Sunday, December 29, 2013

Thursday, December 26, 2013

PNtalk 2.0

PNtalk 2.0 is a modelling and simulation framework for Petri nets based on Pharo. Read more.

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

PunQLite - a new NoSQL wrapper for Pharo

I already reported about PunQLite, a binding for the NoSQL database UnQLite - but now it has become a full-fledged wrapper. Read more.

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Saturday, December 21, 2013

Gravel Smalltalk for JVM

Yet another Smalltalk for the JVM I first thought - but this time a real surprise since it not only aims to be a fully ANSI compliant Smalltalk implementation but is also heading towards modern language enhancements like optional typing, namespaces and traits.

It is called "Gravel Smalltalk" and is announced as a modern Smalltalk implementation for the JVM. It is using the ability on JVM to do #invokedynamic based on the JSR 292, similar to RTalk from Mark Roos that I already reported about.

But while RTalk is not open source and available to the community the new Gravel Smalltalk is already available and licensed under the very liberal Apache-2.0 License. I also do not know how it compares to Readline Smalltalk which is also running on the JVM.

The feature list of Gravel Smalltalk sounds promising:

 - Traits
 - Optional typing
 - Patching compiler
 - Full block closures
 - Resumable exceptions
 - Namespaces
 - Mirror based reflection facilities

Since I have all Java tools installed (JDK7, Eclipse, Maven, ...) it looks like I should clone the github repo with the code, fire up maven commandline and give Gravel Smalltalk a try this weekend.

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Lego MindStorms and Pharo

The new Ev3 series from LegoMindstorms allows to plug a Wifi key and connect via TCP.

So with this equipment and the new JetStorm project you can control your robot with Pharo.

Read more


Phratch 1.0beta

Phratch, the port of Scratch in Pharo has a new release.
Read more.


Monday, December 16, 2013

Objective-Smalltalk

Objective-Smalltalk is an programming language dervied from Objective-C. Website lives on

http://objective.st

It is an experimental project from Marcel Weiher. Code is on github - I havent found any info on the license.


Sunday, December 15, 2013

Private Methods in Pharo

The nice thing on Smalltalk is that it is extensible without having to ask a language vendor.
Using this Camille Teruel created a small proof-of concept for adding private methods to Pharo.

Load the project "PrivateMethods" into your Pharo image. I tried with  Pharo3.0 Latest update: #30639.

Now create a new class

Object subclass: #Bar
instanceVariableNames: ''
classVariableNames: ''
poolDictionaries: ''
category: 'Foo'


Then implement a method that you mark as private using the pragma <private>

foo
<private>

^42

If you try to evaluate 

  Bar new foo

you will get the usual "Message not understood" as it is private.

But nonetheless you can call it from other private or public methods. Just implement a Bar>>bar method:

     bar
        "Call the private method"
^self foo

and evaluate

     Bar new bar

to get the answer to life, universe and everything ...

To make sure it is really private (instead of protected) just implement a subclass and call it from a subclass method. You will see it works.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Sunday, December 08, 2013

Pharocloud

Former "rackincloud.com" is now Pharocloud with new icon and new design.
Look at:  http://pharocloud.com/

Friday, December 06, 2013

Petit parsers

With the Petit parser for Smalltalk it is very easy to build parsers. There is an SQL parser, a Java parser, PHP parser, ... and a Delphi parser, one for the GraphViz dot language, and many more.

Premade images are available on the Moose CI. Nice!

Wednesday, December 04, 2013

Roassal 3D

The Roassal visualization engine now officially has a new member: Roassal 3D. Roassal 3d is about creating and animating 3d scenes. It is meant to visualize data. Roassal 3d recently got textures, translucence, additional layouts and various light models. It should work on Pharo 3.0, under MacOSX, Linux and Windows. Read the offical announcement. There is also some initial documentation available.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

SmalltalkHub update

SmalltalkHub got an update and is now much faster. Read more.

Roassal visualisation engine on top of Amber

The Roassal visualisation engine (which is developed in Pharo) is also ported to Amber (the Smalltalk on top of JavaScript running in a webbrowser). You can already test Roassal on top of Amber in your browser: http://pestefo.github.io/roamber Just edit the examples in the workspace, execute (select all and click on do-it) it and see how the visualisation changes.

Cocotte

Mmmh .... a new page about "Cocotte" defined as Smalltalk + Javascript. Based on Amber and Node.js Not much information yet - lets see when there will be an official announcement

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Thursday, November 14, 2013

PUnQLite for Pharo - using the UnQLite embeddable NoSQL database engine

You may know SQLite - a small RDBMS that one can easily use since it requires only adding a simple DLL fitting into a few kilobytes. Due to its small size it is often embedded into products.

One can also use it in Smalltalk - for instance for Pharo using a simple wrapper project.

Today also the so called "NoSQL" databases like Mongo, CouchDB and others are getting attention. Often they work with documents, key value pairs, ...

