JQuery Mobile for Seaside

Nick provides a new framework for Seaside and JQueryMobile integration.
You can read more here and try it here.

Kaliningrad: Developing with Amber, Seaside and Monticello

If you want to combine the client side Amber with the server side Seaside framework and Monticello then look at the new Kaliningrad project.

CogDroid updates

Dimitry reports again on the status on Cog for Android. Read more.

Dart Language

First infos on Dart appear on the radar: http://www.dartlang.org

You can also try it right in your browser: http://try-dart-lang.appspot.com

Also the language spec.

RoarVM

Interesting overview on the RoarVM.

S8 - Smalltalk on Googles V8 JavaScript engine

Looks like Alejandro F. Reimondo implemented S8 - a Smalltalk platform written on top of Googles V8 JavaScript engine (which is written in C++).

Smalltalk Stammtisch Zürich

There is another Smalltalk Stammtisch Zürich on Tuesday, September 27, 2011. Read more.

Dart/Smalltalk and dynamic object environments

I'm very interested what Dart (the new Google programming language) is all about. Why? Let me explain:

We have seen many new languages in the last few years (from Java, C#, Ruby, Scala, Clojure, Go, ...) - most of them with old and known concepts mixed with different syntax. But nothing really new. I tried nearly all of them but nothing hit me like Smalltalk did back when I understood all of its concepts.

To me Smalltalk is still outstanding since it is not only a language - it's language is only mapped to "the dynamic object system" underneath that the Smalltalk runtime provides. And having such a dynamic object system is the key factor in programming.

Many people are "blind" and dont see this since they compare languages by syntax or features or check if a language is highly ranked in silly comparisions like the TIOBE index. IMHO one of the reasons why Smalltalk is so poorly ranked is that Smalltalk (if seen as a programming language) maps to objects and messages - thats not what people know from other languages and if they look at Smalltalk code this is not what the usual programmer would expect regarding syntax.

Smalltalk is too different here. In a "3 + 4" expression the plus is not an operator - its a message. 3 and 4 are not treated equally - 3 is the receiver and 4 is the argument. Its also different regarding control structures. You dont need a keyword for a "while" loop in Smalltalk - you just need a message. If you dont have a "repeat until" construct you can easily implement it just by adding a message #repeatUntil: to BlockClosure taking a block as argument, ...

But there is this expectation among programmers to learn new keywords and syntax rules with any new programming language. This is how most books teaching programming languages start: learn the keywords, then language control structures and then start coding.
There is also this expectation to use nice wizards to create new classes or writing source code in text files followed by a compiler step.

Smalltalk is different: here you only need six keywords or just send a message to a class to tell the system that you want to create a new subclass of it. So anything is an object and understands messages - even classes and block/closures. Anything is changeable, anytime - even at runtime.

So Smalltalk as "a dynamic object system" is superior - and will continue to be so - since a dynamic environment is easy to change (even the language built on top). If you want you can even cleanly blend in different other more mainstream languages into this dynamic system. You can even make a snapshot of this virtual object system (an image file) and continue with your program or debugging session the next day.

Our world is a dynamic system too - full of objects. Thats why Smalltalk is very close in bringing real world concepts to machines and computing.

But even Smalltalk systems have to be enhanced - there is so much power in the meta facilities of these dynamic environments and Smalltalk still doesn use all of its power here. Meta informations usually are used for IDE tools - but if extended they can allow you to build applications nearly automatically (maybe more on this in another post). This is the field where Smalltalkers have to learn and catch up.

And what about Dart? The people behind Dart know that Smalltalk is not only a language, they worked with the underlying dynamic object system and understand it down to the bare metal. If they have reused and transfer this know how and knowledge correctly into the design of Dart then this new programming language is a chance to again bring dynamic object systems into the focus and raise programmers attention.

So will Dart just be "yet another language" with new books teaching you yet another new syntax or will it be a real step towards more dynamic adoptable and flexible runtime systems?

We will see next week...

Pharo 1.3. available

So Pharo 1.3 is now officially available on the pharo-project.org page.

Running Dolphin app on Mac

As I reported earlier there is some help if you want to run your windows application written in Dolphin Smalltalk also on Mac.

