Roassal display on a super large screen

as the topic says. Read more (including a picture)

Pharo books built using CI

Writing books and writing software have a lot in common. One can write code or books in different languages and styles, let the story go different paths, a review is recommended before publishing, ...

I dont know if unit testing for books exist - but also a story in a novel has to follow some rules. For instance it would not make sense if the murder is the same victim or the detective in a crime story.

So if software can be assembled and built using a continuos integration server why not do the same for books and documentation.

The Pharo community addresses this as well: from today on all pharo books are now built in one place at the Pharo CI server.

     https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/view/Books/

Soon we will also have a http://books.pharo.org page.

If you can wait for more have a look at: http://pharo.pharocloud.com/pharobooks

Pharo bytecode debugger

With the Moldable Debugger framework it is possible to build specific debuggers in the Pharo universe. So beside the regular textual Smalltalk code debugger it is now possible to build other debuggers like for example
Exactly such a bytecode debugger was announced today allowing you to dig down to the level of bytecode instructions for the virtual machine. Read more.

Redline Smalltalk connects to the JVM world

Another infoworld article, this time about Redline Smalltalk.

New Memory Profiler for Pharo

Not only the memory monitor was updated as I wrote in my previous post. Also a new memory profiler is provided.

Read about this new Pharo tool here.

Pharo MemoryMonitor updated

Pharo memory was updated. Meanwhile the button issue is also fixed. You can get it right from the config browser within your Pharo image.

Work in progress: Roassal visualizations for the web

People from ObjectProfile work on moving Roassal visualizations to the web. Here is an example and another one.

If you dig depper and look behind the scenes of the page you will notice that they have a roassal.js JavaScript file with classes like TRMouseClick, RTDraggable, ...making this possible. Nice!

Smalltalk Reflections #007: Minimalism

New episode from SmalltalkReflections podcast on minimalism.

NLP for Pharo

A natural language processing toolkit for Pharo Smalltalk. I like the authors post on Twitter "I am having too much fun with Pharo Smalltalk hacking some natural language processing code".

Smalltalk: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Another essay from Smalltalk Renaissance

VALS semester of code using Pharo or Squeak

You want to participate in VALS semester of code (similar to Google summer of code, except that students work for class credit instead of money) using Pharo or Squeak. Then hurry up - deadline is 13.01.2015.

Twitter #thingsPeopleBuiltWithSmalltalk

People tend to think that Smalltalk is not widely used as it is not in the (stupid) TIOBE index. But Smalltalk is not only a language but a fully dynamic object system (the language is just built in using objects and messages and fully adoptable which makes it hard to compare to regular programming languages). Compared to any other it is also the most pure object oriented systems.

Mostly other languages started to be "object oriented" for fashion reason without following good OO practice. There is also a very simple reason why Smalltalk is not highly ranked in TIOBE index. You do not need a webbrowser or compiler manual. You can concentrate on the problem solving and lively development in the Smalltalk system instead of googling for keywords, syntax and API's.

Nonetheless there are so many projects and applications that are built in Smalltalk - unfortunately they are not that visible in the first place even when some of them influence us daily like financial applications, container management, railway planning and ERP systems.

I was surprised today to see that someone started a #thingsPeopleBuiltWithSmalltalk campaign on Twitter. Nice initiative!

So if you know something built in Smalltalk then just twitter it:

  https://twitter.com/hashtag/thingsPeopleBuiltWithSmalltalk?src=hash

 Lets make 2015 the "There is no excuse not to know about Smalltalk" year ;)

Jun4Pharo combined with Woden

The Woden 3D engine of Pharo and Jun4Pharo combined:

OS Project with initial support for Ubuntu and Unix

Beside the existing "OS-Windows" support for Windows operating system the "Pharo OS project" now also has new subprojects for "OS-Unix" and "OS-Linux-Ubuntu" with some initial support for these native platforms as well.

You can load it from the config browser in Pharo 4.0.

EventRecorder for Pharo 4 now based on Spec

I rewrote the Event Recorder for Pharo 4 to be based on Spec. You can load it from the config browser in a Pharo 4.0 image.

CORMAS - open sourced

The CORMAS modelling platform is now open-source and available under the MIT licence.

