From Stephane:

We are organizing a conference around the web and pharo on 6 June 2013 at http://www.euratechnologies.com.

Great speakers (J. Brichau from Yesplan, N. Petton from Amber and objectfusion, N Hartl from 2Denker,...) will present their business and products as well as some of the technology they use. Do not miss this key event.

Tags: pharo

There's now a Gnome2 look policy out for VisualWorks

Tags: visualworks

There's a preview screencast out of the IntelliJ plugin for Redline Smalltalk.

Tags: redline

From James Foster:

Great news! The GemStone/S team is becoming an independent company after 3 years as part of VMware. The core engineering team, including me, along with Norm Green and Dan Ware, have formed GemTalk Systems. For more information, visit our company web site at http://gemtalksystems.com.

Tags: gemstone

I've had a cold for the last few days, so I was not able to record a podcast with Dave - we'll be back next weekend with new content for you though!

Tags: podcast

21st International Smalltalk Joint Conference - Call for Contributions

Annecy, France
from 9 to 13 September 2013
http://www.esug.org/conferences/2013/

This call includes:
Developer Forum
Smalltalk Technology Award

Student Volunteer
Camp Smalltalk 8 September 2013

For the past 21 years, the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG) has organised the International Smalltalk Conference, a lively forum on cutting edge software technologies that attract people from both academia and industry for a whole week. The attendees are both engineers using Smalltalk in business and students and teachers using Smalltalk both for research and didactic purposes.

As every year, this year's edition of the largest European Smalltalk event will include the regular Smalltalk developers conference with renowned invited speakers, a Smalltalk camp that proves fruitful for interactions and discussions. This year will be held the 9th edition of the Innovation Technology Awards where prizes will be awarded to authors of best pieces of Smalltalk-related projects and an international workshop on Smalltalk and dynamic languages

You can support the ESUG conference in many different ways:

• Sponsor the conference. New sponsoring packages are described at http://www.esug.org/supportesug/becomeasponsor/
• Submit a talk, a software or a paper to one of the events. See below.
• Attend the conference. We'd like to beat the previous record of attendance (170 people at Amsterdam 2008)!
• Students can get free registration and hosting if they enrol into the the Student Volunteers program. See below.

Developers Forum: International Smalltalk Developers Conference

We are looking for YOUR experience on using Smalltalk. You will have 30 min for presentations and 45 min for hand-ons tutorial.

The list of topics for the normal talks and tutorials includes, but is not limited to the following:

• XP practices, Development tools, Experience reports
• Model driven development, Web development, Team management
• Meta-Modeling, Security, New libraries & frameworks
• Educational material, Embedded systems and robotics
• SOA and Web services, Interaction with other programming languages

Teaching Pearls

New this year!!!

We want two news types of sessions in addition to default talk and show us your projects sessions.

• Show your business 10 min session (Get prepared!!)
• Teaching pearls : we want some session on how to teach some design aspects. We want your tip and tricks to teach Smalltalk or OOP. We expect to have several 10 to 15 min sessions aggregated.

Open Forum: starting with Smalltalk

New this year!!

The event will be held at IAE Savoie Mont-Blanc - University of Savoie. This is an opportunity for students and local professionals to discover Smalltalk. A room will be freely accessible and we would like to propose some talks and workshop for Smalltalk beginners.

The list of topics includes, but is not limited to the following:

• Why Smalltalk ?
• Panorama of Smalltalk solutions
• Getting started with Smalltalk
• Success stories

How to submit?

Submissions due on 15st June 2013
Notification of acceptance will be on done on the fly.
More information at http://www.esug.org/conferences/2013

Pay attention: the places are limited so do not wait till the last minute to apply. Prospective presenters should submit a request to Stephane.Ducasse AND USE THE following header [ESUG 2013 Developers].

Please follow the template below the email will be automatically processed!

 Subject: [ESUG 2013 Developers] + your name
 First Name:
 Last Name:
 Email where you can always be reached:
 Title:
 Type: Tutorial/Talk/Teaching Pearl/OpenForum
 Abstract:
 Bio:
 	Any presentation not respecting this form will be discarded automatically

International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies

Smalltalk is considered as a design pearl and as a beacon in the realm of programming languages and programming environments. We are proud to invite submissions to the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies which is held as part of the ESUG 2013 joint event. The goals of the workshop is to create a forum around advances or experience in Smalltalk. We welcome contributions on all aspects, theoretical as well as practical, of Smalltalk related topics such as

• aspect-oriented programming, meta-programming
• frameworks, interaction with other languages
• implementation
• new dialects or languages implemented in Smalltalk, tools
• meta-modeling, design patterns, experience reports

Technology Award Competition

The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, 500 Euros, 300 Euros and 200 Euros during an awards ceremony at the conference. Developers of any Smalltalk-based software are welcome to compete. More information at http://www.esug.org/conferences/2013/

Student Volunteer Program

If you are a student wanting to attend ESUG, have you considered being a student volunteer? Student volunteers help keep the conference running smoothly; in return, they have free accommodations, while still having most of the time to enjoy the conference.