Now there is a new blog post that explains all this in detail.

More Videos on ESUG channel

The ESUG channel on Youtube has new videos available. Read more.

Database conectivity API for Squeak and Pharo

A new database conectivity API and its MySQL implementation was announced by Anindya Haldar for Squeak and Pharo.

ESUG on Youtube

There is now an ESUG Smalltalk channel on Youtube.

Glorp for Pharo

There is an updated port of Glorp for Pharo. Nice!

New site for DBXTalk

DBXTalk (former SqueakDBX) is now online at http://dbxtalk.smallworks.com.ar/

Fast package loading

Mariano is working on fast package loading for Pharo using Fuel.
Impressive: 7 seconds for loading Seaside - he will report soon on his blog.

Amber IRC Channel

The Amber IRC channel is now logged.

More Amber news

Amber already connects with Morphic.js written in JavaScript. See this picture and read more here.

There is also a Twitterwall implemented in Amber.

Really interesting!

Coolacious

Coolacious = Cool + Delicious

With this new screencast released one can get the impression that Andy from ObjectArts released a Mac OSX port of Dolphin Smalltalk into the wild. For those who dont know Dolphin - it is a very nice Smalltalk system - but with history and focus on Win32 platforms. Now natively ported to MaxOSX? Really?

The end of a second screencast here showed that its not a real native port - he uses Wineskin, a tool used to make ports of Windows software to Mac OS X. Wineskin is based on Wine.

Read more here.

I like all these virtual boxes, emulators and stuff. The platform question is nothing one really has to discuss first (in most cases). I can even run my old C64 stuff if I like.

Git Reference

Found a nice intro and reference for Git: http://gitref.org

Seafox for Seaside update with canvas translater

There is an updated version of Seafox for Seaside, now with an HTML to canvas translator. It's helps you building real Seaside apps from existing HTML templates.

You can read more about it here or try it out here:

http://seafox.seasidehosting.st

MethodWrappers ported to Squeak 4.2

Eliot ported Method wrappers to Squeak 4.2. If you know VisualWorks you may already know that Method Wrappers can add hidden behavior to a method without recompiling it. It is a very useful package for implementing coverage and tracing tools.

You can read more about them here.

Klotz

The Klotz project implements an Agile 3D Visualization Engine. It is written in Pharo Smalltalk and is freely available on Squeaksource. There is also a paper for a short introduction.

Pharo 1.3 One click

The Pharo 1.3 one click is now available on the Pharo download page.

Moose video

Want to learn more about Moose then watch this video

Ludus - Game framework on top of Smalltalk on top of JavaScript

Ludus is a new html5 game framework on top of amber:
http://asmalltalkbytheseaside.com

Bangalore Smalltalk Meetup

There is a Smalltalk meetup in Bangalore.

MorphIDE for Amber

When you play with Amber (the Smalltalk on top of JavaScript) you typically need to set up a webdav with Apache. Wouldnt it be better to directly connect this with a server Smalltalk serving the files?

Now there is a new project on Squeaksource3 available that provides a static file HTTP server. It serves the Javascript files that make up the Amber IDE. MorphIDE accepts HTTP PUTs from the Amber IDE, whereupon it will (over)write the .js and .st files being PUT to filesystem. It will also regenerate the MorphIDE HTML file to load the new code that you've written in Amber.

VMIL

There is also an invitation to VMIL workshop that may be of interest to you.

5th Argentine Smalltalk Conference

You are invited to the 5th Argentine Smalltalk Conference - read more here.

Yesplan video

There is now a video online from Yesplan - a software written in Smalltalk using the Seaside webframework. It runs on Pharo with GLASS for persistence.

Extending SUnit

Frank plays with extending SUnit with theories.

More rumors on Dart and Smalltalk

Here are some more rumors on a possible relationship between the new Dart programming language from Google and Smalltalk.

Mhhh ... and we also know that Eric Clayberg is now also working for Google. Is it possible that Dart is the next fast and modular Smalltalk implementation that is deployed via Web browsers like Chrome?

There are also some infos from back in 2010 available on the net.

Let's see what the keynote will reveal and if Google is able to suprise me here.

