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20th International Smalltalk Joint Conference - Call for Contributions

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 21:16:39 GMT

20th International Smalltalk Joint Conference - Call for Contributions

              Gent, Belgium
              August 27-31, 2012; Camp Smalltalk August 25-26
              http://esug.org/Conferences/2012

This call includes:
      1) Developers forum
      2) Innovation Technology Award
      3) International Workshop
      4) Student Volunteer program
      5) Free ESUG tickets program

For the past 20 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.

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 proved fruitful for interactions and discussions (August 25-26)

      - 9th edition of the Innovation Technology Awards where prizes will be awarded to authors of best pieces of
        Smalltalk-related projects

      - IWST: 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/About/SupportESUG

      - 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)!

      - Students can get free registration and hosting if they enroll into the the Student Volunteers program. See below.

1) Developers Forum: International Smalltalk Developers Conference

This year we are looking for YOUR experience on using Smalltalk. In addition, we are looking for tutorials. The list of topics 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

Submissions due on 15 June 2012
Notification of acceptance on 25 June 2012

How to submit?

Pay attention: the places are limited so do not wait till the last minute to apply. Prospective presenters should submit a request to board@esug.org AND damien.cassou@gmail.com AND stephane.ducasse@free.fr following the template below. Please use this template since the emails will be automatically processed!

Subject: [ESUG 2012 Developers] + your name
First Name:
Last Name:
Email where you can always be reached:
Title:
Abstract: (max 1400 characters)
Bio: (max 1400 characters)

Any presentation not respecting this form will be discarded automatically

2) Innovation Technology Award

We are proud to announce the 9th Innovation Technology Awards. 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. This year we will request 3-5min videos.

More information at: http://www.esug.org/Conferences/2012/Innovation-Technology-Awards

3) International Workshop - IWST 2012

International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies, August 28

The goals of the workshop is to create a forum around advances or experience in Smalltalk and to trigger discussions and exchanges of ideas. Participants are invited to submit research articles. We will not enforce any length restriction. Nevertheless, we expect papers of two kinds:

- Short position papers describing emerging ideas.
- Long research papers with deeper description of experiments and of research results.

We welcome research papers on all aspects, theoretical as well as practical, of Smalltalk related topics. All accepted papers will be published in ACM DL, and the authors of the best papers will be invited to submit an extended version to a journal special issue (to be confirmed).

Submissions deadline: June 15, 2012
Notification of acceptance: July 15, 2012

More information at: http://www.esug.org/Conferences/2012/International-Workshop---IWST-2012

4) 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/2012/StudentVolunteers

5) Free ESUG tickets program

ESUG will offer 10 free entrance tickets. To get a free ticket you should send a mail to board@esug.org

Subject: [ESUG 2012 Free entrance] + your name

And you should write a small motivation.

We hope to see you there and have fun together.

The ESUG board
Board mailing list: board@lists.esug.org

Call for Submission on Special issue on "Advances in Dynamic Languages"

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:23:07 GMT

Special issue on "Advances in Dynamic Languages"

Special issue of Elsevier's Science of Computer Programming (SCICO)

Context

Over recent years we have seen an increased interest in dynamic programming languages such as Smalltalk, Lisp, Scheme, PHP, JavaScript, Self, Python, Ruby, and so on. These languages have taken a prominent role in teaching, web development, scripting, rapid prototyping, tool building, language engineering, and many other domains.

For this special issue we invite high-quality papers that focus on novel research related to dynamic programming languages and applications of these languages.

We are interested in research that uses dynamic languages in the context of, but not restricted to:

Aspects, aspect Languages and applications.
Ambient intelligence, ubiquitous / pervasive computing and embedded systems.
Compilation technology, optimization, virtual machines.
Language engineering, extensions.
Model-driven engineering / development.
Meta-modeling, reflection and meta-programming.
Programming in the large; design, architectures and components.
Programming environments, browsers, user interfaces, UI frameworks.
Source-code analysis and manipulation (static analysis, refactoring, type inference, metrics).
Testing, eXtreme Programming / practices.
Web services, internet applications, event-driven programming.
Experience reports.

The special issue is associated with the Smalltalks 2011 conference. The Smalltalks series of conferences (www.fast.org.ar) is a lively forum on Smalltalk-based software technologies that brings together more than 200 people from both academia and industry for a period of three days.

Submission Guidelines

Papers should be written in English, in PDF-format and should not exceed 25 pages (including references and figures), using the Elsevier journal format. The LaTeX template for this format can be found at http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/latex

Papers must be submitted through the EES submission system located at http://ees.elsevier.com/scico/default.asp. When reaching the "Article type" step in the submission process, it is important to select "Special issue: Advances in Dynamic Languages".

Each paper will be reviewed by at least 3 experts within the domain. The accepted papers will be published in a special edition of Elsevier's Science of Computer Programming.

Papers submitted must not have been previously published (at least 30% new material) and must not be under review for publication elsewhere. Papers must strictly adhere to submission guidelines. If you have questions, please send an e-mail to Jannik

Laval (jlaval@labri.fr) and Andy Kellens (akellens@vub.ac.be).

Important dates (tentatively)

- Submission round 1: March 16, 2012
- Feedback round 1: May 17, 2012
- Submission round 2: June 29, 2012
- Feedback round 2 (final notification): August 17, 2012
- Camera ready version: September 14, 2012

Guest editors

- Andy Kellens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
- Jannik Laval (LaBRI Bordeaux, France)

Slides from RMOD at Smalltalk 2011

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 17:10:56 GMT

RMoD has uploaded its slides presented at Smalltalks 2011. Here are the talks with the slides links:

Building your own images with Metacello. Download PDF
Problems and Challenges when Building a Manager for Unused Objects: Download PDF
Bootstrapping a Smalltalk: Download PDF, slideshare
Pharo, One Year Later: Download PDF, slideshare
Research at RMOD: Download PDF, slidehare
Fuel, a fast and flexible object serializer: Download PDF

Smalltalk 2011, your conference

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 15:12:32 GMT

Did you know that the Smalltalks Conference will be held again this year? (http://www.fast.org.ar/smalltalks2011)

Maybe you’re wondering why you should care about a conference that deals with a language you most certainly don’t use for your job, and of whose existence you may not even be aware. But if you take 5' to read this I can tell you that you won’t regret it and that after that you will probably be eager to come to the conference :-)

To begin with, this conference isn’t only about a programming language, it’s about a technology and a development culture which still has a wide influence on our profession. For example, last year Gilad Bracha came to the conference. Who is Gilad Bracha? Maybe the name rings a bell... well, that’s because he’s one of the people behind Dart, Google’s new language (http://www.dartlang.org/). And what does that have to do with Smalltalk? Precisely: Gilad Bracha was one of the creators of Strongtalk (http://www.strongtalk.org/), the fastest Samlltalk at that time, which used adaptive compilation, Polimorphic Inline Caching (PIC), optional variable typing, etc. - all of which are being implemented now in Dart. This year one of his closest collaborators will visit us, Vassili Bykov, who implemented the UI of Newspeak, the latest language he has been working on.