There is also a "small sized" database engine for NoSQL - it is called "UnQLite". It is an Embeddable NoSQL Database Engine and therefore requires no separate server process. The sources have no dependency - it is easy to build a DLL from the provided C File.

Now there is already a Pharo binding in progress called "PUnQLite" from  from Masashi Umezawa. The binding uses NativeBoost to call the UnQLite engine.

Really nice! So if you need a small embeddable Database for your application you should check it out.






Wednesday, November 06, 2013

Pharo UI building with Spec

There is a nice post on how to get started with Spec UI building in Pharo.

Pharo Compiler cleanup

More details about the compiler cleanup work going on in Pharo from Marcus.

So long and thanks for all the fish...

When I do JEE stuff with Java I typically use Glassfish - easy to install and use. Now there is an interesting move from Oracle regarding the commercial support for GF. The commercial offering is just dropped - that news is already commented people from the community.

That does not mean Glassfish will soon be dead, but it may change from a professional appserver to just a developer tool (same story as "Geronimo"?). Interesting...

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Friday, October 11, 2013

Thursday, October 03, 2013

Mustache templates for Pharo

Mustache is a popular templating engine that is supported in many programming languages. Now there is also a Pharo port from Norbert.

Wednesday, October 02, 2013

Bootstrap for Seaside3 project (Release 0.1.0)

I published the "Bootstrap for Seaside" project and announced it on the Pharo and Seaside lists.

Features are:
You can easily load it in a fresh Pharo 2.0 as "Bootstrap" from the config browser. It loads Seaside3
as a dependency. After loading evaluate

  ZnZincServerAdaptor startOn: 8080 
to start the webserver and go to http://localhost:8080/bootstrap to browse the samples. Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:

   

Feel free to use it for your next Pharo/Seaside/Bootstrap based web project

Monday, September 23, 2013

New Mars examples - MarsPackageBrowser and MarsTestRunner

Carla shows some more progress on the Mars project. Watch the screencast here.

Launching Pharo on Ubuntu

Launching Pharo on Ubuntu is now much easier again. Thanks Damien, I also like the overview page.

AOP for Pharo

You like AOP (Aspect oriented programming) in Pharo. Then have a look at PHANtom (PHaro Aspect laNguage). Also check out it's reimplementation.

Redline Smalltalk on JavaOne

If your are at JavaOne conference and see a guy with a Smalltalk T-Shirt. Then this is James Ladd promoting Smalltalk in a Redline Smalltalk show.

LightningMDB

The Lightning Memory-Mapped Database (LMDB) is a new database library written by Symas Corp. for the OpenLDAP Project.
You can read about it's nice feature set here.

It looks like Jan van de Sandt is working already on a Smalltalk driver. Nice!

Pharo Bugfixing Process

There is a new video that helps explaining how you can submit fixes and enhancements for Pharo.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Remote Inspectors

Looks like the Amber-Pharo bridge has remote inspectors working. Nice!

Getting "Deep into Pharo" book

Beside on Lulu the new "Deep into Pharo" is now also on Amazon.

"OS" and "OS-Windows" project for Pharo on STHub

I just announced "OS" and "OS-Windows" project for Pharo. Hope it is useful for others too and community will help to move better external support in Pharo forward. Project and code lives on:

http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~OS/OS-Windows

If you have Pharo 3.0 installed just open "Tools" -> "ConfigBrowser" and install "OSWindows".

You should follow the examples given in the documentation that you can find on the project page. Just scroll down there.

Pharo3.0 now with Metacello2

Starting from today Pharo 3.0 includes Metacello2.

Beside many improvements you can now also make your project configuration class (which usually is named after your project "ConfigurationOfProjectName") a subclass of the predefined class ConfigurationOf.

   ConfigurationOf subclass: #ConfigurationOfExample 
           instanceVariableNames: '' 
           classVariableNames: '' 
           poolDictionaries: '' 
           category: 'ConfigurationOfExample' 

So no need to include metacello bootstrap methods on each configuration.
Did I mention that you can now also work with FileTree and GitHub? ;)

Dr. Geo with Athens

The Dr. Geo Canvas now also uses the Athens renderer or Pharo and looks much better. Here is a screenshot.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Autotest for Pharo

Autotest is a live testing tool (similar to Ruby Autotest, but the Smalltalk way, more dynamic). Autotest automatically runs tests related to the method you edit. Code and video are here.

Seaside on STHub

Seaside moved to SmalltalkHub, new Metacello configurations are available.

inBug - Visual Analytics of Bug Repositories

inBug is a nice project to work with issue tracking software from within Smalltalk. Watch the page or have a look at a presentation about it (also here).

Friday, September 13, 2013

Moose 4.8 released

Moose 4.8 is released with impressive enhancements:

 - Rendering is possible on Morphic canvas or the new Athens canvas (which is driven by NativeBoost)
 - Visualizations are now based on Roassal
 - the new chart engine Graph-ET is integrated
 - ...