One month until Dart is released

AFAIK Google will publish more infos on it's new programming language called "Dart" on GOTO conference in Aarhus in October. Dart is according to various sources a new structured programming language designed for the web.

Why is that interesting to Smalltalkers? Since it is created by Lars Bak (known from V8 JavaScript Engine and Strongtalk/Animorphic) and Gilad Bracha (known from Newspeak).

Can we therefore expect it to be more Smalltalk like? Dont know ... but in a month we will see.

Windows developer preview

Want to get a free developer preview on the new windows. Then look at MSDN for the ISO files.

Amber Smalltalk

JTalk is now renamed to Amber and it has a lot to offer now.

Seaside 3.0.6

is available. See the announcement, you can use the updated ConfigurationOfSeaside30.

Online ProfStef on JTalk

ProfStef is a nice app to teach you Smalltalk. It is now ported from Pharo to JTalk (a Smalltalk running on JavaScript) too so it is available online now.

TextLint integration

TextLint is a tool to check scientific writing for common style errors written in Pharo Smalltalk. There is now an integration into Emacs and TextMate. There is also a web version available online.

VMMaker repo moved

Since squeaksource.com had several outages in the past the VMMaker package (the one you require to build the Squeak and Pharo virtual machine) has now moved to another squeaksource instance: http://source.squeak.org.

Read more.

CogDroid

You want to Test Cog virtual machine to run Pharo on Android devices. Try with the initial relase of CogDroid.

Heretic Smalltalk selectors

Smalltalk is different - and even after years I get rembered by discusssions from time to time how different it really is!
Smalltalk is a real dynamic object system (with the language just built in) and unique in the world of computing.

While a function/method name in a class has to be unique so it could be called - it usually is a Symbol. You know all these #foo, #bar, #negated, ...

In Java you may call it foo() or bar() or negated().

But in Smalltalk this selector could be ANY object. Yes, yes - this is not a typo.
It could be any object, just try it. For instance with the integer 1:

|selectorThatCouldBeAnObject existingMethod|

selectorThatCouldBeAnObject := 1.

existingMethod := EllipseMorph methodDict at: #heading.

EllipseMorph methodDict at: selectorThatCouldBeAnObject put: existingMethod.

EllipseMorph new perform: selectorThatCouldBeAnObject

So the message could even be the object that is receiving the message/itself as message:

| existingMethod receiver|

existingMethod := EllipseMorph methodDict at: #heading.

receiver := EllipseMorph new.

EllipseMorph methodDict at: receiver put: existingMethod.

receiver perform: receiver

Cool !!!

Alan Kay once said that "Smalltalk is object-oriented, but it should have been message oriented."

And as we now know a message is an object and an object could be a message. Mhhh - have to think more on this...

ROSScratch

You want to control your home robot using Scratch? Then look at ROSScratch project.

Dynatree for Seaside

I've wrapped the MIT licensed dynatree widget as part of the JQueryWidgetBox project. So if you need a tree in your web app just try it.

TSUG meeting

If you want to know more why Bombardier is using Pharo and Seaside then visit the next TSUG meeting in Toronto on Sep. 12th.

Pharo/Seaside experience

Francois Stephany reports on his experience with using Pharo and Seaside to develop a web application.

Small seaside image

Pavel created a small seaside image based on the small Pharo kernel image. So you could have a running seaside app in 4.3MB.

Java and late file dialog instantiation

Interesting: Java provides a JFileChooser to provide a file dialog for the
Swing UI framework. Typically I create objects when I need them - so
it was clear to me that I instantiate the class in this example only when
a button is clicked (most other examples on the web instantiate the dialog with the main window):

package foo;



import java.awt.BorderLayout;



public class TestWindow extends JFrame {



	private JPanel contentPane;



	public static void main(String[] args) {

		

		EventQueue.invokeLater(new Runnable() {

			public void run() {

				try {

					TestWindow frame = new TestWindow();

					frame.setVisible(true);

				} catch (Exception e) {

					e.printStackTrace();

				}

			}

		});

	}



	/**

	 * Create the frame.

