OpenVG - vector graphics for Squeak and Pharo

You want to use vector graphics from Smalltalk? Igor Stasenko
announced the availability of OpenVG for Squeak and Pharo.

How to use it:
- download the pharo Win32 installer and run it
- in the monticello browser (World menu -> Monticello Browser -> Repository) add http://www.squeaksource.com/OpenVG as HTTP repository and load OpenVG-Base, OpenVG-Tests and OpenVG-Demo

- download the plugin (OpenVGPlugin.dll) and save it in the virtual machine/installation directory
- download the library for the engine to use (for instance libOpenVGSH.dll for the ShivaVG OpenVG engine) and save it in the virtual machine/installation directory

Now you can evaluate:

OpenVGAPI loadLibrary: 'libOpenVGSH.dll'.
OpenVGAPI initContext.

"Next, run some tests"
VGUTests new display.

"Next run a tiger demo"
VGTigerDemo runDemo

Pharo 1.0 beta

Time moves on and now the 1.0 beta image for the Pharo project is released.

I've built a win32 setup for easy installation. The installer is now also available at http://pharo-project.org/pharo-download

Pharo success stories

The Pharo distribution of Squeak Smalltalk is already used in production environments although the first release version of Pharo (1.0), is still under heavy development.

There is a discussion on the mailing list and Adrian started a list with a few success stories so far. Not bad.

Since Pharo is now also the base for Seaside development and the base for the free Pier CMS system we can expect more to come.

Young programmers win big

Hey - if you havent already it is now time for you to have a look at Smalltalk environments. Even children from the age of four are able to create applications with it (with the help of EToys) and win contests ;)
Read more here and here.

UI Builder for Pharo

Interesting, someone is preparing an UI Builder for Pharo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHbc1t83fEI

Next generation of Smalltalkers ... (Part II)

Sorry for not updating the blog ... my time is very limited these days. But I have a good reason. Do you remember my post from October 2007? Hey since 4.50am this morning Elisa now has a little sister. Welcome on eath little Romy!

ESUG Dead line

Noury Bouraqadi announced the ESUG early registration dead-line (13th of july).

Browse the list of talks or browse the nominations for the ESUG award.

Old Squeak News

Once upon a time ... there was a news magazine based around Squeak Smalltalk which was devlivered as a CD-ROM. Maybe you remember the September issue including the declared Squeak "birthday" or the October issue on "Powerful Ideas in the Classroom".



The old sites http://www.squeakonline.com and http://www.squeaknews.com are now obsolete (and the news have a nice replacement with http://news.squeak.org/).

However whats the new thing I want to share here: Tansel made the old issues available for download.

PhidgetLab - connecting Smalltalk with the real world

If you want to access Phidgets from Smalltalk have a look at the PhidgetLab project from HPI. A Phidget is a sensor and actuator that can be connected to a PC via USB and is now easily programmable from within your Smalltalk image.

Pharo MIT license clean

After months the pharo distribution of Squeak is now license clean. See the official announcement on the pharo mailing list. Great, thanks to all who helped.

Internet Ray Tracing Competition and Smalltalk/Seaside

If you are interested in computer generated graphics you may know POVRay (Persistence of Vision Raytracer). It's a a free tool to create high-quality computer generated images and animations using raytracing. This tool has its roots in DKBTrace - a program written by David Buck.

You may know David from the "Simberon Design Minute" on the "Industry Misinterpretation" Podcast series. His original DKBTrace (and even the modern POV-Ray) benefited from some object oriented ideas taken from Smalltalk.

David (who is very active in the Smalltalk community) now announced that he rewrote the Internet Ray Tracing Competition website using Seaside and VisualWorks Smalltalk.

See http://www.irtc.org

Pharo Preview Setup for Windows

Even if the pharo distribution of Squeak is still in the alpha stage I already created a simple setup with the lates dev-image from Damien so pharo is easily consumable by Windows users. It should now be easy to start without having to know where to get the image/changes file, the sources and the latest virtual machine.