Read the details here. Note that Moose 4.8 is based on Pharo 2.0 - so you can either download from the web or easily from the Pharo config browser.

Thursday, September 12, 2013

SecretOffice++

SecretOffice++ is a secure personal information management software enabling you to conceal your secret appointments, tasks, notes, contacts, journals and files. It was presented at ESUG2013 and is written in Smalltalk. Requires Outlook - so I was not able to try it out. But there are some screenshots on the website.

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

NativeBoost version of the OpenDBXDriver

There is now an NativeBoost version of the OpenDBXDriver for database access from Pharo Smalltalk. This helps in moving from old Squeak FFI to new NativeBoost. Rocio Amaya explains how it was created.

Pharo Sprint in Buenos Aires - this saturday!

10 Pines host a Pharo sprint this Saturday in Buenos Aires. Read more!

Shopping with Pharo robots

Pharo is used for orchestration of Robots working as helpers in a shopping mall. Read more.

Monday, September 09, 2013

ESUG 2013 - Boris Shingarov on "Towards a Smalltalk VM for the 21st Century"

"Towards a Smalltalk VM for the 21st Century" from Boris Shingarov is presented at ESUG-2013. The presentation is online.

First ESUG 2013 presentations

First videos from ESUG presentations are online available.

DicThesaurusRex

DicThesaurusRex - a spelling correction and thesaurus for Squeak Smalltalk. Read more.

FileTree in Pharo 3.0

FileTree is now part of Pharo 3.0 image. It allows to store Smalltalk code in the usual file system structure. So beside the usual Smalltalk versioning systems you can also use Git, Mercurial or Subversion. You can read more about FileTree in this presentation from Dale.

Friday, September 06, 2013

A Spur gear for Cog

Eliot writes about new memory management for Cog virtual machine. Read more here

Wednesday, September 04, 2013

Graph-ET - charts for Pharo

Graph-ET is a project to draw charts with Pharo. It is a library at the top of Roassal to draw curves, histograms and graphs. It will be demonstrated at ESUG this year.

Watch this video to see more.

or look at the code at

MCHttpRepository
location: 'http://smalltalkhub.com/mc/DanielAvivNotario/Graph-ET/main'
user: ''
password: ''

Tuesday, September 03, 2013

DrGeo user guide in english

The Dr. Geo user guide is available in english. If you want to learn geometry with Smalltalk then check it out.

NesTalk or Mario Bros running on Pharo Smalltalk

NesTalk is a NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) emulator running on Pharo Smalltalk. It is a pure smalltalk implementation written from scratch allowing you to run MarioBros on Pharo Smalltalk as this video demonstrates.

Code is on http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~zeroflag/NesTalk

You can follow updates on the authors twitter account.

Monday, September 02, 2013

Sunday, September 01, 2013

Saturday, August 31, 2013

Aida 6.6 Web Framework Released

The Aida 6.6 Web Framework is released. Read more here or just load it using the Config browser in Pharo 2.0 and point your browser to http://localhost:8888 when loading is finished

Friday, August 30, 2013

Thursday, August 29, 2013

HTML5 ServerSideEvents with Zinc and Smalltalk

Server-Sent Events is a new HTML5 technology that is used to send data from a server to a client, over HTTP, on the initiative of the server. You can work with them now also in Zinc for Pharo. Read more in Svens post.

Did you know ...

that Squeak for RaspberryPi now has actual official support for the faster ARM optimised BitBLt code. Amongst other things it will help speed up Scratch a little.

Recover a broken image with Oz

Nice to know about it: how to recover a broken image with Oz.

Aconcagua - Units for Smalltalk

Aconcagua is a units package for Pharo. You can load it using the config browser in Pharo 2.0 and here is a paper explaining it. Also have a look at this video.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Monday, August 19, 2013

Travels with Smalltalk (by Dave Thomas)

Surely outdated and part of Smalltalk history - but nonetheless I never stumbled upon this until today and still find it interesting to read.

Using NativeBoost in Pharo

While I spend some time wrapping more and more Windows API's for NativeBoost Laurent has done
something similar for X11.

He has also written a nice chapter on NativeBoost for the Pharo for the Enterprise book and wants to create a Pharo window manager for X11 next.

Friday, August 16, 2013

Punycode in Pharo

When working with internationalized domain names you may know the "Punycode" encoding (RFC 3492). There is a new project dealing with this on SmalltalkHub.

 You can read more about this on Wikipedia and try the example from the article (using the german word "Bücher" which means books):

PunycodeConverter new encode: 'Bücher' results in 'xn--Bcher-kva' 


PunycodeConverter new decode: 'xn--Bcher-kva' results in 'Bücher' again

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Pharo 2.0 speedup on loading MC packages

After Pharo 2.0 came out the community started with Pharo 3.0 which is still being worked on.

