Reading EXIF from pictures

Alexander Lazarević announced a new project to read Exchangeable image file format informations. This allows you to read EXIF information like the image description, camera model, ... from TIFF or JPEG images.

Code with MIT license is on SqueakSource.

VW UI

Found a screenshot of an app that is built using VisualWorks Smalltalk. Why? Look at the icon and the tabs ...

FSUG Meeting

... about "GLASS ~ GemStone - Linux - Apache - Seaside - Smalltalk" with Norbert Hartl today.

Scripting with Pharo Smalltalk

The "Coral" project (formerly known as "Saphir") is a way to use Pharo Smalltalk for scripting on the shell.

• Project page
  
• Installation (french)

The packages got updated with more support for displaying in a Unix console. Nice!

Seaside master scripts

Just a short reminder for myself: the master scripts for the Seaside 3.0 image and others can be found here.

Seaside 3.0.2 release

There is now a new Seaside bug fix release 3.0.2.

WebTester ported to Gemstone

The Seaside WebTester (a project that is able to test web applications using Selenium) is now also available for Gemstone. Read more here.

Code statistic for Smalltalk web framworks

Janko has some code stats on the three main Smalltalk web framworks
Aida, Iliad and Seaside

ThinkCode TV also provides videos on Smalltalk

Beside Laurents Pharocasts and the "Smalltalk 4 You" series from James (both free) there is now another site (ThinkCode TV) providing introduction videos on Smalltalk.

Davide Varvello (creator of the site) provides this as a commercial offer, but as he notes you can get them for free if you follow his twitter account.

Measure memory consumption

There is a project called Spy on Squeaksource including a profiler
to keep track of memory consumption for Pharo/Squeak.

Alexandre has more infos on this including a paper explaining the idea.

Seaside 3.0 is available for Dolphin too

Seaside 3.0 is now also ported to Dolphin Smalltalk. Read more and download it here.

The next milestone reached!

Pavel was able to load the the rest of PharoCore packages into the PharoKernel image. Yet another step regarding the modularization of Pharo. In the end the goal is to be able to build the current Pharo image on top of the (headless) Pharo kernel image.

Simple morphic

There is a redesign of Morphic called "SimpleMorphic" available. More details here.

Cuis 2.8

Juan has released Cuis 2.8. Details here.

More RUT-K infos

Interesting ... I've found a paper on RUT-K, a train scheduling system written in Smalltalk which I helped to develop as a Smalltalk consultant (I already wrote about it here). It is used by german railway for schedule planning.

The paper is in german and contains two screenshots of the application (page 6 and 7).

The web contains even more info like

• a presentation from Jochen on RUT-K
  
• infos from Martin on the Oracle part for the mobile version of RUT-K
  
• a paper on the theory behind all this and how the projects fit together
  

RoarVM - Pharo and Squeak on multicore

How cool is that, IBM made the RoarVM available as OpenSource on Github:

"RoarVM, formerly known as the Renaissance Virtual Machine (RVM) is developed as part of a IBM Research project to investigate programming paradigms and languages for manycore systems of the future. Specifically, this VM is meant to support manycore systems with more than 1000 cores in the future.

The RVM was open sourced by IBM Research under the Eclipse Public License. Please see the open source announcement for further information.

Today, the RoarVM supports the parallel execution of Smalltalk programs on x86 compatible multicore systems and Tilera TILE64-based manycore systems. It is tested with standard Squeak 4.1 closure-enabled images, and with a stripped down version of a MVC-based Squeak 3.9 image."

It is compatible with Squeak 4.1 and Pharo 1.2, has full closure support and was
tested with 8 cores, 16 hyperthreads on Intel systems/tested with 56 cores on Tilera TILE64/TILEPro64 processors.

Accessing Twitter from Pharo

It's easy to access and display Twitter messages using the Pharo Smalltalk system with the JSON package and my help system implementation.

Still I dont know how to get the correct channel hash for the Pharo project...

Comments appreciated!

Long bug fixing

Funny ... it took five years to fix this issue in hibernate.

