Truly object oriented test

How to find out if a system is truly object oriented. In this old video Dan Ingalls explains how you can simply test this.

In Smalltalk systems like Squeak and Pharo you can do it.

GotalkInterpreter

I like Go as a programming language. It is open source, has a funny mascot and supports easy creation of executables. Still it is not the same as working with a nice Smalltalk system like Pharo.

I guess others see it the same way. That's why a simplistic Smalltalk code interpreter written in Golang is available here: https://github.com/SealNTibbers/GotalkInterpreter

To quote: Why Smalltalk Smalltalk is beautiful dynamic language with a concise and readable syntax. Also we are smalltalkers so that's why.

Stylesheet for Pharo

When writing stylesheets (CSS) for the web it is not recommended to hard code the colors in each stylesheet rule - because often it is a tedious task to adopt or change them afterwards.

Therefore often people use CSS preprocessors like LESS or SaaS or Stylus where you can define variables or other to ease the job.

If you already work in Pharo you might want to easily write your stylesheets in Smalltalk. Thats the idea behind "Stylesheet" - a project to define CSS like stylesheet in Pharo applications.

The project was now migrated from SmalltalkHub to GitHub and can be found on: https://github.com/pharo-contributions/Stylesheet

Pharo Artefact migrated to GitHub

The Artefact PDF generation library written in Pharo was migrated to GitHub (including the STHub history):

https://github.com/pharo-contributions/Artefact

Here is an old video on it:

Pharo IoT Hackathon

There is an Pharo IoT Hackathon on 19th of October 2018 in Cologne by zweidenker Pharo company. Details are here.

 

Docker and Pharo @ZWEIDENKER

The Zweidenker company gave some insights on ESUG 2018 in their usage of Pharo and Docker:


 

MetaLinks Lecture from ESUG 2018

Pharo provides advanced reflection including MetaLinks. You can find more details on all the possibilities in my Pharo wiki collection.

The slides on this topic from ESUG 2018 are available online now:


 

Pharo and IoT - ESUG 2018 slides

Hacktivismo de datos en Smalltalk

The MadridSUG (Madrid Smalltalk user group) started a new event called "Hacktivismo de datos en Smalltalk". Details are here and here

Cormas in 10 years

Cormas is an agent-based modelling and simulation platform. The project can be found on https://github.com/cormas/cormas with a webpage on http://cormas.cirad.fr/indexeng.htm

The system is currently implemented in VisualWorks Smalltalk with a port started to Pharo Smalltalk.

There is a funny video of the CORMAS guys where they see Cormas in 10 years:

 

Gemstone support for Pharo

Gemstone is a very nice object oriented database. At ESUG 2018 there was native Support for Pharo (GemBuilder for Pharo) announced. Read the details in the slides.

Do you really understand git

Another presentation from ESUG 2018 about git:

Pharo in Corner Cases of the Enterprise

Slides from ESUG 2018 presentation on doing business projects using Pharo. The title is "Pharo in Corner Cases of the Enterprise"


 

Pharo and SendGrid v3 API

The SendGrid Smalltalk project is now gradually supporting the v3 API of SendGrid email delivery service. More on https://github.com/sorabito/sendgrid-smalltalk

Pharo Script of the Day

there is a new series of posts on a "Pharo script of the day" by Hernán Morales Durand. So far the following topics were covered:

• Proto proto image preprocessing in Pharo
• Poor's man test runner: Run package tests in Pharo from a script
• Open a line-numbered text editor
• Hash password with PBKDF2 using ApplicationSecurity
• Configure R <-> Pharo Smalltalk with RProjectConnector
• Migrate FileReferences from Linux/MacOS to Windows
• Prefix all class names in a package
• Replay cookies with Zinc HTTP components
• Sort a column in a CSV file
• Parsing Gene Ontology terms
• Rename instance variables programmatically

ESUG 2018 Conference Report

is available here.

