2 releases

The unofficial Pharo SDK for Sentry error tracking platform from Peter is available with a new 0.2.2. release. Now with support for breadcrumbs and basic context.

Code is here:  https://github.com/peteruhnak/pharo-sentry

Feenk work on a Diagrammer for Pharo in Bloc

The Feenk team is working on on Diagrammer in Pharo. The idea is that developers should not have to leave the IDE - not even for drawing diagrams and they give a nice graphic preview on a more elaborate control of lines and figures in this tool with some screenshots on their twitter account.

 - Preview 1
 - Preview 2
 - Preview 3

This nicely shows what is already possible in Bloc.

Updated DiscordsSt for Pharo

A new version of DiscordsSt, An API wrapper for Discord written in Pharo

 https://github.com/JurajKubelka/DiscordSt

Wednesday, March 07, 2018

Clean and modular stateful traits for Pharo

Pharo 7 now integrated (beside many others) a special pull request (PR) to integrate a new version of Traits, this version includes the following features:

- Stateful Traits
- Modular implementation, it is loaded after bootstrap
- Cleaner interface
- Reducing duplicate methods as Traits extends from Class

Since Pharo also has Traits, Slots, MetaLinks, ClassAnnotations and other meta facilities it is a very nice lively system to also work on the metalevel and do metaprogramming.

Shortcuts in Settings tool

With the latest version of Commander and the new Calypso Code Browser, all shortcuts are
explorable and configurable.

SQLite Loadable Extensions for Pharo

Pierce implemented SQLite Loadable Extensions and you can find it in the UDBC repository.

Pharo Bitcoin's BIP39 mnemonic

Esteban Maringolo provides a simple implementation of Bitcoin's BIP39 mnemonic for Pharo

OSSubprocess - 64 bits support preview



The "OSSubprocess" project for Pharo now provides a preview on 64bits support

Tuesday, March 06, 2018

Friday, February 02, 2018

MooseQuery

Moose-Query is a domain-specific language to build navigations and scopes queries for entities in Moose.

 More documentation is available here as well as the project itself.

Thursday, February 01, 2018

Pharo as ticket machine

Pharo powered ticket machine for the Tournai Jazz festival. UI made with Spec framework. See it here.

Saturday, January 27, 2018

Cons for Pharo

In the Pharo catalog you will now also find a "Cons" project. The project provides a Lisp-style lazy cons list. Can handle Smalltalk streams and infinite generators (blocks) as though they were lists. It was written by Evan Donahue and the code is on GitHub.

Friday, January 26, 2018

Pharo 7 time planning

Usually we have a Pharo release each year in May - but the Pharo 7 release is now defered to the end of the year for good reasons.

The switch to git took a lot of time and is still ongoing with a rework in progress for Iceberg tool to simplify the UI. Also the 64 virtual machine for Windows and other important tasks keep Esteban busy. Additionally new additions to the Pharo ecosystem like the new Calypso system browser need to be integrated.

Which gives more time for contributions and cleanups. Meanwhile there are nice changes merge already (like the Shift class builder, latest Iceberg, many cleanups, ...) there are also nice additions in the pipe like the possibility to extend the Playground similar to Inspector or the possibility to use the foreign function interface without the source file in a deployment scenario.


Here is a description for the new contribution process. As an alternative you can also use my contribution project with scripts and a help topic to get you started easily. You can also use the new Pharo Launcher 1.1. or Fari - a shell to fetch and prepare new images. There will also be a Google summer of code (GSOC) in 2018 for the 14th year.

There are also additional sprint dates already announced till June 2018.

Jump in - the water is fine!


Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Porting from StHub to GitHub

How it could be done - read an experience report from Hernán.

Iceberg history in Calypso

How to see the full history of a method with Iceberg (the Pharo git tool) and Calypso (the upcoming new system browser). Esteban shows in a video that it could be done if your project is connected with iceberg:


 

Calypso Spotter tool

Esteban worked on a scoped Spotter for the new Calypso system browser for Pharo, to avoid the use of mouse/track pad when coding.


Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Updated PHANtom

PHANtom - a modern aspect language for Pharo Smalltalk By Johan Fabry and Daniel Galdames was updated for Pharo 6.1. by Inés Sosa

The repo can be found at: https://github.com/InesSosa95/PHANtom

Tuesday, January 09, 2018

Google Summer of Code 2018 with Pharo Consortium

Pharo community will apply also this year - so read more.

OpenSmalltalk VM Meeting

Fabio Niephaus wants to organize a meeting on OpenSmalltalk VM. The agenda is yet to be finalized, but maybe Clément and/or Eliot may give an update on their work on Sista. Read more here if you are interested or check the doodle.