But Smalltalk has to do not only with what’s happening with Dart, but with Ruby as well... Have you heard about MagLev? (http://ruby.gemstone.com/) It’s Ruby’s server for transactional and automatically persistent objects. Guess where that comes from... MagLev is the implementation of Ruby running on GemStone/S, a Transactional and Persistent object server for Smalltalk that is more than 25 years old and that has been bought by VMWare because of its great potential as a transactional memory manager for Java. If you didn’t know, read here: http://www.springsource.com/products/data-management/gemfire65

And where does the conference come in here? Martin McClure himself, responsible for MagLev, and GemStone architect Norman Green are coming! The guy in the know! Do you have any doubts about object bases? Now you know where the answers are.

But maybe you’re not interested in any if this... perhaps the way programming languages work or how they are implemented is not your scene, you just make web applications and only want the infrastructure to scale, to be quick at persisting information etc. In that case we also have a place for you. Have you heard of GLASS? (http://seaside.gemstone.com/) It’s the implementation of Seaside, a dynamic framework based on continuations for web applications using GemStone! (http://www.seaside.st/). That’s to say, you develop a web application just like a desktop application, and you get transactionality and persistence at the object level, for free... and what’s better, without relational databases!!! Yes!!!! No more hibernating, no more SQL, no more tables, only objects! It may sound crazy, you may think it doesn’t make sanse... my advice is, don’t draw any conclusions until you come and hear Dale Heinrichs, who is in charge of this product and who will tell us all the details and explain how it is impacting web developments.

Not convinced yet? OK, let me try just a bit more... Do you know Alan Kay? Turing award, “father of the personal computer”, creator of Smalltalk? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay) No, he’s not coming - yet. But Ian Piumarta and Kim Rose are, two of his closest collaborators in the projects he’s currently working on at his foundation dedicated to minimal programming languages such as OMeta and learning environments like SqueakLand (http://www.vpri.org/index.html). Are you interested in the use of computers for teaching? You can ask Kim. Would you like to know how a good VM is implemented? Ian will be right there to tell you.

If you’re still reading and haven’t scrolled down to the bottom of the page it means I haven’t convinced you yet... hmmm, let’s see what you say about this: MOOSE (http://www.moosetechnology.org), a platform for analyzing your programs - no matter if they are written in Java, C++, C# or Smalltalk, you can visualize your system’s design, not by using those little UML diagrams but by means of graphics specially designed to let you spot at a glance some bugs that may have crept in. Its developer, Tudor Girba, will be there to explain how it works, how it was developed and what you can do with it, because it’s free!

Maybe you’re already tired of reading. I don’t blame, but don’t you blame me either! It’s a great conference! You just can’t miss it! Because this is not all... if you want to find out more about the main Smalltalk development environments, both open source and commercial, you will have the chance to talk to Markus Denker from Pharo (http://www.pharo-project.org/home) and John O’Keefe, architect of VASmalltalk (http://www.instantiations.com/).

A little too much stuff that is industry-oriented? And what about research, do they keep researching on Smalltalk? Well, let me tell you that this will be the second year the conference has a section devoted entirely to research, with an enviable review committee and publication in journals. This way, if you’re doing research on objects and need to present your work at a widely recognized conference, Smalltalks is your place. And I wouldn’t like to forget the university... Smalltalk is still the language used to for teaching objects at almost every university, instead of a merely commercial language.

But I haven’t told you yet about the most important part of this, besides all these people that will be visiting us and with whom we can share our experiences: The Argentine Smalltalk community, one of the most important worldwide concerning this technology. This community has been putting their best efforts during the last five years to organize these conferences, and the last three years some of its members have won the 1st and the 3rd place at the ESUG Technology Award, an international award for the best developments in Smalltalk! And the best part of it is that the winners are from different universities - the UBA, the UAI and the UTN!

The community does not stop there. Did you know that there is an Argentine Smalltalk? A Smalltalk developed by an Argentinian and which is being used all over the world? It’s called CUIS and it was developed by Juan Vuletich (http://www.jvuletich.org/Cuis/Index.html), who is also working on the Morphic 3.0 project, and worked together with Alan Kay developing Squeak. Or did you know that the most widely used layer open source for communicating with relational databases from Pharo or Squeak was developed by an Argentinian too? Or that Fuel, the open source object serialization framework, was also created by an Argentinian? Are you familiar with these names - Mariano Martinez Peck, Guillermo Polito, Martín Dias, Esteban Lorenzano, and others? They are also part of our community and a constant reminder of the excellent technical quality we have in our country. Another Argentinian is the architect of the fastest Smalltalk VM in existence, that of VisualWorks (http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/products/visualworks/), and you can ask him how he was able to speed up the GC about 70% during the last year, and you will have the chance to listen to another Argentinian who has been a Smalltalker for more than 20 years... Can you imagine what your productivity would be if you had been working for 20+ years on the same language? On a language that keeps being productive to our profession? These people are part of this great community and will also be at this wonderful meeting... which is important not only for the people who are coming, but also for those that are already here!

I hope I’ve been able to convince you. I hope you’ve realized that this is not a conference about a programming language, but about a community of developers who want to share with you all they know, and also learn from you. If you want to help this community to keep growing, if you want this to be not just a conference of developers but also for developers, sign up here: http://www.fast.org.ar/smalltalks2011

It’s free, and I can grant you that you won’t regret it. You can see the list of talks at: http://www.fast.org.ar/smalltalks2011/talks

This year it takes place on November 3-5, at the University of Quilmes. And it won’t be restricted to the world of objects: this year we will also have a talk on objects by Fidel (Pablo E. Martínez López), one of the leading Argentinians in the field of Functional Programming, a community that shares the conviction that we are all, after all, programmers! See the response it is already getting: http://vimeo.com/30529851

We’ll be waiting for you!

FAST
http://www.fast.org.ar

Interview to Mariano Martinez Peck, the last winner of the ESUG's Innovation Technology Awards

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 21:19:19 GMT

We had an interview with Mariano Martinez Peck, we talk about FUEL and his present work. You can read it here!

Invitation to 5th Argentine Smalltalk Conference by FAST

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 16:10:13 GMT

The Fundación Argentina de Smalltalk (FAST) invites you to the 5th Argentine Smalltalk Conference, to be held on November 3, 4 and 5, 2011 at the Quilmes University located in Buenos Aires. 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/smalltalks2011
The goal of the Conference is to strengthen the bonds between the Argentine and the international Smalltalk community through the exchange of works, experiences and anecdotes connected with this technology and related matters. As in the previous editions, renowned members of the international Smalltalk community will visit us, and like last year we will have a Research Session with publications reviewed by an international committee. Also, the traditional Industry Track will be available for those who prefer a more practical environment. You can submit papers or talks now through our website at http://www.fast.org.ar/smalltalks2011/technical-session
Finally, a Pharo Sprint will be held prior to the conference for those willing to help the community coding, and two seminars will take place for those who want to get acquainted with or learn more about Smalltalk. For more information go to http://www.fast.org.ar/smalltalks2011/events
For any questions please contact us at info@fast.org.ar.
See you there!

