Smalltalk with James Robertson

My recording of the ProfStef content into screencast form is not only available here, but also on the Pharocasts site now.

Technorati Tags: pharo, pharocasts

Moose 4.4 is out:

We are happy to announce the Moose Suite version 4.4 (download)

What is new:

• New EyeSee engine for scripting visual charts
• New Kumpel importer for SVN repositories
• New Metanool engine for supporting dynamic annotations of models
• Simplified look and feel
• Improved VerveineJ compatibility for Java parsing
• Improved FAMIX support for Java systems
• Improved support for complex shapes in Mondrian
• Improved RPackage engine support for the Smalltalk importer

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I'm supposed togive an overview of Store usage tomorrow, and I wanted to set up a personal repository (the main work one can be slow, as it's across the WAN, whether I'm in my home office or in Dallas). I was going to use PostgreSQL (I use that on my Mac), but the Windows machine is fully locked down - I don't even have local admin.

Fortunately, SQLlite doesn't require admin access - just the dropping of a dll into a working directory. Unfortunately, this is where I ran into a few interesting issues with version control. We are on VW 7.6 at work, so I wasn't sure whether "loading the latest" from the public repository would work (and it's a tiresome process, involving a load on my Mac, copying to a USB stick, shuffling the stick... rinse repeat until it works). Here's what I was looking at, just for the EXDI level access:

Note the lack of references to a specific VW version. What I ended up doing was firing up a base VW image for VW 7.6, looking at the timestamp in the transcript, and making guesses as to what would work in 7.6 based on that. Less than an exact science, that. I guess it's something that all of us who publish to the public store should keep in mind.

The two weeks of Smalltalk training are done - there's a group splitting off from the place I work, and they are taking a copy of the application with them. So, I've been getting them up to speed on Smalltalk (VisualWorks, specifically) for the last few weeks (2 weeks of training with an off week in the middle). I'm on my way home now, and I feel pretty good about how it went.

It's very different from when I was doing this full time back in the early and mid 90's. Back then, I mostly saw C and Cobol developers, and just getting them past the basic OO hurdle was a problem. This group had some Java developers and some database guys; the db guys had a tougher time of it, but they seemed to be ok by the end of the second week. The Java guy in the class was fine - he had issues with some of the VW specific stuff that always gives newbies difficulty (hello, AspectAdaptors), but otherwise latched on pretty fast.

It's been fun - I had forgotten how much I enjoy teaching :)

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Via Joachim:

Sebastian just uploaded a port of the JQueryWidgetBox for VA Smalltalk to VASTGoodies.com.

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Looking for a short Smalltalk gig? If you know Pharo or Squeak - and Seaside - this might be for you:

My apologies for the short lead time, but I need a person that is very conversant with Squeak-Seaside-Pharo-Pier-GLASS plus an interest and ability to quickly learn and mentor others in web-mobile languages and tools. Will be working with English speakers, so facility in that language is essential. The person must be able to be in New Mexico, US, from May 23 to July 29.

If that interests you, contact David West.

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Thomas Koschate looks around the world of Smalltalk - he has some useful advice for both Cincom and Instantiations, and notes that on a personal level, he's looking at Pharo. That accords with my progression as well, in a lot of ways :)

Yoshiki Ohshima is porting Squeak to the Google native client

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Andreas Raab has been exploring the OpenQwaq codebase, and has found some cool stuff. For instance:

This is the first part of our series about the Cool bits of OpenQwaq. OpenQwaq has a complete integration with Python. What this means is that from OpenQwaq you can call Python code simply via something like here:

Python initialize. "initialize the bridge"
module := Python loadModule: 'ExampleModule'.
result := module call: 'add' with: 3 with: 4.
instance := module call: 'ExampleClass'.
instance call: 'exampleMethod' with: instance.

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Jtalk (Smalltalk on Javascript) now has support for DNU.

Technorati Tags: javascript, jtalk