Friday, January 29, 2010

seasidehosting.st now with Pharo support

Adrian announced that the free Seaside hosting service seasidehosting.st now also supports Pharo (as well as any other closure aware Squeak images) since they updated the VM. Cool!

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Pharo 1.0 Release Candidate 2 and image building

There is a new Pharo 1.0 RC2 (release candidate 2) image available. If you are on Windows you can also download the new setup. But there is much more going on in the Pharo community going on than just a new image.

The interesting stuff is that by using the Metacello packaging system one is able to load packages that are compatible with Pharo. Try the examples in the provided intro workspaces of RC2 and check out Dales blog for more metacello news.


After playing a little bit with it and cleaning up my projects I'am now able to load a Seaside sample application - here MetaSource with dependencies like FFI, Seaside 3.0, JQueryWidgetBox, ... just by providing a metacello configuration and evaluating a simple script:


Gofer new
squeaksource: 'MetaSource';
package: 'ConfigurationOfMetaSource';
load.

((Smalltalk at: #ConfigurationOfMetaSource) project version: '1.0-alpha1') load


There is also a loader in preparation to ease this a little bit more. However - it is really easy now to build custom images like the one with MetaSource - a simple seaside application:


German Smalltalk evening in Munich

There is a german Smalltalker Meeting ("Smalltalk-Stammtisch") on
27.1.2010 in Munich. Just visit the Laab location in the evening. Entrance is free.

There will be a presentation from Thomas Stalzer on "Distributed Objectmodels". If you want to apply just send a short mail with your name to the organizer (Steffen.mueller AT VisKonz.de)

See also Joachims blog.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

GemDev IDE - Smalltalk in Eclipse

GemDev is an experimental implementation of Eclipse-based IDE for GemStone Smalltalk.

See more here.

The IDE provides features like Smalltalk Browser, code editor or object inspector. Interesting.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Smalltalk the good parts

Douglas Putnam started a blog called http://smalltalkthegoodparts.com to record his Smalltalk explorations. He starts with a proof of concept for running Smalltalk on Slicehost.

"We believe that Smalltalk can give us a technological advantage in the coming Web 3.0. "


Pssst ... use Smalltalk as your secret weapon and dont tell any other! ;)

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Friday, January 15, 2010

Seaside projects

There is some discussion about real world projects with Seaside. Beside well known sites like dabbledb.com or cmsbox.com there is also one available on a dutch insurance company. It's the embedded component on the right. If you look at the source code of the frame you will see that it is done in Seaside using VAST.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Monday, January 11, 2010

Pharo/Squeak and XML

If you want to work with XML in Pharo or Squeak you should have a
look at these two projects:

- XMLSupport
- Pastell

An example:


|stream doc|
stream := '<foo bar="1"/>' readStream.
doc := XMLDOMParser parseDocumentFrom: stream.
doc root @ #bar


returns 1

So XPath is built in Smalltalk ;)

Pharocasts

There is now a new weblog called "Pharocasts" with screencasts on Pharo development:

http://pharocasts.blogspot.com

First screencasts are on UI building, the blog was created by Laurent Laffont - if you have recorded screencasts you can send them to him.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Unicode and Smalltalk

Interesting idea about the use of unicode and Smalltalk from Michael.

Write interval expressions like "1 to: ∞" and others like using Ï€ ... mmmh have to think about it.

Saturday, January 09, 2010

GUI with Pharo

Laurent Laffont provides a screencast how to build UI layouts programmatically with Pharo. You can also use the UI builder.

Thursday, January 07, 2010

Hudson Build for Smalltalk

One thing I like in the Java world is the continuous integration support that I can get with free/open source CI servers like Continuum and Hudson especially in conjunction with Maven (which I use for builds to manage dependencies and version and that allows me switch between Java IDEs).

Even the Smalltalk world can profit from that existing work and knowledge: Yanni Chiu created a project "Hudson Build" allowing you automate a build through a shell script run by Hudson, and view the SUnit test results through Hudson. Lukas now uses this to build seaside and pharo smalltalk images and monitor the builds in his Hudson server.