ESUG 2011 has finished and again argentinians smalltalkers have won prizes

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:11:08 GMT

We are very happy and proud to know that argentinian smalltalkers are again of the list of winners in the last edition of the Innovation Technology Awards that offers European Smalltalk User Group.
Congratulations to Mariano Martinez Peck and Martín Dias and the Group of LOOP (Guillermo Polito, Gisela Decuzzi, Carla Griggio, Germán Leiva and Nicolás Passerinni).

References

http://www.esug.org/wiki/pier/Conferences/2011

Cuis 3.0 available

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 20:42:57 GMT

Juan Vuletich has announced the new version of Cuis. Download it from here.

New in Cuis 3.0

New Look!

Themes. Several themes included, plus, you can add your own.
A nice default theme, using gradientes, rounded corners, anti-aliasing, nicer buttons, embossed labels, desktop background.
Anti-aliased halos
Window icons (taken from Squeak)
New, friendlier Shout color specs

New TextMorphs

Real view - model separation
Removed StringHolder
Text model holds current text + optional text provider (for accept / cancel)
Simpler code, easier to extend.

Enhancements to:

Color
Layouts
Misc minor tweaks and fixes

Many fixes and enhancements from Squeak

Here are some opinions about Cuis:

"Yay, Juan. You GO, guy! ...a great example of malleable software (and a clever mind) at work." -- Dan Ingalls

"I like it... It's nice and clean and simple and pretty. Nice stuff!" -- Alan Kay

"I think you have a very elegant design aesthetic." -- John Maloney

Smalltalks 2010 video talks availables!

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 02:24:38 GMT

In the website of the "Fundación Argentina Smalltalk" (aka FAST) are available the videos of the talks.
Go to the website: www.fast.org.ar and click into the tab Videos. Enjoy them!

Citilab Cornella interviews to Leandro Caniglia and Hernan Wilkinson at ESUG

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:58:58 GMT

This is a video interview (in Spanish) made by Citilab Cornellà where the ESUG was held in 2010. Leandro Caniglia and Hernan Wilkinson give their point of view of some of the reasons of why Smalltalk is being used in Argentina. Here is the link to the video: http://blip.tv/file/4211623/Por

Smalltalks 2010 Invitation and Registration

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 23:21:44 GMT

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.

The goal of the conference is to strengthen the Argentine and international Smalltalk community through the exchange of works, experiences and anecdotes connected with this technology or related matters. Renowned members of the international Smalltalk community will visit the conference. Moreover, this edition of the conference will have a Research Session with publications reviewed by an international committee, as well as an Industry Track for those preferring a more relaxed environment. We look forward to see your submissions. You can propose papers or talks know through our website, or by sending an email to info at fast.org.ar.

See you there!

Smalltalks 2010 declared of provincial interest

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 01:37:56 GMT

Smalltalks 2010 is going to be held in Concepción del Uruguay in the Entre Rios province. Andres Valloud gives more details at his blog about this news:

The Smalltalks 2010 conference in Argentina has been declared of interest by the Science, Technology and Innovation Agency of Entre Ríos (ACTIER) on the grounds that:

The main objectives of this event are to create an environment conducive to promote research and development, to integrate the Argentine and international Smalltalk communities, and to stimulate the publication of educative and research works;
That the organization entities (namely: the FAST foundationand the Concepción del Uruguay Regional site of the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional) support the event with their reputation, guaranteeing the participation of programmers, students, faculty members and scientific researchers, and national and international experts who will present, give tutorials and courses which, because of the quality and precedent set by past editions of the conference, will have a large impact thus causing regional interest;
That because of its charter to promote research, development and the spreading of technology, to provide technical assistance and to promote all innovative activities that emphasize the social importance of the work done by scientists, technologists and entrepeneurs, the Science, Technology and Innovation Agency of Entre Ríos (ACTIER) is competent to declare the Smalltalks 2010 an event of regional interest.

Many thanks to ACTIER's director Profesora Silvia Kupervaser and subdirector Licenciada Ana María Laffitte, as well as everyone involved in this official declaration and the ongoing success of the Argentine Smalltalk community and the Smalltalks conference.

ESUG 2010, Innovation Technology Awards winners

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 01:45:23 GMT

Here are the ESUG Innovation Technology Awards winners, and again we have people from South America in the first and third place. Congratulations, we are proud of you!

1st Physical Etoys (Squeak Etoys)

Developers: Lic. Gonzalo Zabala, Ricardo Moran, Sebastián Blanco
Keywords: Visual programming, Programming Real world objects

2nd Cog (Squeak, Pharo)

Developers: Eliot Miranda
Keywords: Virtual machine

3rd Mars (Pharo)

Developers: Esteban Lorenzano
Keywords: MVC framework, native UI, OSX

Videos and more info about participants and winners are on: http://www.esug.org/wiki/pier/Conferences/2010/InnovationTechnologyAwards

Aida/Web 6.1 released

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 00:38:30 GMT

Janko Mivsek has annouced that a new version of Aida/web Application server and Web framework is released for Squeak/Pharo and Visualworks.

What's new in 6.1?

Inline translation to multiple languages: to translate your web applications to other languages inline by just clicking the text on the page. Translation is immediately stored in class methods on your web app classes.
Standalone web apps, no link to the domain model needed
Ajaxified input validation
Action blocks (aka callbacks)
Routing of web requests
Static serving moved to a special StaticServer class
IE8 support in IE7 emulation mode to avoid manual checking of IE8
Compatibility view
AdvancedSearch widget introduced, for easier implementation of advanced search in web apps
Email messenger introduced for easier sending emails with notifications and similar from your web apps
RegistrationApp, a standalone web app to guide the user registration process
Pluggable authentication, with default authenticator from local security settings included, LDAP authenticator as add-on.

See the release notes for detailed list of all new features and bugs resolved, with most important ones emphasized

http://www.aidaweb.si/release-notes-6.1

For Squeak/Pharo there is now a Metacello configuration available. To install for instance Pharo just evaluate this script:

 Gofer new

    squeaksource: 'MetacelloRepository';

    package: 'ConfigurationOfAida';

    load.

((Smalltalk at: #ConfigurationOfAida) project version: '6.1') load.

 SwazooAida demoStart.

Download at http://www.aidaweb.si/download.html

Skype interview to Dan Ingalls by Goran Krampe

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 23:11:03 GMT

Here is the MP3 file with the interview. Read more about this in the Goran's Blog

Smalltalks 2010 Call for Papers extended deadline

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 17:59:29 GMT

Fast has announced an extension of the important deadlines. Here are the new dates:

New Important dates

Submission (Extended Deadline): September 25th, 2010 (Argentinian time: UTC/GMT -3 hours).
Notification of acceptance: October 18th, 2010.
Camera Ready Submission: November 1st, 2010

Please, visit the FAST website to have more information.

NAMCO demands takedown of Pacman game created by kid using Scratch

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 01:20:43 GMT

Namco, the owner of the Pacman game, has sent a letter complaining that a kid has recreated the game using Scratch. Scratch it's a programming language based on Squeak for kids. Namco is complaining to the kid, that everyone can play Pacman for free. It's evident that if a kid could reproduce their patents or the playability using Scratch then they're commercially useless. We need to review our copyrights laws, this is absurd. Here is the letter.

