Smalltalk with James Robertson

Spotted in Planet Squeak

Squeak is in the process of releasing its latest version Squeak4.4. Frank Shearar, the release manager, has just released the latest release candidate for public vetting by the community. Download it. Take a look. Post feedback on the Squeak-dev mailing list.

Tags: squeak

For those of you who use something other than Facebook (or maybe in addition to it) - Pharo is now on Google Plus.

Tags: pharo

This will be of interest to ObjectStudio shops:

In ObjectStudio 8.5, Cincom will add a new ODBC Wrapper Via ODBCEXDI. This new ODBC Wrapper is built upon VisualWorks’ ODBCEXDI. While the APIs at the database level are compatible with those in the existing ODBC Wrapper, all of its interactions with ODBC libraries will be handled by VisualWorks ODBCEXDI.

In general, getting rid of redundant frameworks is good. It may involve some ugrade work for anyone who's gone in and made extensions in that area though.

Tags: objectstudio, odbc

Joachim goes through some of the hassles involved in debugging a server issue in Smalltalk (specifically VA, although I think the basic issues are agnostic):

Yesterday I packaged my Seaside Application for the first time on VA Smalltalk 8.5.2 and deployed it to a staging server. And promptly as expected, I got some errors: The first few were easy to find. One of them being a missing rule in AbtXDSingleImagePackagingRule (or some superclass) to include the new EsTimeZone code. That could be fixed by hand. But this morning I spent quite some time searching for a problem in the walkback.log that didn’t exist. And this post is mostly intended for myself to remember next time. But it might also save you some time. The second purpose of this post (or, to be exact, the next one) is to underline why I think the VAST port of Glorp has a lousy adaption of error handling.

There's more, but I have a small word of advice that's made my life easier: don't package images for deployment when going to the server. I run a VW server for this blog, and it's a full dev image, simply running headless. That makes debugging it far, far simpler. I can set up the same image locally, and test things with all the tools available. For that matter, I can set up the same image on a different port on the server, and debug it headful using VNC.

Tags: server smalltalk

Pharo 2.0 is now beta:

Today I finished the pending integrations for move to Pharo 2.0. There is still a problem with the VMs (for NB), but that's not a stopper for moving on. What does this means? Starting now, no new changes of API will be allowed, just bug fixes and minor enhancements that does not change the system behavior. We still have a long stabilization path until we can release, but we hope a couple of months will put us in shape

Tags: pharo

I've done a fair bit of the initial changes necessary to update our code from VW 7.6 to VW 7.9, and I was at the point where I wanted to try running the application (to see what else needed fixing). That's when I ran into a curious issue with Oracle, where a stock query we run was failing, with Oracle telling us "not all variables bound".

That seemed strange; the code (which worked fine in 7.6, and did this, more or less:

conn := OracleConnection new.
conn
	username: 'someUser';
	password: 'somePassword';
	environment: 'oracleDB'.
conn connect.

session := conn getSession.
session bindInput: #(1).
session prepare: 'select * from categories where id = ?'.
session execute.
answers := session answer upToEnd.
conn disconnect.
^answers

Now, that code worked just fine in older revs of VW (and, in testing it against Postgres just now on my Mac, it still works fine in 7.9). To get it working against the Oracle, we needed to do this:

conn := OracleConnection new.
conn
	username: 'someUser';
	password: 'somePassword';
	environment: 'oracleDB'.
conn connect.

session := conn getSession.
session prepare: 'select * from categories where id = ?'.
session bindInput: #(1).
session execute.
answers := session answer upToEnd.
conn disconnect.
^answers

Can't spot the difference? The change moves #bindInput: after #prepare:. In the latest VW, the bind values are cleared in #prepare: - so if you do binding first, you end up with.... no binding. I did have a look at the release notes for 7.9.1, and the section on Oracle changes is reproduced here by Cincom - nothing on this change. It's easy enough to deal with; I just wish this had been in the release notes.

Tags: visualworks, oracle

There's more information available for the upcoming (next June) STIC 2013 conference:

The Smalltalk Industry Conference STIC’13 will be held June 9-12, 2013 at the Wigwam Resort in Phoenix, Arizona. The theme is "30 Years of Smalltalk". The Call for Participation is being prepared and will be announced soon.