	 */

	public TestWindow() {

		setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);

		setBounds(100, 100, 450, 300);

		contentPane = new JPanel();

		contentPane.setBorder(new EmptyBorder(5, 5, 5, 5));

		contentPane.setLayout(new BorderLayout(0, 0));

		setContentPane(contentPane);

		

		JButton btnOpenFileDialog = new JButton("Open file dialog");

		btnOpenFileDialog.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {

			public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent arg0) {

				onClickedButton();			

			}

		});

		contentPane.add(btnOpenFileDialog, BorderLayout.CENTER);

	}



	protected void onClickedButton() {

		JFileChooser fileChooser = new JFileChooser();

		fileChooser.showOpenDialog(this); // open modal on main window		

	}

}

When you run this simple application within Eclipse, click the "Open" button and
close the file dialog via "Cancel" you will notice that an
exception will appear on stdout as soon as you close the main window:

Exception while removing reference: java.lang.InterruptedExceptionjava.lang.InterruptedException

	at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method)

	at java.lang.ref.ReferenceQueue.remove(Unknown Source)

	at java.lang.ref.ReferenceQueue.remove(Unknown Source)

	at sun.java2d.Disposer.run(Unknown Source)

	at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

So the app is not closed correctly and error free.

And I found a workaround, the exception will not appear if you
create an instance of JFileDialog as early as possible in your app:

	public static void main(String[] args) {

		new JFileChooser();

                ...

Since it is not referenced this instance becomes directly a victim of
the next GC - but anyway creating an instance of JFileChooser right at the beginning seem
to trigger an initialization that is required to prevent the above problem.

Thought I would share this if others run into the same problem. Another possibility is to use a better system.

Airflowing goes live

Airflowing, a new seaside application isn’t invite-only anymore - so anyone is able to use their commercial service. Read more or try it out.

FSGit updated

FSGit got an update to the new Filesystem implementation. Read more.

Squeak in Jail

If you want to limit your seaside app (chrooted seaside instance) for security reason this may be

an old but interesting blog post to read.

Smalltalk on JVM 2

An update: watch the video called "A Renaissance VM: One Platform, Many Languages" on this site from Oracle. Highly recommended if you are interested on Smalltalk and (J)VM's.

Smalltalk on JVM

Found Smalltalk mentioned in a Java 7 presentation from Oracle citing Mark Roos from Roos Instruments, Inc:

"“We were able to implement all of the Smalltalk constructs... using invokedynamic to execute Smalltalk code on the JVM. ...The ease of putting a true dynamic language on the JVM was a wonder in itself.”

Note that with JSR292 there is more support for dynamic languages on JVM.

Found a presentation about the "RTalk" project to run Smalltalk on JVM and there is work going on as this message from the open jdk mailinglist proves.

Even when it runs on JVM - I still expect it to be limited compared to a Smalltalk running on a Smalltalk VM. The future will show if I'm right.

Pharo by Example in Spanish

The book Pharo by Example is now translated into Spanish too.

OCR and Pharo

Gary Chambers (creator of the Polymorph UI framework for Pharo) is currently building an image capture, OCR and data processing system using Smalltalk and he provides a first screenshot.

His company Pinesoft is using Smalltalk a lot as you can read here. Nice!

ESUG Seaside sprint

VMware (formerly GemStone) is sponsoring the Seaside sprint after ESUG. Thanks!

Two new chapters for Pharo book

Stef shares two new chapters for the Pharo book. You can also find them here.

This time on floats and little numbers. Feel free to review and send comments to him.

PetitParser Tutorial

Tudor Girba published a tutorial on how to use the PetitParser as part of the moose book.

One ring to rule them all

Refactoring Browser, Packaging Software like Monticello and other Smalltalk tools mostly work on their own code/meta model. What about a unified model?

Veronica Uquillas is currently working on Ring - a unifying and foundational model

infrastructure for Pharo. The goals of the project are:

- Provide a common API at structural and runtime level

- Allow tools to interact and integrate directly with the host environment (Pharo)

- Support history analysis

You can find the code at squeaksource, there is also a continuos integration job

and the latest updates now try to integrate Ring. There is also a presentation available.

Binary Literals

Binary Literals - a new feature of Java 7.

So beside 0x... notation for hexadecimal you can now write 0b... for binary. What a step forward (for the Java community).