References

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100730/17081510430.shtml

Google buys the Java technology from Instantiations

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 01:08:10 GMT

Google acquired Java products, technology, business, and the company’s Eclipse team from Instantiations for an undisclosed amount. Mike Taylor, the CEO of Instantiations, explained in his letter to the customers that he will continue as president and CEO of the new Smalltalk-focused Instantiations.

“In brief, we have entered into an agreement with Google in which they have purchased our highly regarded Java products, technology, and business. Our VA Smalltalk business, products, personnel…and commitment…continue independent and uninterrupted, except that now the new Instantiations (yes, we kept the name) will focus exclusively on Smalltalk!
This may be the most significant news our VA Smalltalk community has experienced since Instantiations and IBM joined forces in 2005--a relationship that remains strong and unchanged as we move forward.”

Indeed, “Our plan is to leverage some of the money we’ve all made in the Google transaction” to keep the Smalltalk business rolling, Taylor said. However, “our Smalltalk business is showing significant revenue growth year-over-year since we got it,” he added. The business has been profitable and self-sustaining, he said.

Reference

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Googles-Instantiations-Buy-is-a-Win-for-Java-Smalltalk-894622/?kc=rss

Interview to Juan Vuletich

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 01:28:58 GMT

We had an interesting interview with Juan Vuletich. We talk about his current projects and his vision about Smalltalk in general. You read it here!

Gaucho, a direct manipulation environment for programmers in Pharo

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 19:44:34 GMT

Fernando Olivero has announced the first release of Gaucho, a direct manipulation software for

Pharo Smalltalk for programmers who firmly believe that programming is modelling. This version provides:

Direct manipulation of Classes, methods and packages
Easily perform rename refactorings of classes and methods
Draggable arrows for manipulating the inheritance relationships between classes
Creating and runing tests for all the classes in the system
Creating workspaces for taking snapshots of the current pampas
Smart searching for any object in the system
Keyboard shortcuts associated to the most important operations
Logging all the changes to the system
Saving/Loading developers and workspaces to the default local directory

You can get more information at the Gaucho's website: http://gaucho.inf.usi.ch/

You can see a screencast here, that shows most of the features of Gaucho:

XMLRPC Support for Pharo/Squeak will be supported by ESUG

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 02:55:36 GMT

Germán Arduino has announced in his blog that his project XMLRPC Support for Pharo/Squeak will be supported by ESUG. Congratulations Germán!
More information of the scope of the project and details of the implementation at his blog post here.

Smalltalks 2010 Call for Papers

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:46:41 GMT

Smalltalks 2010

4th Argentinian Smalltalk Conference - Research Track: Call for Papers
November 11th – 13th, 2010

Important dates

Submission (Hard Deadline): September 7th, 2010 (Argentinian time: UTC/GMT -3 hours).
Notification of acceptance: October 6th, 2010.
Camera Ready Submission: October 20th, 2010.

Conference Site: Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (UTN), Concepción del Uruguay (Entre Ríos, Argentina)

In the past three years the Smalltalks series of conferences (www.fast.org) have been a lively forum on Smalltalk-based software technologies that attracted over more than 200 people from both academia and industry for three days.

During the first three conferences, the industrial partners showed the applicability of Smalltalk in business, while researches (both students and professors) showed their advances and didactic uses of Smalltalk. The presented approaches and methodologies concerned the language, its implementation technology, its programming tools as well as the software development culture it supports.

This year the accepted papers not only will be available in the website but also the best ranked ones will be published in a special edition of Elsevier COMLAN Journal. Thus, we invite to submit papers in the research track on original scientific research conducted in and/or for Smalltalk in general.

Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:

• Aspects, Aspect Languages and Applications.
• Ambient Intelligence, Ubiquitous / Pervasive Computing and Embedded Systems.
• Compilation Technology, Optimization, Virtual Machines.
• Educational Material.
• Language Engineering, Extensions.
• Model Driven Engineering / Development.
• Meta-Modeling, Reflection and Meta-programming.
• Programming in the Large, Design, Architectures and Components.
• Programming Environments, Browsers, User Interfaces, UI Frameworks.
• Reasoning About Code (Analysis, Refactoring, Type Inference, Metrics).
• Team Management.
• Testing, Extreme Programming / Practices.
• Web Services, Internet Applications, Event-driven Programming.
• Experience Reports.

Papers

Papers should be written in English, in pdf-format and not exceed 15 pages (including references and figures), using Elsevier journal format.
Templates for LaTeX formats can be found at http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/elsart
Papers must be submitted through the EasyChair submission web site at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=smalltalks10
The accepted papers will be digitally available in the conference website. From accepted papers, selected ones will be published in a special edition of Elsevier COMLAN Journal.
Papers submitted must not have been previously published and must not be under review for publication elsewhere. Papers must strictly adhere to submission guidelines. If you have questions, please send an e-mail to Marcus Denker and Gabriela Arévalo to smalltalks2010-chair@fast.org.ar using [Smalltalks2010-RT] as tag in the e-mail subject.

Program Committee

• Alexandre Bergel (DCC, Universidad de Chile, Chile)
• Noury Bouraqadi (Ecole des Mines, Douai, France)
• Gilad Bracha (Ministry of Truth, USA)
• Johan Brichau (Inceptive.be, Belgium)
• Johan Fabry (DCC, Universidad de Chile, Chile)
• Alejandro Fernandez (LIFIA - Facultad de Informática – UNLP, Argentina)
• Tudor Girba (Sw-eng. Software Engineering GmbH, Switzerland)
• Andy Kellens (SOFT, Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium)
• Michele Lanza (University of Lugano, Switzerland)
• Adrian Lienhard (SCG, University of Bern, Switzerland)
• Damien Pollet (INRIA / Université de Lille 1, France)
• Lukas Renggli (SCG, University of Bern, Switzerland)
• David Röthlisberger (SCG, University of Bern, Switzerland)
• Tom Van Cutsem (SOFT, Vrije Universeit Brussels, Belgium)

Program Chairs

• Marcus Denker (INRIA, Lille, France)
• Gabriela Arévalo (Universidad Austral, Buenos Aires, Argentina)

GemStone Systems acquired by SpringSource

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Mon, 10 May 2010 23:32:37 GMT

Our community was shocked with the news about the acquisition of Gemstone Systems by Springsource, a VMware division. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The acquisition would help VMware to advance in its vision for cloud computing. The focus maybe is in GemFire, a product which distributes data to reduce network latency. However, Springsource said that it will continue to fully support GemStone's products. It has been a big debate in our list about this, and the experience with acquisitions in the past.
We all know that Smalltalk is not the mainstream, but we hope that in the future Gemstone/S will continue to grow.