Independent from that many bug fixes for 3.0 were also backported to 2.0 and released as Pharo 2.0 Summer release.

 If you grabbed the initial Pharo 2.0 or the Pharo 2.0 Summer release you may have noticed that code loading is not as fast as it was in Pharo 1.4. The main reason for this noticable slowdown was the introduction of the Ring package and proper packages (RPackage).

This has changed since yesterday with yet another update #20619. By using a cache the speedup on loading MC packages is now 3x or more. So either update your image or just get a fresh copy of Pharo 2.0 from the file server. You will notice that loading Seaside or other packages from the Configuration browser is now much faster!

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Mars on Pharo

marsonpharo.wordpress.com is showing results of the GSOC project on Mars - platform independent UI bindings for Pharo

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Why Smalltalk is better than Excel

Georg Heeg demonstrates The Analyst (one of the early, important projects done in Smalltalk-80) at STIC 2013. If you want to know more watch the short video.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Snapshotcello

Snapshotcello - a little utility that enables you to freeze a snapshot of a given Metacello configuration based on what is already loaded in your current image. Read more here and here.

Installing Pharo in many flavors

Guillermo Polito wrote a blog post on the various ways you can install Pharo onto your system. Read more.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

BioSmalltalk published in Bioinformatics Journal

The BioSmalltalk project (a new environment system for pure object-oriented bioinformatics programming) is now published in the Bioinformatics Journal. Read more or directly read the PDF article. The project lives here.

Monday, July 15, 2013

Roassal 3d progressing

More screenshots from the progress on the Roassal 3D work. Click to zoom:


 

Building and deploying your first web app with Pharo

Sven wrote a nice tutorial on how to build and deploy your first Pharo webapplication. It does not use any of the known Smalltalk webframeworks (like Seaside, Aida, Iliad, ...) - it requires only the Zinc HTTP components that are already part of the Pharo image.

He also explains how to deploy the final result to the cloud.


Chapter on Blocks

The "Deep into Pharo" book now also contains a chapter about Blocks. Download is here.

Spec docu

Some links to Spec docu

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Redline Smalltalk Eclipse plugin

The Eclipse plugin for Redline Smalltalk moves forward as this screenshot proves.

Athens on Amber

Athens - the Smalltalk graphic framework that is now also part of upcoming Pharo 3.0 is also available for Amber Smalltalk.

So you can write your graphics code in Pharo first and run it later in Amber directly within a webbrowser.
A demo is here. You have to move the splitter in the middle of the helios IDE to see the "do it" button.
Nice!

Hopefully Amber and Pharo will continue to stay as much as possible compatible - then you can freely choose the appropriate platform for writing server side (Pharo or Amber on node.js), rich client (Pharo) or webbrowser (Amber) code in Smalltalk.


Tuesday, July 09, 2013

Playing with Helios in new Amber

Now that the new Amber 0.11.0 is released I'm sure you want to play with Smalltalk and the new Helios IDE of Amber in your webbrowser. For those who need some instruction:

 - open the Amber homepage:  http://amber-lang.net
 - press F12 in your Google chrome browser to get the debgging tools, now click on the Javascript console
 - evaluate "amber.loadHelios()" and press enter - now Helios is being loaded
- when loading is finished press CTRL + Space to open the Helios IDE

You can open Browser, TestRunner, Workspace and play with it.

Gradualtalk

Gradualtalk is a gradually-typed Smalltalk, which is fully compatible with existing Smalltalk code. Image is based on Pharo Smalltalk and the type system is deactivated by default. 

Amber 0.11.0 released

Amber Smalltalk 0.11.0 released with more fixes, more commiters, more tests, ....
This release includes also the Helios IDE (which is not yet the default but can be opened via JavaScript).

You can either download it or install it via NPM (the node.js package manager).

Thursday, July 04, 2013

SourceCity for Pharo with CI job

SourceCity is a 3D visualization tool for analyse object-oriented systems. There is a new Jenkins CI job to build a "SourceCity" image right from the metacello config.

So you just need to download the image and run with the usual Pharo VM. To create a visualization just evaluate:

            SourceCity exampleRpackage

Note that SourceCity is meanwhile open source with MIT license. Code can be found on SmalltalkHub.
Read more about the project here (page is a little bit slow) or here.

Roassal with Sunburst visualization

There is also some progress on a Sunburst visualization for Roassal. Click the image to zoom the screenshot:


      

Roassal with 3D support

The Roassal visualization engine for Pharo now also supports 3D. Here is a screenshot, click to zoom.

 

 You can also view an older video to get more infos on how to use Roassal.

Pharo inside iPad again

Read more here.

Jun for Smalltalk - new release 795

There is a new release of Jun for Smalltak - release 795 as of 2013/07/03

Wednesday, July 03, 2013

New class builder in Pharo 3.0

The latest updates of Pharo 3.0 contain a new class builder. Check out

  PharoClassInstaller example

 for an example.