I still like Smalltalks base/radix notation since I can freely choose the base (binary, octal, decimal, ...)

2r10010010 

16rA000

...

LDAP and Seaside

If you want to integrate LDAP authentication into your seaside app then read charlies blog entry.

Flash 2 HTML5

Interesting tool to convert Flash to HTML5 from Google

http://swiffy.googlelabs.com/

Pharo Kernel reloaded

As you may know Pavel is working on Pharo Kernel - a small Smalltalk kernel that is stripped down from Pharo Core image. Meanwhile there is also a 3MB Pharo-Kernel-Gofer image available that has networking support and Gofer (a pharo installer to load packages) installed.

With this it is possible to reload back the various packages from Core image on top of the kernel image. By running the tests afterwards it is possible to check if anything is OK. So far the result is very promising and since all of this is automatically built using the continuous integration server it is possible to control changes and watch progress.

Really a great step in the modularization of Pharo Smalltalk images!

Moose Suite 4.5

There is a new Moose release available. Read more.

Humane assessment

Tudor has a new home for success stories of his humane assessment method based on Moose (which is based on Pharo). Read his announcement or visit the new page.

StOMP

Beside Fuel there is now also a second Pharo project for binary serialization available. It is called StOMP (Smalltalk Objects on MessagePack) and the code is running on Squeak, Pharo and VisualWorks. Read more.

Seaside 3.0.5

There is a new shiny Seaside 3.0.5 release available.

Google vs. Oracle

Read about Oracle vs. Google. Maybe Google should have used Smalltalk instead of Java for Android. They were so close but blind.

PDF Viewer in JavaScript

Interesting project to implement a PDF viewer in pure JavaScript and HTML. Cool!

Squeak Meeting in Germany

There is a meeting of Squeakers in germany in Potsdam on 23.07.2011. Two days before there is a presentation

from Alan Kay. Read more (in german)

Spoon mapped to WebDAV

In his Spoon project Craig maps Smalltalk to WebDAV, so he can use his favorite text editor to edit.

Google Analytics Tracker

If you build a seaside application like Nick did with getitmade.com then it may be usefull to get a quick overview of your page visits.

A small tool announced by Esteban can help you here. Just load it in a seaside image using the ConfigurationOfGoogleAnalyticsTracker.

TWM and multiple worlds

The tiling windows manager for Pharo (a usefull tool to control the many windows on your desk) now also supports multiple worlds. It's not the same as in Squeak where "World" means a separate storable/loadable project with own changesets - more in the sense of multiple desktops as you may know from usual operating systems.

There is a screenscast available to demo all the new features.

DBXTalk issue tracker

There is a new issue tracker for DBXTalk (the database framework for Pharo)

Glorp for Pharo

Guillermo Polito announced a new Glorp port for Pharo integrated with DBXTalk (the former SqueakDBX). So if you want to map you classes to a RDBMS schema and store your objects into database tables you should take a look. Note that Glorp is still LGPL but currently in the process to be MIT licensed.

CI tips for Smalltalk

Nick has some tips on Continuous integration using Jenkins and Smalltalk.

Cuis 3.3. released

Juan released Cuis 3.3. with more improvements. Read more.

More REST server

Need only a simple REST server on top of Pharo? Guillermo shows you an example with only KomHttpServer loaded and a custom service. No need for frameworks like Seaside.

However - as I noted back in march it is very easy to build a REST service if you use Seaside. So you can choose depending on your requirements...

ACM Student Research Competition and Smalltalk

Vanessa, a student at the University of Chile presented Hapao, a Pharo application at the ACM Student Research Competition (sponsored by Microsoft Research). Details here.

She arrived 2nd in the category undergraduate student. Congratulations!

Scratch port for Pharo

Looks like Scratch gets ported to Pharo: at least there is a project on Squeaksource. After loading and running "ScratchFrameMorph open" you get the basic UI of scratch. Nice.

SqueakSource3 Alpha Site online

Dale announced a new SqueakSource3 site. Note that this is for testing only and be aware that the repository will be refreshed at the end of the Alpha period.