CORMAS (Common-pool Resources and Multiagent Systems; Bousquet et al., 1998) has originally been developed by CIRAD green team to provide a multi-agent framework that can be used to simulate the interactions between a group of agents and a shared environment holding natural resources. It is written in Smalltalk (originally in VW).

You can learn about it in the classroom and play with simulations like an fire agent model or Conways game of life. You can run models and check results in charts. The game of life is explained very nicely.

There is also already a port for Pharo which can be run in Moose images. There is a mailinglist for development. Read more.

Smalltalk in Business - Italian style

Lorenzo Schiavina on Smalltalk in Business, Italian-style

The Smalltalk Revolution - Birth of the Smalltalk Renaissance Program

A renaissance? Read more

Why JavaScript developers should look at Smalltalk

There are many reasons why JavaScript developers should look at Smalltalk - this is one of them.

Basic remote S8 workspace

S8 Smalltalk by Alejandro F. Reimondo is a Smalltalk which is based on Clamato and Jtalk (now AmberSmalltalk) ideas, so basically it is a Smalltalk on top of JavaScript.

If you want to try just checkout the remote S8 workspace project. A few node.js commands and some files to extract and you can run it locally.

TrySmalltalk in AmberSmalltalk

The ProfStef tutorial to learn Smalltalk is now also available in AmberSmalltalk: https://github.com/amber-smalltalk/trysmalltalk

You can also try it online.

Philippe Back Interviews Sebastian Sastre On Amber Smalltalk

Another podcast from Philippe about AmberSmalltalk.

Smalltalk Reflections #006: Debugging

A new episode of the Smalltalk Reflections podcast is available from David Buck and Craig Latta. This time it is about Debugging. Also do not miss this video here.

Smalltalk in the cloud (Clever Cloud)

Smalltalk in the (clever) cloud story continues.

RTGraphBuilder in Roassal improved

The RTGraphBuilder in Roassal was improved. Read more here and check out the examples.

Identifying a configuration problem with GTInspector

Solving Metacello configuration problems with Pharo easily. Read more.

Smalltalk MVC Translated to JavaScript

Read more here.

PERT

Daniel Lyons is working on PERT (Program evaluation and review technique). Code is on STHub.

Reddit and Smalltalk

There is now a Reddit for Smalltalk.

VeriMeta

VeriMeta is a Pharo based tool that checks every or some packages in a metacello version. It reports unittest result, number of undefined classes, number of unimplemented messages sends, loaded mcz file is newset or not. With this tool, you can quickly know where to fix to make a flawless code supply. Load the code from the project page at SmalltalkHub or watch this tutorial video.

VirtualGPU quick demo

The VirtualGPU is a simple DSL/framework for parallel algorithms. It is implemented in Pharo and available on SmalltalkHub.



In this quick video Ronie Salgado will show the performance and the simplicity of this framework, by using as an example simple vectorial and image processing operations. The structure of this DSL is inspired by the VirtualCPU made by Igor Stasenko et al, and numerical programming such as Matlab and GNU Octave. This DSL works by composing simple OpenCL kernels.

AWS SDK for Smalltalk

The AWS SDK for Pharo Smalltalk enables Smalltalk developers to easily work with Amazon Web Services with Amazon DynamoDB. Read more.

Pharo+Bloc: a first quick tour of View and Morph layers

A video about the current state of Bloc for Pharo.

Jun4Pharo

Jun for Smalltalk is a well known package. Looks like there is now an early port for Pharo.

 

Moose 5.0

is available.

Philippe Back Interviews Herby Vojčík On Amber Smalltalk

available on SoundCloud.

Pharo (and Seaside) on CleverCloud

Running Pharo in the cloud is easy. Especially with specific  cloud providers like pharocloud.com servers.

But you can run it nearly everywhere: now even on Clever Cloud.

Dr. Geo 14.12

is released.

FTP and WebDAV Plugins for Pharo's FileSystem

Udo contributed a new project to access FTP and WebDAV from Pharo. Read more.

More is already in the pipe.

WKHTML2PDF for Pharo

Want to use http://wkhtmltopdf.org from Pharo to convert HTML pages or URLs to PDF?