Using ODBC in Pharo

Want to use ODBC to access a database in Pharo or Squeak? Thats easy since there is a package originally developed by Diego Gomez Deck and meanwhile updated in Squeaksource.

Use my metacello config script to load ODBC support and start with ODBCConnection class.

For further help you can consult the (outdated) documentation.

Maybe Laurent could do a pharocast on it.

OB-Web - JavaScript/AJAX/Smalltalk server example

Anything goes web ... even IDE's like Eclipse (see Eclipse e4).

"Smalltalk labs" has implemented an enhanced web based code browser for the Seaside web framework for Smalltalk. Compared to the standard web based browser tool that comes with the Seaside web framework the one from Smalltalk labs uses AJAX to navigate through the browser which means it feels more like an application than a website.

Coding directly in the webbrowser is still cumbersome - so I prefer the Smalltalk based browser installed in the image and only use the web tools when I have to check an image remotely.

However ... since browsing Smalltalk directly in the webbrowser is easy to do Lukas today updated the packages for "OB-Web" to use OmniBrowser (the Smalltalk browser used in Pharo) to be accessible from a webbrowser too.

Just download Pharo 1.1. and follow the simple instructions to run it and see yourself.

Browsing the code you will find out that it is a nice example how to use the Comanche webserver (KomHttpServer) to write own web based services. It's also a nice example for AJAX communication between client side JavaScript and server side Smalltalk code using JSON.

Some hints for checking out the code:

• "OBKomHttpService startOn: 9090" starts the app on the given port so you can navigate to http://localhost:9090
  
• OBKomHttpService also adds logic for startup/shutdown at image startup/shutdown
  
• in the superclass OBHttpService there is (depending on the web path) a launcher created (see OBWebLauncher>>contents for the generated HTML page)
  
• the page uses http://localhost:9090/library/link.js and http://localhost:9090//library/launcher.js where the first one is responsible for the XMLHttpRequest (AJAX)
  
• both scripts are served by Smalltalk as well (see OBLinkFile and OBLauncherFile)
  
• the AJAX requests are handled in OBHttpService>>processAjax:for:
  
• subclasses of OBInteractionRequest handle requests like menues, etc.
  

Really cool example for JavaScript/Smalltalk combination.

Pharo Kernel and Small(talk) webserver

Pavel continues with his work on a small Pharo Kernel.

The latest release not only contains a headless 2.2 MB image but also a small 3MB image with KomHttpServer. See yourself.

Download the image, start "PharoKernel-KomHttpServer-1.2-12226.image" with your Pharo virtual machine and point your browser to

     http://localhost:8000/

to get a simple HelloWorld response.

3MB for a tiny Pharo Smalltalk based web server - not bad!

Work on Opal continues

The work on Opal (a new compiler for Pharo) continues.
If you want to get more details on Opal read this summary from Jorge. You can also grab an image here.

Upcoming features for seaBreeze

Internationalization and Localization is on the todo list for seaBreeze. Read more from Georg here.

Smalltalk Solutions Call for Proposals

The STIC (Smalltalk Industrial Counsil) has opened a "Call for Proposals" for Smalltalk Solutions Las Vegas 2011. Read more here.

Redline Smalltalk ping

Some more activities around Redline Smalltalk. There is a new webpage including code, a new blog and twitter mentions an Eclipse plugin.

Independent Misinterpretations

James Robertson is not working for Cincom anymore. First I was shocked when I heard about it since I know that he was working there evangelizing Smalltalk for around 17 years. And it was around 1994 when I started with Smalltalk at university using the VisualWorks product...

James has a unique style of bringing a product closer to the customers using all the new medias (blogs, podcasts, ...) and he has done a very good job for Cincom and the overall Smalltalk community by providing news and informations. It's good to see that he will continue to be with Smalltalk since he now launched a new podcast - "Independent Misinterpretations". Read more.

On-line programmable CMS

Reza Razavi' on-line programmable CMS implemented in Seaside is now online. Read more.

Numerical Methods code now MIT

The Smalltalk/Java code of the book "Object Oriented Implementation of Numerical Methods" is now under the MIT license. Read more.