ARCOS - Augmented Reality Collabroative Operating System

Several times within this blog I reported about Croquet. It was written in Squeak Smalltalk and supported communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users. Basically it was a followup of ideas from Morphic - but all in 3D. You could create and visit portals to interactively collaborate.


 If I remember correctly it was later open sourced and ended up in OpenCobalt.NET - there are still some infos are on the Squeak wiki and a video on Youtube.



 It was also continued as OpenQwaq platform and used to form solutions for a company named 3dicc
(started by Ron Teitelbaum, David A Smith and Andreas Raab).

I also reported on the Lively Kernel project - a JavaScript based Kernel and IDE to also followup on these ideas allowing dynamic and linked worlds within your web browser. There is also a video available.

Now it seems there is a fully new web based implementation of these historic ideas available. It is called ARCOS - Augmented Reality Collabroative Operating System and if you check it out you will find many similarities.

Fully written in JavaScript and based on LivelyKernel but with a similar UI as in Squeak Croquet. If you check out the source code you will even find that the classes are prefixed with a "T" - which was back in the time the prefix for TeaTime (a specific framework for Croquet).

You can try it instantly in your browser using the following link or watch the following videos for a demo:

Caffeine.js and WebVR - Smalltalk in 3D

Craig is continuing on his caffeine Project - which uses SqueakJS for a binding to JavaScript. He plays with WebVR and it is nice to see Squeak Smalltalk running in the browser in 3D.

A demo is here:

https://caffeine.js.org/a-frame/

PharoJS V22 available

PharoJS V22 is available on SmalltalkHub.

From the release notes: RELEASE V22 Added statistics package. Generates statistics about Pharo classes used by an app and the size of generated JS code Fixed default app folder parent to fit the modification in github repo = non-pharo code moved to HTML folder

This is like the last version done on Pharo 5 and SmalltalkHub as Noury will switch to GitHub now.

Jun meets GTInspector

Combining Jun 3D with GTInspector:

 

Creating Bloc Widgets in Pharo

Creating Bloc Widgets in Pharo: - part 1 - part 2 - part 3

ESUG 2018 - Slides on Pharo evolution

Slides from ESUG 2018 from Esteban on Pharo evolution and current roadmap.

ESUG 2018 - Clap Slides

Slides from ESUG 2018 about Clap - the Pharo Command line Parser. Code is on https://github.com/cdlm/clap-st

ESUG 2018

is running. You can follow it using the various tweets.

Farmers Market App don in PharoJS

News from ESUG 2018 also on PharoJS:

The Farmers Market App at https://nootrix.com/farmers-market-app/ is built in PharoJS

Shampoo - Emacs Smalltalk development

Shampoo: a set of tools for remote Smalltalk development with Emacs.

• Project page is here: http://dmitrymatveev.co.uk/shampoo
• Source is available on GitHub: 
• https://github.com/dmatveev/shampoo
• https://github.com/dmatveev/shampoo-emacs
• https://github.com/dmatveev/shampoo-homepage

Basically it is constructed using a Smalltalk image-side server that provides a remote access to an image and a Shampoo mode for Emacs. It also runs for latest Pharo as this picture proves.

Geranium - agent-based simulator in Pharo

Geranium is an agent-based simulator with a dedicated DSL, for analyzing energy consumption in residential urban environments. The model takes into account structural, social and micro-climate characteristics. It is written using Pharo and here is a video session:




Code is on https://gitlab.com/npapoylias/Geranium and a project page can be found here.

You can also check the following PDF with a presentation including some more details.

ESUG 2018

Next week ESUG 2018 Smalltalk conference will start. You for sure will find infos and news on

https://twitter.com/hashtag/esug18
https://twitter.com/hashtag/esug2018

HoneyGinger in Pharo

I already reported on HoneyGinger in the past.

This is a new demo movie for HoneyGinger, a fluid dynamics engine written in pure Pharo.

