Smalltalk with James Robertson

interesting thoughts on who took what ideas from Smalltalk, from Bruce Badger

In a message to the vwnc mailing list, Travis Griggs has laid out the best explanation of how the VW UI works that I've ever seen - shedding light on the good, the bad and the ugly.

Technorati Tags: visualworks, wrapper

Interested in trying out SmallHarbor (for hosting a Seaside app)? Check out the first screencast they've put out.

SmallHarbour account creation from Romain Verduci on Vimeo.

The SmalltalkHub project continues to move forward. It would be a really good thing if the various vendors and OSS projects coalesced around something like this. Having all the disparate environments living in their own silos really holds Smalltalk back. A lot.

Technorati Tags: smalltalkhub

The recording of Alan's talk is now available for download.

Looks like I'll need to do another screencast on the download process for Cincom's Smalltak products - they are back online, using a new download process:

To receive your free evaluation copy of Cincom Smalltalk, simply fill in the form below and the link will be emailed to you. If you would like to have media shipped to you, click here. *All fields but “Comments” are required.

Looks like you fill in a form, and then receive an email download link. I'll see how well that works, and update the post. In the meantime, go get it :)

Update: Looks like it's VW 7.8 NC, without the cryptography code included.

Second Update: So what do you do if you want to work on something that requires that crypto code (like, say, any modern network API?). Well, it's easier than you think if you have 7.7.1 lying around (or a recent version of ObjectStudio, for that matter). Simply copy the entire Security folder from that distro into the 7.8 directory structure, and use those libraries. Problem worked around :)

Technorati Tags: visualworks, objectstudio

Say you want to load a Metacello configuration, but your network limits which apps have network access? That's the issue Joachim had to deal with recently:

I needed to get Seaside and some other stuff into a Pharo image on a machine at a place where there is very limited offline access. The network there is configured in a way that not every application can download stuff from the web. Pharo, of course, is not on that list.

Follow the link for details.

Technorati Tags: pharo, metacello

LShift explores the PetitParser by using it to create a Haskell parser - it's a nice example usage that should give you an idea as to how it works.

Technorati Tags: parser, peg

Randal Schwartz got some oohs and ahs recently at the Rio de Janeiro Dojo:

To rehearse, I had done the exercise earlier in the day, so I had a sense of where the code was going, although the actual solution from the group effort was a bit different. We finished in about 45 minutes, and with the remaining time, we tackled the second stage (decimal values containing a 3 digit, not just numbers that are multiples of 3). After completing that, I showed that we could put the logic for #isFizz and #isBuzz over in the Integer class, which was pretty amazing unless you've seen it before, and even got the protocol category right so that the MCZ package contained the monkeypatches. Finally, I loaded the MCZ into a new image, and ran the tests. All green. It was a fun experience, and they later told me that they'd never even started the second stage question before with other languages, let alone getting it to a place where a file could easily be handed around with the solution (including tests).

He also visited the LA Smalltalk User's group - follow the link for that report.

Technorati Tags: fizzbuzz

Spotted in The Hitchhiker's Guide to Smalltalk:

Veronica Uquillas is currently working on Ring - a unifying and foundational model infrastructure for Pharo. The goals of the project are:

• Provide a common API at structural and runtime level
• Allow tools to interact and integrate directly with the host environment (Pharo)
• Support history analysis

Sounds like a good idea to me - having a bunch of duplicate models running around for each tool is a bit much :)

Technorati Tags: pharo