The Hitchhiker's Guide to ...: October 2018

Monday, October 15, 2018

Sunday, October 14, 2018

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

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:

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