 This will end up in the support of "slots" - a slot is a meta-object for accessing a field in an Object. This makes class building also more explicit - for instance you can define the layout when building a class (PointerLayout, ByteLayout, ...)

So instead of having an instanceVariables array you can now have real layout objects. The implementation also includes field modifications which can track changes required to migrated instances (adding/removing fields, shifting position, ...).

Read more about Slots here.

Friday, June 28, 2013

Playing with Cairo and Athens in upcoming Pharo 3.0

The next Pharo version (Pharo 3.) which is in preparation now has Athens and Cairo integrated for better graphics. If you want to play with it just read this.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Monday, June 24, 2013

Redline Smalltalk on JavaOne

RedlineSmalltalk will be presented at JavaOne JVM Languages track - CON7805 in SanFrancisco (September 22–26, 2013).

Friday, June 21, 2013

Custom icon themes for Pharo / Eclipse icons

As you may know you can change the UI theme in Pharo.

Just click "System" - "Settings" to open the settings browser and select the user interface in the appearance section. Beside the "Pharo" theme there are also themes called "Vistary" (if you like Windows) or "Watery"/"Watery2" (if you are used to Mac).

You can even implement own themes (as Doru demonstrates with his "White theme").

In the upcoming Pharo 3.0 you can even provide an own custom icon theme.Esteban demonstrates this with this goodie that allows Pharo to look like Eclipse since it uses the same icons as the Eclipse Java IDE.

                   

Click on the screenshot images to zoom. Very useful if you want to show someone fluent in Java the wonderful world of Smalltalk.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Better rewriting rule tool

There is a GSoC Project to provide a better rewriting rule tool. If you are interested you can follow its progress on this blog or find the code here.

Monday, June 17, 2013

Presenty

Presenty is a user interface framework for Pharo based on MVP (Model view presenter). Read more about it on Denis blog. Code is on SmalltalkHub.

Friday, June 14, 2013

STIC 13 - VA Smalltalk Roadmap

First video recorded by James from this months "STIC 13" conference, Wigwam resort, Phoenix Arizona (June 9-12). Expect more to come in the next days ...

Barcodes in Smalltalk

Didnt know Barcodes are so easy to implement in Smalltalk. So I started with EAN13 barcode together with unit tests.

Project lives on: http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~TorstenBergmann/Barcode

You can also load it using the config browser in Pharo 2.0 now. It is already usable - thanks to the power of Pharo.

Short Guide:

 To instantiate: BarcodeEAN13 value: '2109876543210'
You can get the binarySequence of a barcode:

(BarcodeEAN13 value: '2109876543210') binarySequence


calcuate the checksum (last digit):

 (BarcodeEAN13 value: '2109876543210') computeChecksum


 or visualize the barcode:

  BarcodeEAN13 example asForm asMorph openInWorld


 or to write to a file:

   PNGReadWriter putForm: BarcodeEAN13 example asForm onFileNamed: 'sample.png'


  Now includes EAN8 as well

Units in Smalltalk

I uploaded a "ConfigurationOfUnits" to the MetaRepoForPharo20. With this the "Units" framework is easily loadable from the Pharo 2.0 config browser.

Here are some examples from the Unit framework:

(10km + 10km) gives you 20km

You can also convert easily

  (10km + 24m) as: 1m

gives you  10024 metres.

It is also simple to compare:

  1hour < 10 seconds

which gives you false.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Log4s for Pharo

Log4s - a logging framework for Smalltalk was open sourced with MIT license by Instantiations. It runs on Pharo 2.0.

Some details about it can be found in this presentation.

libsodium Binding for Pharo and Squeak

libsodium ( a portable shared-library version of the NaCl cryptography library) can now be used from Pharo and Squeak. Read more.

Magritte for Morphic

Magritte is a framework allowing you to easily build seaside apps by adding meta informations to domain classes that can be used to easily build the UI.

Now there is also support for Morphic available. Just watch the video.

Sunday, June 09, 2013

Friday, June 07, 2013

Web with Pharo Conference 6 June 2013 @ Lille

The program from yesterdays Pharo web conference is already on twitter:


Lets see when the first videos appear on the web.

Thursday, June 06, 2013

Tektronix Smalltalk Document Archive

This page contains annotated links to primary documents related to the development of Smalltalk products at  Tektronix in the 1980′s. 

Amber Smalltalk on the iPhone

Sebastian Sastre is playing with Amber - so here is Amber Smalltalk running on the iPhone. Click the image to enlarge.

Wednesday, June 05, 2013

Sunday, June 02, 2013

SourceCity is OpenSource now

SourceCity is a 3D visualization tool for analyse object-oriented systems. It is now OpenSource with MIT License! Read more.