Image sizes and MicroSqueak

Reduce the size of the image by shrinking or write out a new (reduced) image file. Either way - if size matters and you feel like you have to dig into bootstrapping an own Smalltalk system based on Squeak you should have a look at this post from Eliot.
There you will find code that will produces a headless 57k image with a few basic classes as a proof of concept. Interesting!

Reminds me on the minimal image experiment from the past that was able to compute 3+4 which was only a few kilobytes in size. Nobody was able to see the result since it was instantly garbage collected ;)

Scratch for Arduino - an interview

An interview with the developers of Scratch for the Arduino open source hardware platform. Scratch is implemented in Smalltalk.

To quote:

Then was when I discovered Scratch, once the hard part of learning Smalltalk. A hard but interesting part because I've made my career in programming but not as much as Marina, and still I realized that is something different, unlike any other object oriented languages and completely dynamic. It's almost like learning to program again because it has a different syntax, a different philosophy and is something new.

ESUG 2010 Videos available

The videos from ESUG 2010 (Barcelona, Spain) are now available:

• raw videos
  
• videos by James Robertson
  

Morphle and Siliconsqueak

There is a new startup company providing Seaside hosting and SiliconSqueak - a processor chip that will run almost all existing Squeak images without modification. It is a hardware "virtual machine".

ESUG 2010 Slides available

The slides from the ESUG conference in Barcelona are available now.

EToys 4.1.

EToys 4.1. (which is based on Squeak Smalltalk) is available, read more here.

New URL for Pharocasts

Pharocasts has a new URL: http://www.pharocasts.com

New from Dolphin Smalltalk

While cruising on James blog I've noticed his post on the new Dolphin Smalltalk website. Andy and Blair also reduced the price for the professional edition.

Check it out - Dolphin is a wonderful Smalltalk system for Windows with a nice UI.

Next Pharo sprint

Next Pharo sprint / Moose dojo -> october 23-24, bern

PDF Generation using Smalltalk

Marten Feldtmann is working on pdf creation using libHaru, he published a first, not ready code for a wrapper around libHaru.

But I already wrapped this small library for Pharo/Squeak two years ago with a more natural Smalltalk interface. So one can write:


| document page image |
document := PDFDocument new.
page := document addPage.
image := document loadPNGImage: 'Image.png'.
page drawImage: image rectangle: (Rectangle origin: 72@72 extent: 144@144).
document saveToFile: 'documentWithImage.pdf'


My library is also mentioned as one of the options for generating PDF on the seaside PDF page.

I made the code available at http://www.squeaksource.com/HPDF.html and licensed it with MIT. Would be good if Marten will have a look and maybe port my code to VAST before doing any unnecessary work on his side...

Independent from that I would still like to write/see a PDF framework written in plain Smalltalk (similar to Java's iText).

The more I think about it the more I like the idea:

• Solutions like using external libraries or frameworks (LibHaru, ApacheFOP, ...) always have limits
  
• If any work would be done in Smalltalk one would have full control
  
• PDF is a nice document format that is usable on nearly any platform
  
• PDF is now more than just text and images - you can have interactive PDF forms, annotations, ...
  
• There is no unify way for reporting and printing in current Smalltalks
  
• Yes, there is a rough plain Smalltalk PDF Generator from Bruce Badger but the license is AFAIK restricted (I would prefer MIT)
  
• it would make up a nice GSOC/CampSmalltalk/Community project
  
• Smalltalk streams are much easier to use than Java streams
  
• the code would be nicely testable using unit tests
  

However - time is limited. But if anyone is interested feel free to contact me...

BTW: did you know that Bruno Lowagie (author of iText) changed the license of his Java PDF library to block his government.

JQueryWidgetBox 1.5 for Seaside 3.0

The JQueryWidgetBox project is growing and we now have 32 interesting JQuery widgets wrapped for Seaside. Feel free to use them in your seaside app to enhance the user experience.

After some fixes and updates to align with the new Seaside 3.0 I just made version 1.5. of JQueryWidgetBox available as a Metacello configuration. Read the announcement.

