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.

TalkFFI

There is an initial release for TalkFFI - a new project to automatically generate the Smalltalk bindings for FFI (here NativeBoost in Pharo) right from the header files.

Jun for Smalltalk

The Jun for Smalltalk project (a library to handle 3D graphics and multimedia) has a new version "Jun794" released.

Pharo Finder Tricks

Ben shares some tricks about the Pharo Finder tool.

Oak - distributed persistence using Smalltalk

Göran writes about Oak - a project for Smalltalk to make use of Riak for distributed and easy object persistence.

Fuel 1.8.1

There is a new Fuel release now ready for many image versions: Pharo 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 2.0 Squeak 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4 Read more here.

Magma 1.4 is out

The Squeak Magma Database 1.4 is out.

BioSmalltalk 0.4

A new release of BioSmalltalk is available.

Squeak on RISC OS Pi

Tim Rowledge may be known to you. He ported Squeak to the Acorn RISC processor and wrote "A Tour of the Squeak Object Engine" when working at Interval Research. He is now working on the Raspberry Pi (RISC OS Pi) and as of today he has a running Squeak on it.

Need chocolate

The company Object profile is hiring: "Object Profile is hiring: Yes! We are ready to share our happyness! We are looking for fulltime and partime engineers to share fine chocolate." So if you want to work with Pharo and VW contact them.