Then read more here and checkout the project on STHub. You can also load it from the config browser in Pharo 4 beta.

Another Smalltalk Book in 2015

There is another Smalltalk book upcoming in 2015. Look at Amazon for details.

New Collections for Pharo

There is a package to introduce new kind of collections. Lets see how this moves forward.

Smalltalk2014 videos

Smalltalks 2014 videos are available.

RMapViewer

A viewer for reaction maps among isomers implemented in Pharo Smalltalk.

HoneyGinger

HoneyGinger is an interactive simulation environment based on Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics. Implemented in Pharo.

Dynamic Code Evolution VM

Found that on the web:

The Dynamic Code Evolution Virtual Machine (DCE VM) is a modification of the Java HotSpot(TM) VM that allows unlimited redefinition of loaded classes at runtime. The current hotswapping mechanism of the HotSpot(TM) VM allows only changing method bodies. Our enhanced VM allows adding and removing fields and methods as well as changes to the super types of a class.

Nice - should move Java a little bit closer to Smalltalk.

Chalten - working with times in Pharo

Chalten: an interesting library to work with dates, you can load it from the config browser in Pharo.

LampSort

Another nice article written by Sven.

GTSpotter - another new tool

A new tool in the GT (Glamorous Toolkit) to easily  spot objects. Read more here and here.
It is now part of upcoming Pharo 4.0.

   

Pharo binding to R

R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. Now there is a Pharo binding to R released as an initial version. Read more.

Squeak on Plan9 OS

Looks like Alex Franchuk got Squeak VM working on Plan 9 operating system. Read more.

GetOpt for Pharo 3.0

When working with Pharo Smalltalk on the commandline there is already some support in class CommandLineHandlers to retrieve arguments and options. Now Phillipe Back has improved this even further by making Ian Piumarta's GST GetOpt work in Pharo 3.0.

You can load the code from SmalltalkHub. Getopt should be known to you if you ever work(ed) in C/C++ world. It automates some of the chore involved in parsing typical unix command line options. Java has something similar with CLI.

With Phil's project for Pharo it is now fast to use command line options and it allows also easy to debug them in the most lively environment you can work with.

Web development with Smalltalk

Web development presentation using Smalltalk by Mariano.

Scale command line handling for Pharo 3.0

Guillermo Polito once blogged about replacing bash with Pharo by using a custom command line handler. Now Philippe Back has packaged this up in a project called Scale for Pharo 3.0. Read more.

Onion Pharo

... or a way to continue modularizing Pharo is described by Guillermo Polito on his blog.

Smalltalk and business

within the context of Pharo was presented by Mariano Martinez Peck during "Summer School on Languages and Applications" 2014 in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Here is the presentation.

Simple DDS Pharo client

SimpleDDS Is a Publisher / Subscriber (DDS) Architecture framework - a Data Distribution Service Implementation for Pharo. Read more here or checkout the project here.

Deep Roassal integration in the Moose Finder

Read more at Tudors blog.

Smalltalk Reflections episode one

Craig Latta and David Buck released episode one of “Smalltalk Reflections”, a podcast about Smalltalk. This initial podcast is a tribute to James Robertson (R.I.P.). James would be proud that this valuable resource of Smalltalk information continues to run.

Smalltalks 2014 report

A quick report on Smalltalk 2014 conference, just found on the web

Visual Design Inspector for Pharo

Vidi is a visual Design Inspector for Pharo. Read more details at:

 http://vidi.inf.usi.ch

To try out you can grab a premade image from CI or check
the project on GitHub.

Dont know about the status - I guess work is currently still in progress.
But I was already able to check some own projects with it. Nice!

PaymentFont for Seaside

The “PaymentFont for Seaside” project is a small Seaside wrapper for the PaymentFont project.

Pharo HTTP fundamentals

http://zn.stfx.eu/zn/pharo-http-fundamentals.pdf

Using Blowfish in Pharo

look here.

Hubcap - a SmalltalkHub API and browser for Pharo

Hubcap - a tool to browse and access SmalltalkHub contents from within the Pharo image. Read the
details.


 

Kiviat support in Roassal

Roassal for Pharo now supports Kiviat-Diagramms. Read more here and have a look at the picture.