References

http://www.springsource.com/gemstone-systems-acquisition-faq

ESUG call for contribution + student volunteer programs

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Mon, 10 May 2010 18:50:07 GMT

18th International Smalltalk Joint Conference - Call for Contributions

Barcelona, Spain
September 13 - 17, 2010; Camp Smalltalk September 11-12
http://www.esug.org/conferences/2010/

This call includes:

Developer program
Free ESUG tickets
Business day 16th of September (sponsored by Cincom Smalltalk)
International Workshop http://www.esug.org/Conferences/2010/International+Workshop+on+Smalltalk+Technologies
Student Volunteer http://www.esug.org/Conferences/2010/Student+Volunteers+program
Camp Smalltalk 11-12 September 2010

For the past 18 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. Besides, this year will be held the:

6th edition of the Innovation Technology Awards where prizes will be awarded to authors of best pieces of Smalltalk-related projects
International workshop on Smalltalk and dynamic languages http://www.esug.org/Conferences/2010/International+Workshop+on+Smalltalk+Technologies

New this year:

There will be a business day: thursday 16th of September 2010. The focus will be on "Agile Development Processes and Smalltalk"
ESUG will offer 10 free entrance tickets. To get a free ticket you should send a mail to the esug board (board@esug.org)

Subject: [ESUG 2010 Free entrance] + your name
And you should write a small motivation.

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 (156 participants at Brest and 170 people at Amsterdam)!
Students can get free registration and hosting if they enroll into the the Student Volunteers program. See below.

Developers Forum: International Smalltalk Developers Conference

This year we are looking for YOUR experience on using Smalltalk. In addition, we are looking for tutorials. The list of topics 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

Submissions due on 1 July 2010

Notification of acceptance on 15 of July 2010

More information at http://www.esug.org/conferences/2010

How to submit?

Pay attention: the places are limited so do not wait till the last minute to apply. Prospective presenters should submit a request to board@esug.org AND stephane.ducasse@free.fr following the template below. Please use this template since the emails will be automatically processed!

Subject: [ESUG 2010 Developers] + your name
First Name:
Last Name:
Email where you can always be reached:
Title:
Abstract:
Bio:

Any presentation not respecting this form will be discarded automatically

Innovation Technology Award

We are proud to announce the 6th Innovation Technology Awards. 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. This year we will request 3-5min videos. More information at http://www.esug.org/Conferences/2010/Innovation+Technology+Awards

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/2010
http://www.esug.org/Conferences/2010/Student+Volunteers+program

We hope to see you there and have fun together.

About the projects voted in the Smalltalk GSoC

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sun, 02 May 2010 21:53:01 GMT

In the web of the Smalltalk Google Summer of Code (GSoC), organized by ESUG this year, we could read that in the final list are 4 students from Argentina. This represents a really good surprise for the spanish community. We wish them the best of luck and we're proud of them.
Go Smalltalk!

New Smalltalk website, www.world.st

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 22:20:20 GMT

Geert Claes has announced a new Smalltalk website, www.world.st. It has a nice and clear design. The website shows information about Smalltalk, the different distributions, access to the major mailing communities and a calendar with events.

Welcome to the neighbourhood!

Pharo Sprint in Argentina

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 17:28:51 GMT

Alexandre Bergel is organizing a Pharo Sprint during May 17 and May 23 in Argentina. An entry has been added to the page http://code.google.com/p/pharo/wiki/PharoSprints. Please, add your name if you wish to participate. The date and the location hasn't been defined yet. Some people proposed to do it in Rosario instead of Buenos Aires. There are two doodle to define the day and the location:

Choose the day: http://www.doodle.com/fhb84vcu2df2amkq

Choose the location: http://www.doodle.com/tte9fwnbnqk6ekbz

Calling for Students -- Smalltalk Google Summer of Code 2010

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 22:24:30 GMT

About

Smalltalk community as a whole is participating on this year Google Summer of Code (GSoC) under the umbrella of European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG). The main goal for GSoC is to encourage university student participation in the open source world. It is a great opportunity for students in Computer Science or related fields. GSoC is an annual program, in which Google awards stipends to hundreds of students who successfully complete a requested free software / open-source coding project during the summer.

For potential students

Students, now it is your turn! You will have to register in our website, put there some information, show interest for the projects and contact the project mentors. After the registration step you will get all the mentors information in order to contact them. By pressing the button on the project, you will show your interest. This is not something formal yet.

Our mentors will vote for the most interesting projects and in the middle of the voting Google will tell us, how many projects will actually be funded. Voting will happen in April, with final results expected at the end of April. At that time you will finally know if you are accepted or not.

Of course, there can be many students interested per project. This means that interest for this project is high, but on the other side a chance that you will be chosen is lower. It is up to you to convince a mentor that you are the best!

Note also that the Ideas page is deprecated. On ideas page just the project ideas were collected. Now, we are preparing the real projects.
So, please from now on always refer to this link for the projects: http://gsoc2010.esug.org/projects

So, the initial steps are:

1. Register on our special Smalltalk GSoC website: http://gsoc2010.esug.org/registration
2. Edit your profile to get some more contact information for mentors to let you know
3. Fulfill your brief Biography page (see Biography tab on profile)
4. Go to Projects page, choose up to three projects and click there I'm interested button
5. Contact and discuss with project mentors about your interest.

You will be also subscribed to a special mailing list [1] where we will help you with further steps.

Deadline: as soon as possible, because the deadline to register on official GSoC website [2] is 9. April, which is, well, soon! But about that later...

Finally, we will really appreciate if you can help us to distribute this call for students. One of our goals is to increase the Smalltalk community. Those who have access to universities can distribute this among the students.

GSoC Admin Team
esug.gsoc.adm2010@gmail.com
http://gsoc2010.esug.org

[1] Students mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/smalltalk-gsoc-students
mailto: smalltalk-gsoc-students@googlegroups.com

[2] Official GSoC website: http://socghop.appspot.com/

PhD positions at INRIA

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 20:04:46 GMT

INRIA is offering some PhD positions and they are looking for candidates (note that a commitee will decide).
Before applying please contact marcus.dunker or stephane.ducasse
Here are the topics:

Reflection and Security in Dynamic Languages
Position type: PhD Student
Functional area: Lille (Villeneuve d'Asq)
Research theme: Networks, systems and services, distributed computing
Project: RMOD
More info here (Only works with IE)

Software re-modularization
Position type: PhD Student
Functional area: Lille (Villeneuve d'Asq)
Research theme: Networks, systems and services, distributed computing
Project: RMOD
More info here (Only works with IE)

Reflection and Scoping in Dynamic Languages
Position type: Post-doctoral Fellow
Functional area: Lille (Villeneuve d'Asq)
Research theme: Networks, systems and services, distributed computing
Project: RMOD
More info here (Only works with IE)

Designing a pure trait-based language
Position type: Post-doctoral Fellow
Functional area: Lille (Villeneuve d'Asq)
Research theme: Networks, systems and services, distributed computing
Project: RMOD
More info here (Only works with IE)

Smalltalk 2009 Photos

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:17:24 GMT

Here are some links to photo album of the Smalltalks 2009 conference:

James Foster presenting Gemstone/S at Smalltalks 2009

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:12:15 GMT

This is a presentation by James Foster at Smalltalks 2009. It's an introduction to Gemstone technology. For more information, please visit his blog at: http://programminggems.wordpress.com/.

Smalltalks 2009 video presentation

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:01:39 GMT

The Smalltalks 2009 was the most important event for the smalltalkers in south-america. Here is a presentation video composed by Hernán Wilkinson.

In the Fast website you can find the presentations, impressions and photos from this great event!