InfoVis for Seaside

Holger announced some wrapper packages for the InfoVis Toolkit to make it usable in Seaside.

Next Cologne Smalltalk Meetup

Cologne Smalltalk Meetup will be happening next Thursday at the usual time and location. Read more.

Smalltalks 2010 conference

In November there will be the Smalltalks 2010 conference. Read more.

Avocado

Hey Avocado is released: it provides a Self like environment coded in JavaScript and is based on the work done in the Lively Kernel. Read more.

WebClient with NTLM authentication

Andreas added NTLM authentication to WebClient. Nice.
Read more here.

Krestianstvo SDK 1.1/Croquet Video

Nice video from the Krestianstvo SDK 1.1 showing some of the features available in the Croquet platform which is written in Smalltalk.

Help System for Pharo/Squeak

Some months ago I wrote a help system for Pharo and Squeak
to provide an easy way to browse available documentation
for the open source Smalltalk systems.

You can use it to display available API documentation
(extracted from class/method comments) and to provide custom
documentation in form of simple written text books.
These informations are extracted from the image by two
predefined help builder classes that convert the help contents
to instances of "HelpTopic".
These HelpTopics can be nested (book structure) and displayed
in a HelpBrowser. Since help text is extracted/stored in
classes and methods you can use the usual tools to maintain
and package help contents together with your code.

The design is simple but nonetheless powerfull since by
allowing you to integrate own custom help builder classes
you can easily integrate documentation extracted from any
source available to you.

It was accepted by the community and integrated in both
standard images (Pharo 1.1/Squeak 4.1). Thanks guys!

Laurent now created a new screencast to show you how to use
it:

http://pharocasts.blogspot.com/2010/09/document-with-helpsystem.html

Starting from now, no excuses not to write documentation ;)

It is still ASCII based but I have plans to integrate other media
types (especially HTML) in the near future...

Frankfurt Smalltalk User Group Meeting

The next Smalltalk User Group Meeting for developers around Frankfurt area will take place on 21th of September 2010, 6:30pm at the following addresss:
ITS-People GmbH, Lyoner Strasse 44-48 in Fankfurt-Niederrad

Alan Knight will talk about GLORP.

Pharo CI Server

Pharo now has an official continuous integration server (using Hudson) ready to build images. It is currently empty but will soon test the official pharo core and pharo (pharo-dev) releases.

Seaside 3.0

Seaside 3.0 is now finally available. Read more.

Aida/Web 6.1 released

Janko announced the new version of Aida/Web Application server and
Web framework (http://www.aidaweb.si), currently prepared for Squeak/Pharo and VisualWorks. Read more.

Seaside runtime image with Pharo

Jan van de Sandt gives some tips on how to create a Seaside runtime image based on Pharo.

Iliad 0.9

The next release of Iliad 0.9 is out. Currently for GNU Smalltalk, a Pharo is in preparation. Read more.

Skype interview with Dan Ingalls

Göran published an interview with Dan Ingalls (done via Skype).

Dojo Toolkit for Seaside

Holger Kleinsorgen published some packages that help developing Seaside applications that use the Dojo Toolkit.
Read more.

SqueakDBX 1.2 release

There is a new 1.2 release for SqueakDBX available. Read more.

S4A - Scratch for Arduino

Jordi Delgado announced Scratch For Arduino (S4A) - a modification of the well known Scratch software (which is written in Squeak Smalltalk) that supports simple programming of the Arduino open source hardware platform.

Nice.

Pharo in the Cloud

Jan van de Sandt created a new public Amazon Machine Image (AMI) setup as a Smalltalk web server with a Linux SqueakVM, a Pharo 1.1 Smalltalk image and the Apache2 web server. Anyone can use this AMI as a robust and scalable runtime platform for Seaside applications. Read more.

OmniBrowser chapter for PBE 2

A new draft chapter on OmniBrowser is available for the Pharo by Example book.

Smalltalk User Group meeting in Frankfurt

on September 21st. Details can be found here

Interactive Web site testing

Laurent created a new screencast on using Selenium (a java web application test system) and Pharo to interactively test web applications. See more.