Fuel in SandstoneDB

Ramon now included Fuel into SandstoneDB. Here is the comment from "SandstoneDb-RamonLeon.141.mcz":

Introduced a dependency on the Fuel serializer. You can load it first with...

Gofer new
squeaksource: 'Fuel';
package: 'ConfigurationOfFuel';
load.
((Smalltalk at: #ConfigurationOfFuel) project latestVersion) load: #(Core Tests Benchmarks).

It's smoking fast compared to SmartRefStreams. A 200 object commit with SmartRefStream on test machine takes around 2.2 seconds, .41 seconds with Fuel.

Passes all tests. SmartRefStream is still the default for now so loading this won't change anything or corrupt existing databases. To set fuel as the default serializer evaluate...

SDFileStore serializer: SDFuelSerializer new.

This will of course invalidate any existing db based on SmartRefStreams. To migrate, simply resave all of your objects. This would require grabbing all objects first into some temp arrays, changing the serializer, then calling save on all objects.

So startup Pharo and try it out.

Modern UIs

Just read an article about the Language Workbench Competition 2011. There the MetaEdit+ tool was demonstrated and highly praised. According to this article by Cincom the tool is implemented using Cincom Smalltalk. Looks like the tool really rocks:

Steven Kelly demonstrated the MetaEdit+ implementation of the assignment. In fact, he implemented most of the assignment from scratch during his demonstration! Very impressive and the only one who did it this way. For me, this shows the productivity and ease of use of MetaEdit+.

But yet again someone complained about the old-style UI:

The main comment on twitter about MetaEdit+ was that its UI looks a bit old-fashioned. That's of course a matter of taste, but their next version (5.0 - to be released soon) will have a new, Windows 7 looking UI.

So the next version will have a Windows7 UI. CST catches up with current trends - good.

But the question to me still is what is next step in UI development? Is it really worth to following UI design of the native platform.

Or should we focus on the nice things that can be done in browsers and other rich clients today? Or should we focus on 3D Smalltalk?

If I look at all these new devices and apps then I think an application that looks "modern" should at least support graphics and animation. Mhhh ... time to look at morphic again?

What is the (Smalltalk) application with the most "fashionable" UI?

More notes on JavaFX2.0

Oracle did a really good job on JavaFX 2.0 - there is now a webbrowser component included (based on WebKit). This is very usefull since you can implement a part of your application in HTML/JavaScript. This brings RichClient apps and WebApps closer together.

Think of a rich client app where you want to display a google map or use a jquery library to display charts, integrate sites like facebook, google, ...
You can decide if you implement/reuse a widget/webapp in HTML or implement it in Java(FX).

It is even possible to call JavaScript embedded in the displayed website or handle events from the website (get a callback from JavaScript). Note that WebKit already supports HTML5.

I remember an example in Smalltalk/MT where it was possible to get a callback into Smalltalk on events generated from the scripting engine in Internet Explorer. So a Smalltalk window was able to display a webpage by embedding IE and when you clicked in the webpage you could handle this in your Smalltalk app.
But it was only possible with deep knowledge of IE and its COM interfaces.

JavaFX also provides Swing Interoperability - so you can use existing Swing widgets or integrate a JavaFX stage/scene into your Swing app. You can also style your app using CSS similar to a webpage. You can run a JavaFX app easily as applet, webstart or local application. It is very deployment friendly and you can even develop apps that run on a TV. Let's see if it will also have a future on mobile devices/platforms. Yes - JavaFX is really nice and opens new opportunities.

But still ... with Java you have the compile-run-check cycle and you waste a lot of your development time compared to more productive languages like Smalltalk where you dynamically interact with objects and code. Maybe all these nice UI features like CSS skinning, embedded web browser, animation framework, visual effects ... should be added to platforms like Squeak or Pharo too ;)

JavaFX Beta

Tried the new JavaFX beta 2.0 ... looks good so far. Some small graphic errors on my machine ... but could be nice to build visually attractive rich client apps.

Lets see how easy it will be to use Java now instead of the former JavaFX scripting language...

Learning EToys

Want to learn about the eToys system in Squeak. There are nice screencasts available on the Waveplace website.

On top of ...

