Smalltalk with James Robertson

Today's screencast looks at a small package of numerics added to the collection classes.

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Technorati Tags: video, numerics

Ian Prince notes that making a scalable Seaside app on Amazon's cloud just got a whole lot easier:

It just got a lot easier to implement load balanced and fault tolerant Seaside servers on Amazon EC2 as sticky sessions have just been announced as a feature of Elastic Load Balancing.

Using VisualWorks or ObjectStudio, you can get to that scale pretty easily using the Cloudfork code in the public store repository.

Technorati Tags: cloud, amazon, ec2, load balancing

Today's screencast looks at reading image files (jpg, etc) into Smalltalk.

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Technorati Tags: video, graphics, images

Today's screencast looks at changing tabs in a VisualWorks UI.

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Technorati Tags: video, visualworks, tab widget

Steve Wessels makes a good point about the malleability of Smalltalk:

What I would like to say is that I love how Squeak is open under the covers, and so easy to explore and extend.  All the Smalltalk tools do that.  But I m also aware of how these little annoying behaviors about Squeak have more that just a few times caused me to become diverted by yet again another tools enhancement run.  The temptation to personalize it, which is exactly what I think Alan Key and Dan Ingalls had in mind, can be great enough to the point of distraction.  You just have to remember that.

Yeah, it's incredibly easy to get lost in a "bug hunt" at times. It's cool that you can do things like what Steve talks about in his post (modifying the browser), but then again - if it were more nailed down, would you spend less time on bug hunts and more time on your actual project? It's worth considering, I think...

Steve Wessels has some nice things to say about VisualWorks.

Technorati Tags: visualworks

Here's Hernan Wilkinson, presenting mutation testing at ESUG 2009. You can download his slides here (PDF). To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly.

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Technorati Tags: esug09, brest, france, smalltalk, testing

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at creating a simple test case using SUnitToo - with the File handling code from last Friday. You can also download the small package I show in the screencast (zip file). To watch, click on the viewer below:

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Technorati Tags: video, testing, sunit, sunittoo

This week, Michael and I got VisualWorks customers from older versions of VW up to the latest. It ended up being a wide ranging conversation; this is part 1 of 2 - part 2 will be out next week.

To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software.

To listen immediately, use the player below:

If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Effortless for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!

If you have feedback, send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or visit us on Facebook or Ning - you can vote for the Podcast Alley, and subscribe on iTunes. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!

Technorati Tags: podcast, visualworks, upgrade

Today's screencast is a basic introduction to file handling in Smalltalk, looking at class Filename, and at basic Stream protocol.

Here's the code I used in the short examples in the screencast - The #nextLine message is part of the NetClients package - when I did the recording, I didn't notice that. To get that code, load the NetClients parcel:

"Filename is your entry point into file handling"
(Filename named: '.') directoryContents.

"Read line by line"
list := List new.
stream := 'lines.txt' asFilename readStream.
[stream atEnd]
	whileFalse: [list add: stream nextLine].
stream close.


"more manually, to show stream protocol"
list := List new.
stream := 'lines.txt' asFilename readStream.
[[stream atEnd]
	whileFalse: [| next|
				next := stream upTo: Character cr.
				list add: next]]
ensure: [stream close].

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Technorati Tags: file, stream