Friday, May 31, 2013

Rubric demo for Pharo

Alain Plantec gives a first demo of Rubric (a deep refactoring of TextEditor) for Pharo in a new video:

http://vimeo.com/67400546

Code lives on SmalltalkHub.

Websela

Another way to make a websites with ST is Websela. You can use Monticello packages to send changes to the website.

Device prototype with Smalltalk from 1991

This device was a prototype for a pen computer called the "ActiveBook". Software part was done with Smalltalk.

Artefact 1.0 - PDF framework for Smalltalk

Artefact 1.0 is released - a project implementing a PDF framework for Smalltalk.

Project and code live at on SmalltalkHub. Read more about the features in the announcement.

To easily try out download Pharo 2.0, open the config browser and load the "Artefact" project.
Then check the class PDFDemos. If you evaluate "PDFDemos runAllDemos" you will find a "pdf" directory with all the PDF samples generated.

Happy Birthday Smalltalk-80!

30 years and still strong!



Smalltalk Debugging facilities for web development

A debugger is not only something a developer uses to hunt for bugs. It is also a tool that makes a developer more productive.

In Smalltalk the debugging experience is really impressive. As someone once said:

"I love Smalltalk. I love coding in the debugger, being able to archive processes and restore them exactly later if they encounter exceptions, the amazing reliability. The economy of expression and the brilliant class library."

Soon Amber Smalltalk will bring this debugging experience also to web development. Have a look at this demo video.

Some Smalltalk history

A picture provided by Allan Wirfs-Brock with the following comment:

 "And this was how you coded a fast Smalltalk virtual machine in 1985"

 

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Reflectivtity for Pharo

Reflectivity for Pharo is out - this tool allows you to annotate AST nodes with "metalinks". Read more.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

To trap a better mouse

Ian Piumarta (Squeak Unix VM maintainer, long time Squeaker and Smalltalker) who is working for Viewpoints Research Institute will speak Wednesday May 29, 2013, 3:30 pm at Room W1008, West Building 8W, Ookayama campus, Tokyo Institute of Technology about "To trap a better mouse".

Monday, May 06, 2013

Sunday, May 05, 2013

Friday, May 03, 2013

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Smart Suggestions for Pharo

The idea of "Smart Suggestions for Pharo" is to have suggestions based in the text selected or the cursor position in the code editor.

Read more about and see some screenshots here.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

ObjC bridge for Pharo

Esteban is working on an ObjC bridge for Pharo. Here is a first demo video comparing graphics within the world canvas and outside of the usual Morphic World using the bridge.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Pharo 3.0 and Opal compiler

After Pharo 2.0 came out the development on 3.0 immediately started.

Pharo 3.0 already has many new updates and today it also integrates Opal (a new compiler).
If you want to know more about Opal then read here or look at this presentation from the Deep into Smalltalk summer school.

Still Opal is not the default compiler - but step by step...

Monday, April 15, 2013

Friday, April 12, 2013

Athens Tutorial

Want to use the new Athens graphics package? There is a new tutorial that you can run from within the image. This video from James shows how to use it.

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Profiling using Spy framework

Alexandre Bergel is demonstrating some profiling and visualization of the Spy framework. He uses package "HelpSystem" - stuff that I wrote back in 2010. Interesting point of view on things I did myself in the past. Looks like I should apply these visualizations to the new Online Help system as well to get even better results. Thanks!

Sunday, April 07, 2013

Friday, April 05, 2013

Amber Smalltalk Game

A nice demo of an in-browser game developed in Amber Smalltalk is available
since today. Click here to try or read here.

If the demo runs in your browser click on "class browser" to see the code.

Thursday, April 04, 2013

Alan Kay interview

Again an interesting interview with Alan Kay.

Quicksilver

Quicksilver is a tool for the interactive exploration of hierarchical graphs. Code is on SmalltalkHub.
Gofer new
smalltalkhubUser: 'Quicksilver' project: 'Quicksilver';
package: 'Quicksilver';
load
It requires Moose and can be used to create Roassal visualizations like this from a filesystem.

Wednesday, April 03, 2013

Athens Vector graphics tutorial for Pharo

Athens is a new vector graphics API for Pharo. There is now an in-image tutorial from Igor you can use to get used to it. Really nice!

Trying Parasol with Selenium in Pharo Smalltalk

Johan Brichau answered my question from my last post: about the difference between the "Parasol" and "Webtester":
So I gave Parasol a short try today:
  • a fresh Mozilla Firefox was already installed on my machine
  • Parasol still requires old Pharo 1.4, so even when I prefer Pharo 2.0 I downloaded it again
  • I installed the current version selenium-server-standalone-2.31.0.jar of Selenium which can be found here
On Windows (64Bit) I start the JAR with a batch to tell the Java component about the firefox location

java -jar C:\selenium\selenium-server-standalone-2.31.0.jar -Dwebdriver.firefox.bin="C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"
pause

Now in Pharo 1.4 image I installed Parasol using:

Gofer new
    url: 'http://ss3.gemstone.com/ss/Parasol';
    package: 'ConfigurationOfParasol';
    load.
((Smalltalk at: #ConfigurationOfParasol) project version: #development) load: 'dev'.