FAST has a new website

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 16:03:50 GMT

FAST (which is the acronym in Spanish for Smalltalk Argentine Foundation) has a new website powered by the GLASS platform (Gemstone/Linux/Apache/Squeak/Seaside) at www.fast.org.ar. It's the official site for Smalltalk 2009. Here you can register to the conference and if you do it before October 25th you will get the official conference t-shirt! Also, you can send your talk proposal or get involved in the coding contest.

Seaside for Dolphin 2.9.0-alpha4 available

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 15:33:14 GMT

Our friends at Infoil has announced the alpha release port of Seaside for Dolphin. Here is the link where you can download it: http://www.infoil.com.ar/seaside/. If you want to collaborate just contact Sebastian Calvo at fxgallego (at google's free email).
For more information, here is the announcement.

Dan Ingalls and Stéphane Ducasse will be at Smalltalks 2009

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:24:23 GMT

The Organization Committee of Smalltalks 2009 (Buenos Aires, 19-21 November) has announced that Dan Ingalls and Stéphane Ducasse will be at the Conference.
Congratulations to all the people at Smalltalks 2009! We're really excited at the local community! See you at the conference!

Retrobjects gets the first place at ESUG 2009 Innovation Awards

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 22:32:20 GMT

Congratulations to Gabriel Honoré for the first place obtained at the innovation awards! He has done a great job with his Commodore 64 emulator which can be downloaded from: http://www.zeek-it.com.ar/retrobjects.
Here you can read the interview to Gabriel after winning the first place in Smalltalks 2008.
Congratulations to all the SqueaNOS team too! They obteined the third position!

Gabriel Honoré and Gerardo Richarte
Photo by Hernán Wilkinson

The Argentinian team at ESUG 2009

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:16:28 GMT

This is the photo of the argentinian people who went to this ESUG edition. It's funny to see them wearing t-shirts from the argentinian soccer team and the argentinian rugby team, "Los Pumas".
Congratulations for the nice idea!

The argentinian team in ESUG - Photo by Adriaan Van Os

Smalltalks 2009 Coding Contest

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 01:44:13 GMT

Welcome to Smalltalks 2009 Coding Contest!

This contest is organized in the context of the Smalltalks 2009 International Conference, to be held in Buenos Aires. It is also possible to participate in the contest remotely.
A discussion forum has been created for participants to share their experiences, make comments for developers, exchange information and of course download game versions and instructions: http://groups.google.com.ar/group/smalltalks-2009-coding-contest

Story, Motivation and Setting

Who has never heard the call of adventure? Who has never dreamed of riding dragons or unicorns, with the breeze stroking your face? Who has never longed to wield a broadsword, or to cast a powerful spell on an evil enemy? The clashing of forged metal against shield, magic sparkling in the air and at your fingertips, fantasy creatures, marvellous settings, quests and adventures...

Human fantasy is full of such things. Fairy stories, epic poetry, folklore, mythology and - latterly - novels, short stories, movies and TV series. Much more recently, video and computer games. The Internet, too, is now full of fantasy games where imaginary characters may "live" and have adventures in virtual worlds. This is what our coding contest is about this year: a (very schematic) epic fantasy game.

Be welcome to participate and have fun with this interesting challenge. Programming a game of this kind requires a great deal of effort; it is not finished yet and your comments and suggestions will surely come in handy.

Smalltalks 2009 Organization Committee

Smalltalks 2009 - Argentina's third Smalltalk conference

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:45:24 GMT

Argentina's third Smalltalk conference, Smalltalks 2009, will be held from November 19th through November 21rd at the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales (FCEyN), Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). All those connected with Smalltalk, be it faculty, students, researchers, developers or entrepreneurs, are invited to participate, free of cost, as presenters and members of the audience. The organization committee will announce the registration website shortly.

The conference's goal is to gather both the Argentine and International Smalltalk community to get connected sharing our work and experience with regards to Smalltalk or related topics. Smalltalks 2009 presentations will be divided between the "Industry and Development" and "Research and Education" categories. In addition, the event will host a Smalltalk programming contest. As in other editions, well known personalities from the international community will attend the conference.

The "Research and Education" category is the best match for research and education work done with Smalltalk in universities and public or private entities. The "Industry and Development" category is suitable for presentations related to Smalltalk software developed by companies or individuals, both public and private.

A list of suggested presentation topics, not exclusive, is below:

Development tools.
Development with prototypes.
Model driven development.
Agile practices (XP, TDD, etc).
Web application development.
Metamodeling / metaprogramming.
New frameworks or models.
Materials for education.
Embedded systems and robotics.
SOA and web services.
Experience reports, both development and research.
Commercial systems.
Automation and best testing practices.
Interoperability with other technologies.
Best design and architecture practices.

Interested presenters should keep in mind the following deadline schedule:

1. You must present a summary of the proposed presentation no later than Monday, October 19th, 2009. The summary must fit on a single page, and must include a description, objective, and category of the work to be shown. The submission procedure will be announced shortly.
2. The conference's program committee will select the event's presentations from the proposals submitted according to the above procedure by Monday, October 26th. The proposals including dynamic examples as opposed to just static presentations will be given priority.
3. The conference schedule will be published in the conference's website on Wednesday, October 28th.
4. The conference's works and presentations will be published in the conference's website after the conference.

Those interested in the coding contest can become familiarized with it at the smalltalks-2009-coding-contest Google group: smalltalks-2009-coding-contest@googlegroups.com. The contest's goal is to have a good time solving a problem in Smalltalk, and win a prize while at it. We are working hard to ensure everyone can participate, and we will show examples and prototypes that can be improved by the participants.

For directions to FCEyN, you can go to the computer science department's web site: http://dc.uba.ar
Feel free to share this invitation with those who might be interested. If you have any questions, send us an email at fundacion.smalltalk@gmail.com

See you at the conference!
Smalltalks 2009 Organization Committee.

New Smalltalk book by Andres Valloud

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 17:13:37 GMT

Andrés Valloud has released a new book called Fundamentals of Smalltalk Programming Technique, volumen 1. Congratulations Andrés!
Here is the link to buy it http://www.lulu.com/content/7451511.

SqueakNOS will be presented at the 6th ESUG Innovation Technology Awards

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:11:27 GMT

Gerardo Richarte has confirmed that the SqueakNOS project will be presented at the next ESUG innovation Technology awards. If the project is selected to be the prize winner, the money will be used to award the people who develop new features for SqueakNOS, such as device drivers, protocols, utilities and others.

ClubSmalltalk supports this initiative and wish the best of lucks for the project!

Interview with Gerardo Richarte, Smalltalk, Hacking and OS.

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:19:24 GMT

We had an interview with Gerardo Richarte, one of the minds behind SqueakNOS. You can read it here.

ClubSmalltalk & PasswordsPro Promotion

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Mon, 11 May 2009 04:43:31 GMT

A great promotion from ClubSmalltalk and PasswordsPro

PasswordsPro (visit the Web site at www.passwordspro.com) is a tool designed to help you manage your passwords and private data securely. It stores all your passwords and text notes in a single file locked with one master password. That one password is all you need to access all your private data.
PasswordsPro is developed in Dolphin Smalltalk and it had been presented in ESUG 2008. User feedback has been extremely positive.
Given the strong reviews, ClubSmalltalk and PasswordPro are announcing a fantastic promotional deal. The purchase of a license for the special edition of ClubSmalltalk gives you PasswordsPro, which normally sells at $29, for the outstanding price of $15. A third of the cash will go toward ClubSmalltalk. And that's not all: The buyer will get two discount coupons to purchase another license that can be gifted.