I've used NSIS installer for the setup and the nice logos provided by Samuel.
The whole process is described here and here in case anyone wants to build an own custom virtual machine for a distribution or commercial application.

You can download the setup.exe here. Use at your own risk and note that the pharo community has some more bugs to fix ;)



Thanks to all for making this possible - with the pharo distribution Squeak now really has stopped looking toyish. Only 10MB download for a complete world full of Smalltalk :)

Smalltalk TV beta

How cool is that: Smalltalk has an own (commercial?) TV station:

http://www.smalltalktelevision.com

Thanks to Chris Cunnington, expect more to come.

Meteoroid, a MVC framework for the web using Comet

Lautaro Fernández announced the first beta version of Meteoroid, a Comet-based framework running on top of Seaside.

It allows you to create "live" web application in a few steps - you can trigger changes to connected web browsers by using an observer-like mechanism. Each time the model changes, an announcement is triggered and data being pushed from the server to a special div in the browser.

There is
- the project page
- a prepackaged download based on the VisualWorks VM and image
- a screencast how to install the project yourself

Just start the image with the virtual machine executable and start two or more browsers on http://localhost:8080/seaside. Anytime you change (for instance the shared counter application) the other browsers will update. Nice ...

More Charts for Seaside

As I mentioned earlier Udo Schneider has created a Seaside wrapper for OpenFlash Charts.

The code has now moved from

http://www.squeaksource.com/SWFObject.html to
http://www.squeaksource.com/OpenFlashChart.html

and there is an online demo available together with an online demo of SWFObject.

Looks like there will also be a wrapper for jQuery Flot available later today:

Update: here is the link for Flotr

http://www.squeaksource.com/flotr.html

Reserved keyword conflicts

JavaFX - the latest hype on the language market. But not without trouble.

"insert" and "delete" are new JavaFX keywords - so they conflict
when you will try to call a Java method with this name. But there is help - this time use double angle brackets. So yet another thing to remember ...

Thats why Smalltalk is so much better - it is simple and consistent without all these "language workarounds". Your brain is free to care about solving the problem - and not busy remember all language possibilities or busy satisfying the compiler.

And I tell you a secret: Smalltalk is not a language - its a dynamic object system with the language built in...

Browse the code vs. RTFM

There are many reasons to fall in love with the keyword message syntax and dynamic type system of Smalltalk.
One reason is that (depending on appropriate names) you easily understand the intention of a method. If not you can easily find out by browsing the code.

In the non-Smalltalk land you have to spend your time reading api descriptions. And you will find horrible examples like this. Just scroll up and see how many ways there are to set an attribute ;)

Smalltalk in Barcelona

There is a new website on Smalltalk managed by the
Software Dept. of the Technical University of Catalonia

http://smalltalk.cat

It was announced by associate professor Jordi Delgado who
gives courses in Smalltalk and Botsinc.

The site is powered by Pier CMS and language is catalan.

If you havent already you should check out the video on
Alan Kays OOPSLA talk on "The Computer Revolution hasn't happend yet"
which is included in the site.

SeaBreeze for Squeak

Looks like SeaBreeze gets ported to Squeak (which is the initial and main Seaside platform):

http://www.squeaksource.com/SeaBreezePort.html

Pier CMS 1.1

Release 1.1 of Pier is available. Easy to install:

- download
- start the executable VM
- go to http://localhost:8080/seaside/pier

So you have a Smalltalk based CMS within a minute.

Whats new: several fixes and it is now based on the Pharo distribution of Squeak.

If you are interested how Squeak development can look these days then open the browser within the image. It includes the new UI look and OmniBrowser with new icons, eCompletion and syntax highlighting.

BTW: if you are on Windows you have to select "System" -> "Preferences" - "PreferenceBrowser" -> "general" -> "swap mouse buttons" to get the right click menu again since the image was built on Mac.