NeoVIM client in Pharo

A NeoVIM client written in Pharo.

Roassal and Hololens

Roassal looks even cooler when presented using a Hololens...

HDFS for Pharo

A library to access the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) from Pharo. Nice!

Pharo code completion work

Article from Myroslava on her internship at INRIA with infos on her work on code completion in Pharo

git-migration and Tonel for Pharo

If you want to migrate projects from SmalltalkHub (or any MCZ-based repo) to GitHub to profit from new git integration in Pharo then use Peters "git-migration" tool.

The tool is now using the Tonel format to store the code. Tonel is a file-per-class format, that means a class and all methods are stored in a single file. This is faster than having a file for each method but also prevents some trouble with git on Windows due to number of files and subdirectory depth.

Amber Smalltalk and npm

Amber Smalltalk and accompanying libs do not use bower any more, everything is based off Node package manager (npm) only now. Read more.

If you have an old command line interface (old amber-cli from previous installations) then uninstall it first.

GeoHash for Pharo

Pharo package to decode/encode Geohashes to/from latitude and longitude (geolocation).

Available on GitHub: https://github.com/simonfranz/smalltalk-geohash

Using Docker with Pharo

Two small tutorials on how to use Docker and Pharo: - Tutorial one - Tutorial two

Pharo Newsletter Summer 2018

is available here.

CuisSmalltalk Live templates

A prototype of LiveTemplates for Smalltalk - implemented in CuisSmalltalk. Shows how quickly and easily one can adopt a Smalltalk IDE.

RDF for Smalltalk

Christian Haider made his code available to deal with RDF/XML file. Check out his Resource Description Framework (RDF) page. It is currently for VW - but I guess porters are welcome.

Clap Teaser

Clap - is the Command line argument parser for Pharo. The project is available on GitHub now including a teaser to demonstrate some features.

A quick memory game using Pharo’s dynamic spec builder

Spec is a UI framework used in Pharo. It not only allows to declare static layout but you can also dynamically use it.

Here is a new medium article explaining some of it's features using a memory game as a demonstration. Nice!

Test-driven development for generated portable Javascript apps

some more infos on PharoJS

Improved Playground

Feenk is improving the Playground

A mini scheme in Pharo

Now as a PDF and HTML. Looks like more of the Pharo books are converted to be available in both formats.

Exemplifying software in Pharo

An article on working with example based programming using Pharo.

Controlling a Turtlebot using PhaROS: Goals planning and Automatic docking

Read more details here or watch the video:

Context visualization of Object Factories Video

An interactive visualization of a software execution profiling in Pharo:

 


Artifact and details are available here

Towards Machine Learning in Pharo with TensorFlow

TechTalk on using TensorFlow in Pharo easily:



Code Repository is here: https://github.com/PolyMathOrg/libtensorflow-pharo-bindings

KerasWrapper - AI for Pharo

KerasWrapper is a project providing bindings from Pharo to Keras (which is implemented in Python). You can transparently play with the high-level neural networks API and visualize results in Roassal directly.

The github repo is on https://github.com/ObjectProfile/KerasWrapper

Improvekit

Found a page on the web and a twitter account from a company in Buenos Aires also doing ST development. From the screenshots they seem to have choosen Squeak as IDE and Morphic for the UI ...

Pharo TechTalk: Tensorflow

Next TechTalk session is on 12th July 2018 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM (UTC+02:00) - read more.

If you want to participate - join the #techtalk channel on Pharo's Discord server. You can get an invite here.

Pharo ZeroConf

A short video I created to demonstrate the Pharo ZeroConf scripts:


 

StCAD - now open source

'StCAD' is a basic 3D CAD framework implemented in VisualWorks Smalltalk. It can be used for 3D motion simulation and other. Details on the framework can be found here.

It is now open sourced with MIT license. The author Aik-Siong Koh hopes Pharo users will port it to Pharo. Read the details.