More information at

• http://www.esug.org/conferences/2013
• http://www.esug.org/Conferences/2013/Student+Volunteers

We hope to see you there and have fun together.

Tags: esug13

Just keep track of the hash tags #pharoconf and #mooseday

Tags: pharo, moose

Sorry gang - tomorrow is my wedding anniversary, so no podcast coming. We'll be back next weekend though!

Pharo is moving away from the "one click image" concept. I'm pleased by that - while it's somewhat simpler for newbies, it makes it much more difficult to save to a new image name and then start that new image.

Tags: pharo

Looks like it's out of beta and in general release

Tags: pharo

Amber is approaching the 1.0 milestone:

The Amber language is deeply inspired by Smalltalk. It is designed to make client-side development faster and easier. Amber includes a live development environment with a class browser, workspace, unit test runner, transcript, object inspector and debugger.

Tags: amber, javascript

It's time to think about the Google summer of code again:

Time for your cool project ideas on this year Smalltalk GSoC! For now just express any idea you have here on the mailing list. Later we will together develop it to be in complete format together with two mentors needed. Deadline is end of Mart, so we have three weeks of time. To see how fully developed ideas look like please look at the 2012 ones

For more informtion, visit the esug page for GSOC 2013.

Tags: gsoc, esug

All the details are here.

Tags: moose

James Savidge has moved his Smalltalk blog site. You can subscribe here.

Tags: jobs

Had dinner tonight with a bunch of Smaltalkers (all of them from CenturyLink) here in Minneapolis. Dave Hasegawa put the meetup together - we took some photos at Hells Kitchen

If you ever get to Hells Kitchen, check out the pictures on the bathroom walls :)

I noticed that the app I'm working on does a fair bit of GC right as it starts (this is ObjectStudio). Turns out, there was a really cheap win, as you can see from the results below:

ObjectMemory dynamicallyAllocatedFootprint 78967736
 
ObjectMemory currentMemoryPolicy growthRegimeUpperBound 48000000

Pretty simple - just move the growth regime past the base memory size, and you get an immediate boost. Next up - figure out whether that starting size is optimal.

Tags: objectstudio

There's going to be a mini-conference in Bern this April:

During April 2-4 we will organize a PharoConf and a MooseDay in Bern, Switzerland. Mark the day and join us. The participation will be free of charge. The conference will focus on interactivity and exchange, and will feature experience report talks, tutorials, show-us-your-project sessions and open discussions.

Interested? Contact Tudor Girba

Tags: pharo

There was a hiccup with the beta downloads of the one click distribution for the beta, but it's back again.

Tags: pharo

Sean DeNegris shows you how to make temporary overrides part of your continuous integration process in Pharo.

Tags: pharo, integration

PDX.st is meeting tonight, January 29th.

Tags: portland

Sean DeNegris talks about extension methods in Pharo

Tags: pharo

You can follow Randy's thoughts on Smalltalk, Ruby, and whatever else he's getting into over here.

I just saw very, very sad news in the Squeak mailing list - Andreas Raab has died. I didn't know him well, but his name pops up all the time in Squeak, and - even after the split - in Pharo. Rest in Peace Andreas - you left us too soon.

Tags: squeak, pharo

The next one will be in Lille (France) on February 8.

Tags: pharo

Dave Buck explains why working in Smalltalk is so different from everything else.

This change happened back in 7.8, but since we are only now upgrading, we ran into it while going from 7.6 to 7.9.1. Take code that looks like this in VW 7.6:

point := 4@-5.

In 7.6, that gives you a point object. In newer VW? It gives you the message #@- sent to 4 with an argument of 5. Same thing with fractions. Not hard to fix - just look for senders of #@- and #/- and then use a rewrite rule to fix them. Better yet, it was turned up by our unit test suite :)

Tags: visualworks, upgrade

Happy New Year, Happy New Squeak!

Spotted in Planet Squeak

A new version of BioSmalltalk has been released. BioSmalltalk is the Smalltalk environment for doing bioinformatics with Pharo. There's a list of features, status and to do's at the link

Tags: pharo

Saw this from Marcus Denker:

A devroom for the Pharo, Squeak, Amber, GST, Etoilé, Seaside, Moose Smalltalk projects & Newspeak as derived language. Smalltalk environments offer a very high development productivity, unmatched by their successors. Come do some pair programming with us and experience yourself the advantages of a real OO environment

You can get more info on the conference here

Tags: fosdem, pharo

I'm taking a short break from screencasting - basically, the 3 days around Christmas. Things will be back to normal tomorrow on that front.