Pharo Online Help (Preview)

Some time ago I wrote a little help system for Pharo. You can see some infos about it here.

I now implemented a hopefully better one and today published a preview of a possible "Pharo Online Help". Documentation and QuickStart tutorials are crucial in my opinion for better adoption of Pharo and Smalltalk. Lets see if the community accepts my proposal and helps moving it forward...

Click the image below for a preview or read about it here.

Smalltalk and multicore programming

Found a new presentation from a talk from Stefan Marr on Multicore programming in Smalltalk

How old are your objects

Nice discussion and info about the age of objects:

"Also, since our GC does not change the order of objects when compacting, you can tell if an object is older than another by enumerating all objects. The oldest ones are of course nil, false, and true (more than 30 years old now)"

Pharo downloads

If you want to grab the latest Pharo development you can regulary use the Pharo CI Server (http://ci.pharo-project.org). Unfortunaletely it is down today - but there is a page with all the latest things for download.

Pharo Server backend

UN Number is a new application for the iPad/Android. What you cant see is that it uses Pharo Smalltalk for the server backend.

Smalltalk is cool

A popular german computer magazine (ct') has a special issue on programming. On the title it states: "Cool Languages: Haskell, Smalltalk and D". Yes - and we plan to make Smalltalk even better.

 

Interactive Snap! using Seaside

A video about connecting Snap! and Scratch Sensor Board via Seaside - nice.

Yesplan video

This is a new video (in dutch) about Yesplan - a planning software made with Pharo and the Smalltalk Seaside web framework.

Byte Magazine on Smalltalk

The famous BYTE magazine issue about Smalltalk from 1981 is available online.

Aida with Websockets

The Aida web framework is now the first one with full Websocket support. So a new Aida 6.5 Interim release is published for Squeak, Pharo and VisualWorks. Download it from the website.

Amber and script tag

Amber allows you to write client side scripts for the webbrowser in Smalltalk.
Nicolas now added support for the script tag so you can write the code directly in the HTML page:

 

Pharo localization and translation with ICU

A really good package for everything related to Locales, translation and I18N is ICU. There is an interface for Pharo written by Jan van de Sandt (using the NativeBoost callout mechanism).

Pharo VM Update

There is an updated set of Pharo VMs available (built by Jenkins), including Cairo, FFI, FreeType and SSL support.

GSoC 2012 Showcases

The showcases for the Google "Smalltalk" Summer of code are available online.

Morphic BPM

There is a "Morphic Business Process Modeler" running right in your webbrowser. Based on JSMorphic which is a port of Smalltalks Morphic to JavaScript.

Watch the video or try yourself.

Lars Bak on language virtual machines

Lars Bak presents several language virtual machines (Self, Strongtalk, Hotspot), why they matter and how they influenced V8 and Dart.

I find it is a really interesting talk, especially since I follow his VM developments over the years (StrongTalk, OOVM, ... as you know from previous posts). And I agree with Lars who states: "I like Smalltalk"

Try to imagine if the software industry would have continued on the dynamic path in the 90's without getting the detour on static language ideas and VMs. Yes - Java and C# have momentum - but more because of marketing and commercial pressure, market pressure and since people believe in stupid TIOBE index. Better tools and IDEs makes them nowadays less painfull - but that just hides the fact that we need easily changeable and maintainable systems with meta facilities and true reflection that are easily scriptable and extendable.

We know we can do better in the software industry with dynamic languages and dynamic system. Dart is a move forward - but for me still not comparable to the most dynamic object system.
And it still comes with curly braces ;)

Talk about RTalk

James interviews Mark Roos about RTalk (a Smalltalk on top of JVM).

 RTalk is a Smalltalk 'Live' Environment built on the JVM. You can also get the slides from the JVM lang Summit (slides and workshop slides) or watch the video about it at Dr. Dobbs..

Pharo Workshop at fOSSa Open Source conference

There is a Pharo Workshop at fOSSa Open Source conference. Read more.

JSON with Pharo

Want to parse JSON with Smalltalk? You can use Petit parse to do it. Here is a short guide.

Phobos

Pavel announced Phobos - the XULRunner based Smalltalk framework for development of native GUI with standard look&feel for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Read more here and here.