STIC’13 Call for Sponsors
We are actively recruiting sponsors for STIC’13. Please let me know asap if you have any qualified leads. We are especially interested in companies who were developers or early adopters of Smalltalk in the 1980’s and 1990’s (e.g. Xerox, PARC, IBM, Apple, Microsoft, etc.).

STIC’13 Sponsorship Levels (Preliminary)

• Platinum $10,000
• Gold $5000
• Silver $2500
• Corporate $1000
• Academic $500

You can see the sponsors for the previous conference STIC’12 here.

Commemorative Pins
We are planning to make commemorative lapel pins similar to the Smalltalk Balloon pins that Xerox made for me to distribute in the 1980’s. The design for the pins was based on the iconic August 1981 Byte Magazine cover artwork and was approved by the artist Robert Tinney.

• Xerox Smalltalk lapel pin approximately 1.3” tall circa 1984 (1000 produced)
• Limited edition 11”x14” print of Byte Magazine August 1981 cover artwork, signed and numbered by Robert Tinney (500 produced)

Please let me know if you have a source for making high quality, low cost hard enamel lapel pins. Also, we may be interested in a sponsor for the new pins, so let me know asap.

Objectively,
Evelyn Van Orden
Director, Smalltalk 30th Anniversary Reunion
STIC’13

Tags: stic13

This is from Evelyn Van Orden, whose history with Smalltalk goes all the way back:

Smalltalk-80 was launched from the ivory tower of PARC on April 24, 1983. InfoWorld published an article May 30, 1983 with a picture of the "Smalltalk" balloon that was on the lawn at PARC that day: InfoWorld May 30, 1983: Smalltalk-80 is official

I was there.

Adele Goldberg and Dave Robson autographed my Blue Book. Adele autographed my Orange Book which has my Appendix titled "Smalltalk-80 Software Development Do's and Don'ts". Glenn Krasner autographed my Green Book.

30 Years of Smalltalk
Next Spring will mark 30 years since that launch. February of this year was exactly 20 years since I left Xerox and retired from the software industry, and I was curious about the state of Smalltalk in the marketplace. So I started researching online and contacting colleagues from those early days to see if there might be any interest in organizing an event to celebrate Smalltalk’s 30th Anniversary.

This Summer, I spoke with Adele Goldberg, Dave Robson, Dr. Tom Love (1st commercial Smalltalk-80 customer; co-developer of Objective-C), Angela Coppola (contract manager for The Analyst), Georg Heeg, and many others.

I learned that the Smalltalk Industry Council (STIC) has been holding annual Smalltalk developer conferences, and Georg Heeg (whom I met in 1984) is the Executive Director. After discussions with Georg and his team from Cincom Systems, GemStone, and Instantiations, it was decided that the theme of the 2013 Conference will be "30 Years of Smalltalk"

Smalltalk Conference 2013
The STIC’13 Conference will be held June 9-12, 2013 at the Wigwam Resort in Litchfield Park (Phoenix). The Call for Participation is being finalized and will include a Call for Papers about the history of Smalltalk, specifically information that has not been published elsewhere.

What We Need
We need your help to make the conference and the reunion a success:

• Invite colleagues to participate - send their contact info to me or ask them to connect with me on LinkedIn
• Historical information, especially info not previously published: send stories, interviews, photos, videos, etc.
• Donations of memorabilia for a silent auction; proceeds to benefit software engineering scholarships
• Attendance at and ideas for a 30 Years of Smalltalk Reunion Banquet to be held during the conference
• Submission of papers - Call for Participation will be available soon

Please contact me if you’re interested in participating.

Smalltalk Rules!

Evelyn Van Orden
Director, Smalltalk 30th Anniversary Reunion
STIC’13

Technorati Tags: stic13

Interested in helping Redline Smalltalk get to the finish line?

We are currently running an indiegogo campaign to raise money to have James Ladd be able to work on Redline Smalltalk full time for a while. The goal is to be able to come out of it with a production usable version 1.0 Smalltalk running on the JVM.

We'd appreciate if you could spread the word about the campaign amongst anyone you know that might be interested and of course, donations are welcomed as well.

Thanks for spreading the word

Technorati Tags: redline, jvm

Via Torsten:

A new NativeBoost version 1.7 for Pharo 2.0 (which is still alpha as of today) is now available.

Technorati Tags: pharo, native boost