The download is provided as a ZIP.

June release of Web-stack

There is a new June release of Web-stack for Seaside and Pharo

Daywork

Another Pharo Succes Story: Daywork

Pharo TechTalk Dates second half 2018

You can find the Pharo TechTalk Dates second half 2018 here

Pharo Launcher v1.2 released

An updated Pharo Launcher was released:

https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-launcher/releases/tag/1.2

You can read the details here.

GT Documenter for Pharo

GT Documenter - a new GT Tool for Pharo based on Bloc graphic framework

Cuis-Smalltalk-Chip8

Yet Another Chip 8 Emulator - written in Cuis Smalltalk

Designing Code Quality Assistants for Pharo

Pharo 7 on SqueakJS (demo)

With some tweaks mostly related to FFI and fonts, we are able to run Pharo 7 on SqueakJS VM. Read more or try out directly in your web browser.

PngSuiteExplorer

PngSuiteExplorer is a simple tool to test the support for PNG files in Pharo using the "official" test-suite for PNG.

Alternative Pharo-contributor tool explained with videos

https://github.com/astares/pharo-contributor now provides two videos demonstrating how this tool can be used as an alternative to easily contribute to latest Pharo 7

Video 1:

 

and Video 2:

 

Pillar Techtalk

Intelligent System Construction

Video from latest tech talk of PharoClub: Intelligent System Construction by Alexandre Bergel


 

PrismCodeDisplayer for Seaside

A wrapper for PrismJS for Seaside web framework. Read more here or check the demo here.

TelescopeCytoscape for Seaside

Telescope is an engine for efficiently creating meaningful visualizations using Seaside and Pharo. Now there is a connector for CytoscapeJs for Seaside. Read more here and a demo is here.

Reproducible moldable interactions using Pharo and Bloc

A new inspector model in Pharo that records developer interactions as first-class entities and uses them to reduce repetition: this is part of "Reproducible moldable interactions" master thesis. You can directly jump to the PDF here. Note that the solution presented is implemented in Pharo using Bloc UI infrastructure.

Pharo - "Containers" for collections and data structures

"Containers" - a project for alternate collections and data-structures for Pharo Smalltalk is now on GitHub. Read more

ChartJs for Seaside

a binding of ChartJs for Seaside (the web framework running on Pharo). Read more
or try the demo here. Note that the demo link is different from what was originally announced.

Willow-Mixpanel

Willow-Mixpanel is now part of the ba-st Web Stack family. Read more.

Grafoscopio Sucess Story

Grafoscopio is a moldable and versatile tool for that allows to mix prose, data, code, visualizations into interactive reproducible documents, raging from single notebooks to complete books. There is new success story availabe for it available on the Pharo homepage.

Iceberg 0.7.5

the git tooling for Pharo is vailable and integrated into latest image of Pharo 7

Using P3 to connect Pharo to CockroachDB

One can now also use the P3 driver (PostgreSQL driver protocol 3.0) from Sven to connect Pharo also to CockroachDB. CockroachDB is an open-sourced software project (relational database management system) that is designed to store copies of data in multiple locations in order to deliver requested data when needed. It is described as a scalable, consistently-replicated, transactional datastore. The database is scalable in that a single instance can be run from a laptop while building an app, then scaled to thousands of commodity servers as a business grows.

Read more.

Pharo and XML

Monty has a nice blog about Pharo and XML

Dockerizing Pharo

Some slides on how to dockerize Pharo.

Iceberg 0.7 explained

Iceberg - the Code Versioning Tool for Pharo with a binding to git now has a reworked model and UI. Esteban gave an intro to it in a techtalk:


 

GraphQL

REST services are easy to implement in Pharo - especially with "Teapot" and my simple "Tealight" extensions for it. Read the Tealight project page with some documentation and examples to get an idea about it.

If you worked with or heard about REST then you might also come across GraphQL. It's a technology initially developed at Facebook.