As I said in my post on JTalk it is very easy to run the Rhino JavaScript Engine from Java and therefore should be easy to load JTalk to run this Smalltalk implementation on the JVM.

Stefan picked up the idea and tried it with the following snippet:

ScriptEngineManager factory = new ScriptEngineManager();
ScriptEngine engine = factory.getEngineByName("JavaScript");
engine.eval("var CanvasRenderingContext2D = false;");
engine.eval(new java.io.FileReader("jtalk.js"));
engine.eval(new java.io.FileReader("init.js"));
engine.eval("println(smalltalk.Date._today())");

He did more experiments to make sure calling Java-Classes from JTalk-Smalltalk is possible too.

Today Stefan left a comment on my blog post on "JTalk and JSTalk". He announced that the execution of smalltalk-code on the server-side via Rhino is possible. Details on the remote runner and how you can save your Smalltalk Code to a DB can be found on his blog.

So given enough time (and money) it should be possible to build a Smalltalk IDE using Javas Swing UI library or a Seaside server running on top of Glassfish/JBoss/WebSphere/Weblogic/Geronimo/... app servers, ...

I still doubt that performance would be good. It would make more sense to run it on Googles new Native client.

However - JTalk on Rhino is a nice way to experiment with Smalltalk on top of JavaScript on top of JVM on top of...

Background Changer

Daniel Galdames G. created a background changer for Pharo. Just evaluate

Gofer new
  url: 'http://lemuus.homelinux.org/lemuus/BackgroundChanger';
  package: 'BackgroundChanger';
  load.

World menu->System->Change Background

Now select a directory with images. Nice.

Dr. Geo Release 11.06

There is a new release of Dr.Geo - an app built with Pharo Smalltalk.

Need Fuel

Fuel - a new project to implement binary object serialization for Pharo is part of the ESUG SummerTalk. It's work in progress but already usable, there is a ConfigurationOfFuel metacello config to easily load it.

Read about the details here or on the project website. The Source code can be found on squeaksource.com, there is also an issue tracker. According to the benchmarks its faster than SmartRefStream.

It is very easy to serialize and materialize (deserialize) an object, you can store blocks (that get evaluated when loaded again) and Fuel takes care to keep global instances like Transcript.

| sourceArray loadedArray |
sourceArray := Array 
  with: 'HelloWorld' 
  with: Transcript
                with: [ Transcript show: 'a string' ]. 
"Store to the file"
FLSerializer serialize: sourceArray toFileNamed: 'example.fl'. 
"Load from the file"
loadedArray := FLMaterializer materializeFromFileNamed: 'example.fl'. 

Bytecodes explained

You want to know more about how the virtual machine of Pharo works? Then go to Marianos blog - this time he gives an introduction on Smalltalk bytecodes.

Ephemerons for Cog

Igor implemented Ephemerons for Cog and Eliot explains why they are usefull. You can also read a paper on this topic.

Talk about Pharo's Future

James talks to Stef about Pharo's Future. Listen here.

PC Emulator in JavaScript

Nice: a PC emulator in JavaScript to run Linux. Read more or try in your browser.

EyeSee

Need some easy visualizations in your application written in Pharo?
Then check out EyeSee:

Gofer it
squeaksource: 'EyeSee';
package: 'ConfigurationOfEyeSee';
load.
(Smalltalk at: #ConfigurationOfEyeSee) loadDefault

It is easy to create diagrams with it. Check out the examples in class "ESExamples".

I tried it in Pharo 1.2 - some examples were broken since the class Circle was removed. This is currently discussed on pharo-list. However - it's easy to fix.

Next time I need some visualizations I use Pharo instead of Excel ;)

News on JRockit

JRockit (a fast JavaVM similar to Hotspot) is now free and available on Oracles Tech net. Nice!

Video on Cuis and Morphic3

There is a new video available about Cuis (a Squeak fork) and Juans Morphic 3 implementation.

ESUG: registration is open

via Joachim: ESUG 2011 registration is open.

Learn Smalltalk with ProfStef

Thanks to James Pharocasts now includes a screencast on using ProfStef to learn Smalltalk.

BSUG Meeting

The Belgian Smalltalk User Group (BSUG) is organising its next meeting on Tuesday May 31. Read more.