WAKomEncoded startOn: 8080.
Deprecation raiseWarning: false; showWarning: false.

Took a while since it loads Seaside. After anything is set up I can easily script the webdriver/Firefox from a Smalltalk workspace. Here is an example:

"Start the driver and open wikipedia" 
driver := BPRemoteWebDriver new.
driver get: 'http://en.wikipedia.org/'.
"click on search"
(driver findElementByID: 'searchInput') click.

"enter some text"
driver getKeyboard sendKeys: ('Pharo' , (String with: BPKeys return)).

"query some text from the webpage"
Transcript show: ((driver findElementByID: 'mw-content-text') findElementByTagName: 'p') getText.

driver quit

So it is easy to write SUnit tests or automate some tasks you do on the web using Pharo. With the help of F12 in the webbrowser it is easy to find out about element ids, ... in HTML, so one can easily navigate through pages.

I worked with Selenium in Java and other languages already in the past. Parasol is not as comfortable as with the Selenium IDE recorder - but it works and using Smalltalk usually makes one more productive.

It is nice to see that I can now also control the Firefox browser to automate things and write webtests directly from within Pharo Smalltalk.



Parasol - web testing using Smalltalk

There is a project called "Parasol" allowing you to do web testing using Smalltalk. It uses Selenium.


Still dont know what the difference to "WebTester" is - which is another project for webtesting I already blogged about.

Tuesday, April 02, 2013

Pharo and GitFS

There is a GitFS available for Pharo. It is a work in progress and there is already some docu.

Fuel and Tanker demo session

First videos from PharoConf 2013 appear on the net. One video is about Tanker - an experimental package loader. It uses Fuel to do serialization and deserialization and will allow for faster loading.

Didnt know about the debugger menu item to serialize the stack to a .fuel file. Allows to serialize an error stack in case of problem and materialize the stack in another image to reproduce.

Nice - try that with other technologies out there ;)

Code for Fuel is already in Pharo 2.0. The Tanker project is on SmalltalkHub.




Back to the command line with Pharo Smalltalk

Pharo 2.0 allows you to easily deal with the command line. This is very useful if you want to script some daily tasks or your CI builds.

You can pass arguments to the image and also register own command line commands. Just check out the class comment in class "CommandLineHandler" and check its subclasses.

Creating an own handler is easy: just subclass CommandLineHandler with a custom class:


CommandLineHandler subclass: #TimeCommandLineHandler
 instanceVariableNames: ''
 classVariableNames: ''
 poolDictionaries: ''
 category: 'Custom-CommandLine'

Implement a class side method to return the command name:

commandName
 ^ 'time'

and implement an instance side #activate method:

activate
 self activateHelp.
 
 FileStream stdout 
  nextPutAll: '[time] ';
  nextPutAll: Time now asString

Now call it from the command line

    $PATH_TO_VM myImage.image time

and it will print the current time on stdout. Note that the #activateHelp will activate the --help option which displays the class comment of your custom handler class.

Also note that it is now possible to write in colors in a terminal from Pharo as this photo shows (click to enlarge):

 

Get Pharo easily

If you want to install Pharo on your platform you can go to:

         http://files.pharo.org

and download the specific distribution for your platform from the platforms directory. For instance "Pharo2.0-win.zip" for Windows, "Pharo2.0-mac.zip" for Mac and "Pharo2.0-linux.zip" for Linux.

There is also a "Pharo2.0-portable.zip" if you change platforms often (just put it on a USB stick). Also note that Pharo 3.0 is already available there as well - so if you want to help with fixes and changes feel free to do so.

If you visit

      http://get.pharo.org

there is another way to install it. This page includes the Zero conf script allowing you to easily
install Pharo using the command line. For Pharo 2.0 this is:

    wget -O - http://get.pharo.org/20+vm | bash

And you can use:

    wget --quiet -O - get.pharo.org | bash

for the current stable release of Pharo and the PharoVM.

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Pomodoro for Pharo 2.0

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method. There is now also a simple timer implementation for Pharo 2.0 available.


You can load the tool right from the config browser and it allows easy scripting from Smalltalk:

   "Provide an action when pomodoro is finished"
   Pomodoro timerFor: 20 minutes 
            whenFinishedDo: [ self inform: 'Pomodoro finished']

Read more about the details here.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

IRC Pharo

The old IRC channel #pharo-project about Pharo is now closed. So if you want to chat about the Pharo environment use the new #pharo channel on freenode.