In GraphQL, the shape of the response is built up on the server side to match the shape of a given JSON query.

So while in REST when you ask for a "book" item you receive a predefined JSON response with all attributes of the book. In GraphQL you might ask only for the books title or in another case for the books title and author at the same URL and receive an appropriate response.

Now there is also an initial library for GraphQL available for Pharo and VisualWorks.

Really nice!

Programming Neural Networks in Pharo - Preview

Agile Artificial Intelligence with Pharo - a new book is in the pipe. You can already have a preview.

Boadebui

Boadebui, a simple MIDI sequencer for Squeak Smalltalk.

Pharo to Anki

Using Pharo to create Anki decks that help to deliberately practice Japanese grammar by visualizing.

Instance inspection in Pharo

The Pharo Inspector on classes now has “instances” view. I added this a a few days ago and forgot to send a message to the list so anyone knows. Looks like I should blog more about my contributions again.

Pharo AWS SDK with SNS support

The Pharo AWS SDK now supports Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

Pharo-sentry v0.2.2 releases

The unofficial Pharo SDK for Sentry error tracking platform from Peter is available with a new 0.2.2. release. Now with support for breadcrumbs and basic context.

Code is here:  https://github.com/peteruhnak/pharo-sentry

Feenk work on a Diagrammer for Pharo in Bloc

The Feenk team is working on on Diagrammer in Pharo. The idea is that developers should not have to leave the IDE - not even for drawing diagrams and they give a nice graphic preview on a more elaborate control of lines and figures in this tool with some screenshots on their twitter account.

 - Preview 1
 - Preview 2
 - Preview 3

This nicely shows what is already possible in Bloc.

Updated DiscordsSt for Pharo

A new version of DiscordsSt, An API wrapper for Discord written in Pharo

 https://github.com/JurajKubelka/DiscordSt

Playing with face detection in Pharo

A nice medium article from Andrei Chis on "Playing with face detection in Pharo"

Clean and modular stateful traits for Pharo

Pharo 7 now integrated (beside many others) a special pull request (PR) to integrate a new version of Traits, this version includes the following features:

- Stateful Traits
- Modular implementation, it is loaded after bootstrap
- Cleaner interface
- Reducing duplicate methods as Traits extends from Class

Since Pharo also has Traits, Slots, MetaLinks, ClassAnnotations and other meta facilities it is a very nice lively system to also work on the metalevel and do metaprogramming.

Shortcuts in Settings tool

With the latest version of Commander and the new Calypso Code Browser, all shortcuts are
explorable and configurable.

SQLite Loadable Extensions for Pharo

Pierce implemented SQLite Loadable Extensions and you can find it in the UDBC repository.

Pharo Bitcoin's BIP39 mnemonic

Esteban Maringolo provides a simple implementation of Bitcoin's BIP39 mnemonic for Pharo

OSSubprocess - 64 bits support preview

The "OSSubprocess" project for Pharo now provides a preview on 64bits support

Terminal Emlation in Pharo

Pavel is resurrecting Terminal Emulation for Pharo. Read more.

 

Amber Smalltalk 0.21.0

New release 0.21.0 of Amber Smalltalk is announced here.

Actors for Squeak Smalltalk

A library to add an Erlang-style Actor model to Squeak.

Code Critics Bar Charts for Pharo Smalltalk

can be found in the following Git project: https://github.com/hernanmd/ccbc

Would be interesting to compare Pharo 6.1 with Pharo 7alpha

ELIZA-Pharo

Pharo Smalltalk implementation of ELIZA, an early natural language processing computer program.

Restore Open Croquet

Nikolay Suslov restored the original Open Croquet onto Squeak 6.x. Video is here.

Teamtalk - Pharo Cluster execution

Teamtalk - Simple library to execute Pharo Smalltalk code in a cluster of Pharo Smalltalk instances. MapReduce is also supported. It is based on Vert.x using the VerStix library.