Smalltalk with James Robertson

There's an interesting looking new HTTP framework brewing for Smalltalk - Zinc:

Zinc HTTP Components is an open-source Smalltalk framework to deal with the HTTP networking protocol. This is a new project (started September 1st 2010) that is currently under heavy development. Our long term goals are very ambitious: we want to reach the level of functionality, scope, architectural clarity and maturity of the Apache HTTP Components library. Our short term goal is to offer working HTTP client functionality to support fundamental features in a Smalltalk image. For the time being, Pharo is our reference platform.

There are lots of details at the link, including info on how to get involved.

Technorati Tags: zinc, http

I post a lot of Smalltalk related links, so I thought that a monthly "link dump" page might be useful. I'm not including "Smalltalk Daily" posts; since I do one of those each day, including them would bury the rest of the links, I think. Anyway - you can get to the September dump here, and I'll be updating it when the month ends.

I was going to put that together by hand, but I decided that sounded like work - so I wrote a couple of methods, patched the server, and then ran this on the server:

BlogSaver
	dumpLinkFileFor: 'blog'
	to: 'linkDump.txt'
	start: (Timestamp readFrom: '9/1/10 0:00:00' readStream)
	end: (Timestamp readFrom: '10/1/10 0:00:00' readStream)
	forCategories: #('smalltalk' 'esug2010' 'audio').

Then I just renamed the output file and dropped it where it would get picked up. Pretty simple stuff, and the code I'm using above lets me run arbitrary category reports if I so choose.

You can register (free) for the Smalltalks 2010 conference, to be held November 11-13 in Argentina:

The Fundación Argentina de Smalltalk (FAST) invites you to the 4th Smalltalk Conference of Argentina, to be held on November 11, 12 and 13, 2010 at the Concepción del Uruguay site of the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional. Everyone, including teachers, students, researchers, developers and entrepreneurs, are welcome as speakers or attendees. Registration is free and now open at http://www.fast.org.ar.

Technorati Tags: smalltalks2010, argentina

James Foster pointed out some interesting work on Namespaces for Pharo:

Germán Leiva was accepted in Google Summer of Code 2010 and developed a Namespaces implementation for Pharo Smalltalk. This video is based on his presentation at ESUG in Barcelona, Spain in September 2010. You can get the code here.

The ESUG presentation will get posted to the ESUG 2010 video archive soon.

Technorati Tags: pharo, namespaces

Squeak News has an excellent ESUG 2010 roundup. It has a link to the first video from the conference - you can check back at the archive pages for all the video that's available, and subscribe to Smalltalk Videos to get notified when a new one goes live.

Technorati Tags: esug2010

Torsten reports on a new PDF wrapper for Squeak:

Marten Feldtmann is working on pdf creation using libHaru, he published a first, not ready code for a wrapper around libHaru.

and also mentions his own work from a lottle while ago:

But I already wrapped this small library for Pharo/Squeak two years ago with a more natural Smalltalk interface.

Follow the link to see his code example.

Technorati Tags: squeak, pharo, pdf

Spotted in Planet Squeak

The JQueryWidgetBox project is growing and we now have 32 interesting JQuery widgets wrapped for Seaside. Feel free to use them in your seaside app to enhance the user experience.

This is what's cool about having a growing community around Seaside - there's active interest and work going on to bring standard web stuff into Seaside, which makes it easier for "dumb web developers" (a category into which I include myself) to get things done.

Technorati Tags: seaside, jQuery

We just wrapped up a podcast with John McIntosh about the status of Smalltalk and Scratch on IOS - we found out quite a bit about how things are evolving and what the interactions with Apple have been like. From what we heard, Smalltalk is punching above its weight in terms of driving change in this arena. Download it this Sunday to hear it all :)

Technorati Tags: ios, iPhone

Tudor Girba has announced Moose 4.1. What's New?

• Significant speed improvements of Mondrian and Glamour
• Improved Mondrian drawing of complex shapes
• Improved Glamour engine to handle cyclic updates
• New user interface look an feel
• Improved set of Glamour widgets
• Re-packaging to strengthen the naming convention
• Re-organization of the code to break unwanted dependencies
• Cleaning of FAMIX
• New extensible design of the Moose Finder
• New PetitParser-based parsers for MSE, Java, and MANIFEST.MF files
• New browser for meta-models described in MSE files
• Based on Pharo 1.1

Follow the link for download and installation instructions.

Technorati Tags: open source, pharo, moose

Spotted in Planet Squeak:

These HelpTopics can be nested (book structure) and displayed in a HelpBrowser. Since help text is extracted/stored in classes and methods you can use the usual tools to maintain and package help contents together with your code.

There's a new Pharocast showing you how it works.

Technorati Tags: documentation, pharo