Smalltalk and wine

A fine glass of wine is something you may find enjoyable while developing software.
The interesting part is that there is a german IT expert now selling wine called "Smalltalk", "Pearl", "DreamWeaver", ...

Read more (german article)

Enjoy a "SmallTalk 2008 Rheingau Riesling QbA trocken"

Instantiations bought by Google

Instantiations was acquired by Google - mainly to get the Eclipse, Java expertise. Interesting enough the company now continues with its VA Smalltalk business:

"The new Instantiations will focus entirely on Smalltalk and remains fully committed to supporting and evolving the products we all know and love!"

The Wave is closed

Google Wave is closed. I think there was too much of a hype than usable technology. Read the announcement.

BTW: The announcement was written by Urs Hölzle who formerly worked at Animorphic systems (yes, the company that had one of the fastest Smalltalk JIT's and that was later acquired by Sun).

TextLint

You may know the lint tools for Smalltalk or Java helping you to common errors in code.

There is now also a nice app called "TextLint" which is written in Pharo Smalltalk. It is a lint tool for common style errors in natural language. You can use it to process your text/latex/... files.

Here are videos (1 and 2)showing the tool in action.

Seafox.xpi - HTML to Seaside plugin

Nick released Seafox.xpi - a small plugin for Firefox that translates a websites HTML into the appopropriate seaside methods.
Nice and helpfull! Read more.

Reddit in Smalltalk

Sven Van Caekenberghe provides a new Seaside article on "Reddit.st - In 10 elegant Smalltalk classes"

Pharo 1.1. Setup for Windows

The new Pharo 1.1 release comes (similar to the first version) as a large download: the one-click image with virtual machines for all major platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux).

As before for those who want to use/run Pharo 1.1. on Win32 system only I additionally prepared a smaller installer for the new release. Read more. As ever it is also available on the Pharo project site.

Aida on Pharo 1.1

Not only Seaside 3.0 is running on the new Pharo 1.1. release. Also the Aida Smalltalk
web framework is running nicely on the open source Smalltalk platform. Read more.

Pharo by Example on Amazon

Pharo by Example can now finally be ordered at Amazon.com and therefore also orderable at any bookstore. You can also visit the online version.

Pharo 1.1. released

Pharo 1.1. - the next milestone of the Pharo project is released. Here is a short summary what's new.

Sunset or Eclipse with Oracle JVM

When you run the new Oracle JVM 6u21 and Eclipse you may encounter frequent Eclipse crashes.

Eclipse launcher (which is written in C/C++) reads the JVM vendor and if it detects a Sun JVM, it adds a necessary memory parameter for Eclipse to function.
Since now the "Java" vendor was changed from Sun to Oracle it crashes.

So the current version of Eclipse does not work with the current version of Java on the most popular platform - at least not out of the box.

There is a bug report already ...

Seaside in Czech

Two new Seaside applications on the radar:

http://www.webchod.cz
http://www.kalorik.cz

Cycles in your software

Jannik Laval announced a new tool to see your software package structure and to fix cycles between packages. It is based on Pharo and Moose.

Read more.

Squeak-SSL

Andreas announced a new SSL interface for Squeak.

The project page can be found on squeaksource.

Self programming language

Self 4.4. is released. Read more.

Boot Squeak

Intersting alternative to SqueakNOS: Michael van der Gulik describes
a way to boot Squeak on a tiny core linux.

Seaside 3.0 RC

Julian announced Seaside 3.0 RC.

Yet another Smalltalk success story

There is a very nice web based ERP system built with Pharo and Seaside by Inceptive. Read more.

Squeak is now part of the SCF

Squeak is now a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Read more.

Teleplace Cog VMs are now available as OpenSource

Wow ... soon after I asked what the state of the Cog virtual machine is Eliot now announced it as open source release on the squeak list.

The Cog VMs are Squeak/Croquet VMs that run closure Squeak/Croquet/Pharo/Cuis images and should really give them a performance boost. Read more.

Cuis 2.4 released

Cuis is a free Smalltalk-80 environment derived from Squeak. Beeing minimalistic it should be a great tool for running Smalltalk on small devices.