PasswordsPro's developer explains the product

To get more information on PasswordsPro, Germán Arduino, an independent software developer and the principal architect of Password Pro, answered some questions.

1) Germán, what inspired you to make this kind of software? And why did you choose Dolphin Smalltalk to develop it?
I was searching some cool idea to develop a desktop product to market as Micro ISV and Daniel Pierini, a friend of mine and now my partner at PasswordsPro, got the idea. Daniel is the owner of an important Web hosting company (Solo10.com) and needed a password manager. The whole idea for the product comes from him.
I was immediately enthused and started coding.
Of course, being a Smalltalker myself, the idea I was searching was to develop this software with Dolphin Smalltalk Professional. There several reasons for this.
First, I've owned a Pro Edition of Dolphin for some years, but I've only used it to make some custom products. I never designed any software for the mass market. I became very interested in trying to develop in a commercial way. I tried before with Promoter, a product using Web UI, but Squeak came up with it. I wanted to try to built a true desktop product.
The choice to use Dolphin was one of functionality. Dolphin fit perfectly for the development of PasswordsPro. It allows you to generate compact Windows exes that don't need lengthy runtimes (This was one of Daniel's original goals). Such exes also run smoothly under Wine on Linux and ever on a pen drive connected to a Windows machine.
Dolphin is really an excellent implementation of Smalltalk and can be used to develop any sort of software.
This idea also originated out of need. I realy needed a password manager.

2) Sensitive information like bank passwords, credit card information and other data is always at risk. How does PasswordsPro address this issue?
The lack of security was one of the main motivations behind PasswordsPro. Many computer owners have several passwords, usernames and ATM pins, among other things, and it is difficult to remember all this crucial access info.
In addition to passwords, most of us have files that contain text that also need to be stored in a safe way. like e-mails, work documents, etc. The goal of PasswordsPro is for the user to have this private information locked in a secure file that is encrypted with a master password.
Inside the product we have some interesting features. For example:

The program doesn't store the master password on the files, avoiding reverse-engineered attacks.
It has a feature called Inactivity Protection. It automatically closes an open passwords file after a configurable number of minutes without activity.
The program may be executed from a pen drive. That means that you can an have all your passwords everywhere you go. The pendrive with your data and the program is all you need. And if your pendrive is loss or stolen, don't worry: Nobody can read your private data.

3) Have you enjoyed developing of this product?
Definitely. I have been interested in security topics and security programming (encryption algorithms) from years, from when I developed a Gmail-like complete mail system in a mainframe environment. At the same time, I'm a Smalltalker who enjoys developing anything with Smalltalk. So this project, which fused security and encryption with Smalltalk, was really cool to me. I hope continue working on it.

4) What's next for PasswordsPro?
Future plans depend primarily on the sales of the current product. But if all goes well, we are considering several possibilities. Some are:

PasswordsPro Mobile (To iPhone and other phone cells)
PasswordsPro Corporate (A special version focused on big IT staffs that need to administer/manage many passwords in its datacenters)
Integration with devices such as Yubikey

Get the Promotion!

The SqueakDBX team has announced the first stable version of the OpenDBX Wrapper

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 23:20:10 GMT

The SqueakDBX team has announced the first stable version of the OpenDBX Wrapper, here is the announcement in the Squeak List.

After a continuous work since January 08, we are very glad to announce our first stable version of SqueakDBX.

For those who don't know what this is about, the aim of this project is to build an OpenDBX (http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/OpenDBX/) wrapper which will allow users to perform relational database operations (DDL, DML and SQL) through a truly open source library. Through this feature, the squeak community will hopefully be able to interact with major database engines, such as Oracle and SQL Server, besides those which are open source, like PostgreSQL, MySQL or Sqlite. Moreover, by integrating this with GLORP (http://www.glorp.org/), will allow us to generate a complete and open source solution to relational data base access.

Why did we do squeakDBX?

There are several approaches to persistence in Squeak, some very interesting: OODB like Gemstone and magma, image, CouchDB or TokyoT/C, and so on. All of this options get sense if you can actually decide the way you will persist your objects.

However, this is not something that happens very frequently. FREQUENTLY, the client (the one who pays you for making the software) requires you to use a particular persistence strategy (RDBMS). Not only that, but also a database in particular (like Oracle, MS SQL, and so on). They have lots of reasons: they already have license for it, they have support and companies for it, they know SQL, they want to do selects, legacy systems, and so on. But Squeak only provides drivers for MySQL and PostgreSQL natively, so... what would you do in the rest of the cases? move to another language? OK, we don't. We want to program systems in Squeak.

If you know about SqueakDBX you can just see changelog here: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6109; If you don't, you should continue reading ;)

SqueakDBX features:

Cross-platform support: Linux, Windows (using MinGW) and Mac. See http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6108
Runs on Squeak and Pharo.
Mini VM blocks when using FFI (asynchronous queries). See http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6060#External%20call%20implementation.
Own SqueakDBX plugin (experimental). Ability to easily change the external call strategy (FFI or our own plugin).
Support for: Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MS SQL Server, ODBC and SQLite3
Transactional concept: begin transaction, commit and rollback. See http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6071
Mappings from String to specific types in selects. See http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6075
Special OpenDBX options: multistatements, ï»¿encryption, compression, paged results, MySQL modes, and more. See http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6068
Automated database connection ralease (although manual disconnection is recommended ;-)
Automated results retrieving in order to do another query, after doing a query and not iterating ALL results
Lots of unit tests that buck up our project ;-) (85 right now). See http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6077.
Lots of benchmarks and comparison with native drivers (PostgreSQL and MySQL). See http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6063.
Error handling: Not only errors, but levels associated with an error in order to avoid FFI calls (if you get a fatal error, it has no sense to do another query and the resources must be free). See http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6076
Query timeout (this is very useful for web applications) and page size can be set for each query. See http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6069
Very completed documentation in wiki and getting started.
Code critics and SwaLint were run several times.
Good design (at least all the major refactors demonstrated that).

Full documentation, installation and getting started instructions can be found at wiki page: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6052 . We spent a lot of time in it. It has all the information you may need and is in continuos development.

Benchmarks: We have a lot of SqueakDBX benchmarks and also some for native squeak drivers (PostgreSQL and MySQL) and SqueakDBX seems to be faster than both of them. You can read more here: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6063

Packages can be installed from Universe (3.10) or SqueakMap. Current version is 1.0. Sources can be download from SqueakSource http://www.squeaksource.com/SqueakDBX (it requires FFI installed).
OpenDBX version: 1.4.

Remember that you can compile OpenDBX by yourself or use precompiled binaries. For more information please read: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6129.

