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Surely outdated and part of Smalltalk history - but nonetheless I never stumbled upon this until today and still find it interesting to read.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