Juan announced version 2.4.

Squeak on iPad

Bert has Squeak with eToys running on the iPad.

Watch the video here or read more on his blog.

Hudson Build Server for Pharo

There is now a Hudson Build Server for Pharo. Welcome to CI.

Smallthought Systems bought by Twitter

The Smallthought Systems company which is known for dabbledb.com (an online data tool written in Smalltalk using Seaside) was acquired by Twitter today.

Interesting, looks like dabbledb.com service continues but does not allow new registrations and Avi (who is also the creator of the original Seaside framework) is now working for Twitter in the Twitter's analytics team. Either he will now switch to Ruby again or we can expect Twitter services driven by Smalltalk in the future. Who knows ...

Read here and here.

OpenCobalt on Squeak 4.1.

Open Cobalt Alpha is the first step in a long term project to make available to all people a free and open source platform for constructing, accessing, and sharing virtual workspaces for research and education. It's all done in Smalltalk.

The OpenCobalt project now moved forward to run on the latest Squeak 4.1. version. Read more.

There is also a new website online for sharing Cobalt worlds: http://cobaltworlds.com.

ESUG 2010

ESUG 2010 is in preparation, this year in Barcelona, Spain (September 13 - 17, 2010) together with a Camp Smalltalk (September 11-12).

Read more if you want to contribute or attend.

JNIPort Preview for Pharo

JNIPort - a bridge between Smalltalk and Java is now also available for Pharo. Joachim released a first preview.

Memory Monitor for Pharo

Alexandre created a small memory monitor for Pharo. Nice.
Instructions to load via Metacello can be found on the project site.

Pharo Engineer

INRIA is looking for a fulltime Pharo engineer. If you want to work with Smalltalk in France then read more.

Seaside at Irish Software Show

Julian speaks about the Seaside web framework on the Irish Software Show (held between June 8th and 11th in Dublin's Trinity College). Read more.

Gaucho 1.0

Fernando announced "Gaucho 1.0" - a direct manipulation environment for software based on Pharo 1.0.

If you want to try it out go to http://gaucho.inf.usi.ch to get the install script or watch a video.

Features included in version 1.0:
Direct manipulation of Classes, methods and packages
Easily perform rename refactorings of classes and methods
Draggable arrows for manipulating the inheritance relationships between classes
Creating and runing tests for all the classes in the system
Creating workspaces for taking snapshots of the current pampas
Smart searching for any object in the system
Keyboard shortcuts associated to the most important operations
Logging all the changes to the system
Saving/Loading developers and workspaces to the default local directory

Moose 4.0

There is a new version 4.0 of the Moose suite. It's its first fully open source release since it is now based on Pharo 1.0. Read more.

CKEditor for Seaside 3.0

John Pierce has wrapped the CKEditor for Seaside 3.0. The editor is a web based WYSIWYG editor that you can now use in your seaside application.

The project ist here.

40 YEARS OF FUN WITH COMPUTERS

Dan Ingalls will give a talk on "40 YEARS OF FUN WITH COMPUTERS"
upcoming Thursday at HPI in Germany. Read more.

Points of view - a tribute to Alan Kay

Nice collection of essays written to celebrate Alan Kay's 70th birthday.
Ken found it at Ians site:

http://piumarta.com/pov/points-of-view.pdf

There is also a page at VPRI about it.

Camp Smalltalk London

UK Smalltalk User Group would like to invite everyone to attend
Camp Smalltalk London this July 16-18. Read more.

Pharo by Example: New draft chapter on Monticello

There is a new draft chapter for the "Pharo by Example" book
available. Read more.

To get the PDF check out the news section on http://pharobyexample.org

Seaside 3.0 on Pharo 1.1.alpha

Hey, with the latest updates Seaside 3.0 runs fine on the Pharo 1.1 alpha.

seaBreeze 4.5

Magnus Schwarz just announced a new seaBreeze version 4.5 (based on Seaside 3.0)

You can get it from http://seabreeze.heeg.de.

Chinese on the Seaside

Bernat Romagosa implemented a Chinese Learning Tutor using Seaside. Nice.