Moose 4.8 on Pharo 2.0

Moose moved to Pharo 2.0. All tests are green and the team recommends to use Pharo 2.0 in the future.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

One-click is dead

Even when then new Pharo 2.0 is delivered as a one-click on the homepage, in the future we will see OS specific packages for Win, Linux, Mac, ...
The platform specific builds are already in place.

Squeak 4.4. for RiscOS

Squeak 4.4. is now available for RiscOS too.

Wednesday, March 06, 2013

Cross dialect Smalltalk CI

Do you want to use cross dialect Smalltalk (Pharo, Squeak and GemStone) continuous integration service? Then have a look at "builderCI" from Dale which is using GitHub and TravisCI.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

OOP - a critical approach

Some years ago I had email exchange with Huw Collingbourne about programming and Smalltalk and  Smallscript/S# in particular. At this time I helped my friend David Simmons a little bit with some early Smallscript releases.

Huw runs the http://www.bitwisemag.com and he had a tutorial on Smalltalk with Squeak and one about Dolphin Smalltalk.

Huw also published an interview with David as the creator of Smallscript. Smallscript (as some of you may know) is still closed and not released into the wild for various reasons. It is still one of the most fascinating software technologies and dynamic scripting environment/language I was able to get my hands on.
But I dont want to write about Smallscript here.

Huw Collingbourne is instructor on programming languages, he wrote books about Ruby and is director of technology at SapphireSteel Software (known for their Ruby IDE).

I found an interesting post about Smalltalk and other programming languages in the context of object oriented programming from Dec 2012 written by Huw:

  https://www.udemy.com/blog/object-oriented-programming-a-critical-approach/

Read it. It should make you think and again remind you that the IT world made no real progress with recent languages and software technologies regarding objects.

Day by day I see so many people write code or writing about OO code (in blogs, papers, ...).
Not all really understood about OOP and its key concepts.

People learn languages like Groovy, CoffeScript or Scala today, the next day they learn Dart or the next language. Sometimes only the syntax changed. But they never looked at OOP, they never looked at its origins in Smalltalk or Lisp because these technologies are "too old" and not mainstream. But they should - it will help fighting complexity and help when the code grows.

Only a few of them ever took the time to look at Smalltalk. And a few of the few people really continued to look and understand that Smalltalk is not really a language. It is a dynamic object system with the language just built in. Even a class is an object and therefore has a class. It can dynamically changed, created or removed and garbage collected like any other object. If you need new control structures just add them as new methods. It's turtles all the way down and the power is in the simplicity: Objects and Messages.

Worked with several languages and environments I learned to know about both worlds. On one side the text file based, often static compiled world (mostly combined with a horrible grammar) that constraints writing good OOP and on the other side a dynamic live environment where you can lively interact with all the objects around either by using code or direct manipulation.

Smalltalk is still the mother of OO languages - you can not get any closer to OOP than within its environment. And it is also opens the door to metaprogramming - something I will write about later here.

I can only recommend it - grab a free copy and learn about it. You will not regret it even if you continue to work with more mainstream technologies.



Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Network Time Protocol in Pharo

Want to sync server times? You can check your local clock agains other servers using the NTP protocol. Sven provides some sample code in his Neo repository. Since the network time protocol (RFC2030) is based on the UDP protocol you now also have a nice example on how to use UDP datagrams.

Sunday, February 24, 2013

BioSmalltalk screenshots and integrated help

BioSmalltalk provides some screenshots of their Pharo based application. Way cool: it uses my HelpSystem which (as the site states) they could integrate in less than an hour work. Nice! But nonetheless I now provide an online version

Pharo Online Help with Markdown support

The Pharo Online Help now has support for the markdown format. I also made a tutorial available on how to use it. Code is on SqueakSource3, but will soon move to SmalltalkHub.

You can try in a clean Pharo 2.0 image, load it using the configuration browser.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Smalltalk Jobs

There is a new site for worldwide Smalltalk Jobs: http://SmalltalkJobs.com

PBE 2 as PDF

Want to read "Pharo by Example 2" book as a PDF. Here you go. Update: Now the book PDF is built by the CI Server and you can find the chapters here.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Marea: Swapping Objects

A new paper was published on Marea, an object graph swapper for Smalltalk. Read more here or directly go to the PDF.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Smalltalk and CouchDB

If you want to develop an application with Smalltalk (Pharo) and CouchDB, then continue reading this paper.

It includes a port of the Mustache web template library which is easy to use if you work with JSON. Look here for a syntax example.

Code lives on SS3 and will soon move over to SmalltalkHub (at least the project is there already, still empty).

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Loom

There is another new tool from ObjectProfile called "Loom - Threads Monitor Tool" which is available for Pharo and VisualWorks.

Monday, January 07, 2013

AsmJIT

Want to work with assembler even in high level languages? Then have a look at "asmjit" - a complete x86/x64 JIT Assembler for C++ Language. There is a port to Smalltalk at http://www.squeaksource.com/AsmJit.html It is already used in Pharos NativeBoost project.