Spur 64

Spur VM for Pharo, Squeak and Newspeak is also progressing in the 64 bit area. Another milestone is described here.

Wireless Sensors Network simulation in Pharo

A demonstration of a sensor network overlayed over a map and animated. Read more about it here.

OpenStreetMap Roassal extension for Pharo

Watch the video here:

Cincom ObjectStudio 8.6 and Cincom VisualWorks 8.0

are available. Read here.

SciSmalltalk v0.16

is released. Read more.

Smalltalk-on-Rails

The goal of this project is to provide an object-oriented scripting environment for web applications running on Ruby-on-Rails.

Treap - a new collection

in VisualWorks. Read more.

Arbitrary Precision Float in Pharo

Read more here.

Lambda Calculus in Pharo

another nice article from Sven. Read more.

InfoQ article on Essense# Smalltalk

A new infoQ article called "Introducing Essence#: A Smalltalk-based Language for .NET"

VisualAge Smalltalk 8.6.1.

VisualAge Smalltalk 8.6.1 has been released.

Smalltalk with Robots

A presentation can be found here.

Kendrick

Kendrick is a platform for epidemiological modeling and analysis. It helps epidemiologists craft custom analyses cheaply. It's based on Pharo and MOOSE. It's open source under BSD/MIT.

Kendrick project participates to the Ebola Computing Challenge organized by Hacker League in October 2014

Memoization for Smalltalk

using Smalltalk blocks - clean and simple. See here.

ARM Stack VMs available

Pre-built Squeak stack and stack/spur VMs for ARMv6 (i.e. Raspberry Pi) and ARMv7 (i.e. BeagleBone Black, Parallella, numerous Chromebooks, etc) are now available at the same location as the other Cog and Spur VMs. Read more.

Smalltalk Foundation meeting in Portland

Smalltalk Foundation meeting in Portland on Monday, November 10, 2014.

Toronto Smalltalk User Group and Newspeak

Next meeting of the Toronto Smalltalk User Group is Monday, November 10 on Newspeak. See http://www.smalltalk.ca for details.

Smalltalks 2014 conference

has just begun. If you are not there you can follow on Twitter.

Swiki in Squeak 4.5

Swiki was and still is one of the best (and most easy to use/maintain) implementations of a wiki. It is written in Squeak Smalltalk and I usually use the Winterlong release back from 2005. With it a Swiki server is easy to setup (just unzip and run) and as it stores the files in XML they are easy to backup, repair or query.

Now Chris got Swiki working in a recent Squeak 4.5. image also. Nice!

Smalltalks 2014 conference schedule

Smalltalks 2014's preliminary conference schedule is now available, check it here.

Smalltalk cheat sheet

Need a litte Smalltalk cheat sheet - then look here.

PharoDays 2015

Read all the details about the upcoming Pharo conference and check the doodle.

Chat on AmberSmalltalk

see here https://gitter.im/amber-smalltalk/amber

PharoDays pre check participation

There is a conference planned in Lille the 29 and 30 of January called "PharoDays". Read here to find the Doodle.

Some postings on the Iliad framework

Iliad is a web framework for Pharo, some posts on it can be found here:

http://leonardoce.github.io/

Substructure Random Fractal

in Pharo. See here.

Agile visulization

using Pharo. Read more at http://agilevisualization.com/

Pharo success stories

More and more Pharo success stories appear. Like this about the usage in a bank.

APL concepts in Pharo

Want to use APL (Array processing language) like concepts in Pharo. Then have a look here.

Amber 0.13 is released

Read more.

Phratch 4.0 release

Phratch 4.0 is available. Read more or grab it from http://www.phratch.com/.

Spur trunk image available

New Spur trunk image is available.

PharoNOS - Pharo No Operating System

Booting Pharo as OS with only 55MB ISO image. Read more and take care where you use it (best on a virtual platform to not to erase disks)

Pharo 4 progressing

Pharo 4.0 is not yet released but progressing. Beside many many other stuff some of the interesting things include:

• integration of GTTools allowing for quickly building nice tools like custom browsers and inspectors, (also see this video)
• Properties for classes
• a Compiled Method inspector