GLORP integration: Actually, this may include two parts:

The integration of GLORP with squeak is completely hardcoded with PostgreSQL native driver. Because of this, first we will do a refactor in GLORP in order to enable it to support different drivers. We will create a PostgreSQL driver with the things that GLORP already has. We invited Alan Night to have dinner with us when he came to Argentina. We told him our ideas and discuss for a while till we got a first design of this refactor. We have already started this part.
Create a SqueakDBX driver for GLORP just like the one we are planning to do for PostgreSQL.

The last squeak port of GLORP is very old and there is nobody to do it. A friend of us, Diogenes Moreira, has accepted this job, so, thanks to him, we hope to have latest GLORP releases in Squeak.
You can see our Glorp progress here: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6132

Help is always wanted. We would really appreciate if you:

Give us opinions, comments, ideas, new features, complaints and so on.
Tell us if you find a bug.
Tell us if you test SqueakDBX with other RDMBS or OS different from the ones we tested. Just to know if it works or not :)

If you try SqueakDBX and you write something somewhere like a blog, let us know. We have this link: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6131 where we put useful links for all the people.

Special thanks to:

ESUG, for supporting us through Summer of Talk 08;
To Norbert (author of openDBX) for his help and to all the people who tested it and help us.

Cheers,

SqueakDBX team

Interview with Gabriel Honoré, the creator of a Commodore 64 emulator in Smalltalk

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 21:53:54 GMT

We had an interview with Gabriel Honoré, the creator of an Commodore 64 emulator. We talked about his work and future plans for it. You can read it here.

Bertrand Meyer in Argentine

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:28:45 GMT

Bertrand Meyer is giving a conference the next February 11th, 2009 at the Universidad Tecnologica Nacional (National Technological University) called "Touch of Class: How we teach introductory programming".
This is the abstract of the conference: "Teaching programming faces a host of challenges, due in particular to he unprecedented variety of student backgrounds and to the demands of the IT industry. Techniques that worked well in the seventies do not scale up to today's context. The "concepts or skills?" debate is more relevant than ever, especially in the ever more globalized world of software development.
For the past 6 years, we have taught introductory programming at ETH, based on an "outside-in" approach that makes it possible to introduce the reality of large software while emphasizing the principles of sound software development. This approach has resulted in a forthcoming textbook ("Touch of Class: An Introduction to Programming well with Objects and Contracts", Springer-Verlag, May 2009). I will present the result of our experience, including metrics that we have systematically collected along the way, and draw conclusions regarding how to teach programming today. I will argue the task consists of teaching twenty-six seminal concepts, and will explore one of them in depth."

For more information, please refer to: http://www.seminariosathena.com.ar/

Smalltalks 2008 repercussion in local newspaper

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:09:40 GMT

Nov 25th, 2008. The Smalltalks 2008 congress has finished, however the free newspaper La Razon has published today a little article talking about the event. La Razon is freely distributed in the subways, trains and other crowded places in the city of Buenos Aires.
Congratulations to all the people involved in the organization.
Here is the article:

Smalltalks 2008 Notes

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:10:04 GMT

Andrés Valloud has written notes in his blog about each day of the Smalltalks 2008 Conference, and here we are collating them. Thanks Andrés!

Thursday
Whoa, it's been an almost 20 hour day already, and I had not been able to sleep last night anyway. Organizer jitters, most likely. Here are some notes on Thursday's happenings at Smalltalks 2008.

The conference's opening was again in the hands of HernÃ¡n Wilkinson. The main point was that this event happens because our community shares the enjoyment of doing what we do. This goes from the UAI offering the conference's venue, to the sponsors offering the prizes for the contest (the finals are tomorrow!), to Diego Roig-Seigneur donating an original August 1981 Byte magazine to be given to the best presentation in the conference. There were plenty of jokes, and I was the receiver of one :)... since I will be the referee in the coding contest's finals, I became the infamous William Boo! We shall see is justice is served on the final round now...

Monty's keynote showcased a complete list of successful applications (where successful is defined as 10+ years in production) written in Smalltalk that have a profound effect in our lives whether we are aware of them or not. Besides OOCL's container shipping application, Progressive's auto insurance rating, Adventa's chip manufacturing application, Key Technologies' food sorting machinery, Florida's power utility call center running in a state that goes through hurricanes every year and many others that I do not recall, there was again mention of one that I remember fondly... JP Morgan's Kapital.

I really enjoyed Dan Rozenfarb's talk on his expert system to handle patients at a medical call center. He went through many of the attempts that did not work, and that made the final achievements of e.g.: 99.3% correct seriousness evaluation all the more impressive (if the call is incorrectly assessed, then the software can suggest not to send an ambulance when one is definitely needed).

Next was a follow up on Zafiro by AndrÃ©s Poncelas. Zafiro is InfOil's application framework, which was presented at Smalltalks 2007. With the new improvements, InfOil uses Zafiro as a means to easily express domain objects and their relationships in their applications, which are used to manage a significant fraction of all the oil and gas produced in Argentina.

After lunch, we saw Gabriela ArÃ©valo's presentation on Moose, an application designed to enhance the way in which developers can obtain a high level view of software they do not yet know intimately. It was interesting to see how the 7 +/- 2 rule applies everywhere, even to the diagrams Moose produces --- for example, one can use colors in Moose to represent different metrics obtained from the code, but after 5 colors they become difficult to understand because it is difficult to concentrate on so many colors at the same time.

Gabriel Cotelli showed Mercap's reflexive report tool, which is used in XTrade to allow power users to produce ad-hoc reports in a controlled way and without having to write Smalltalk scripts.

Bruno Brassesco came from Uruguay to show how he used Dolphin to deal with a really obtuse XML, WebServices, .NET and C# development environment that produced applications for banks in Central America. Basically the problem they were having was that they had to use a C# framework that executed a WebServices stack. The WebServices stack was structured in 3 layers (the presentation layer, the business layer, and the system primitives layer) on top of a set of .NET libraries that called the back end. Each layer of the WebServices stack called services in the same layer or a lower layer, starting from an original invocation from HTML. Eventually the back end was called and the results were transformed via XML transformation rules until the last transformation produced HTML from XML. The issue came when there was a problem somewhere. Let's say we know the presentation level service didn't finish. So they would insert debug steps before and after each service invocation to determine which service failed in the presentation layer. The debugger action of these debug steps? Send the developer an email.

Yes, you read that right.

No, I am not kidding.

So if you were debugging a web service with 3 service sub invocations, you'd add 4 email sending debug steps. Let's say you find that service number 2 is broken (because you only get two emails: before step 1, before step 2, and then the thing crashes). That's great because now you have to go to the business model XML file, find the service definition for service number 2, and add more email debugging steps on that to see where the problem was.

Eventually you have 3 huge XML files open, with lots of copy/paste going on, missing service definitions, unsent services, broken XML, etc etc etc. Egad. Bruno showed us a definition of a service with well in excess of 100 sub invocations. And each time you make a change, you have to kill the server, recompile all the files, upload the files, restart the whole thing, and try your test case again by hand hoping you'll be able to reproduce the failure. And, oh by the way, without proper file locking in an environment with 150-200 developers.

What he did was to use Dolphin to create an IDE for all this mess. Since the technology could not be changed, then at least he was able to make work far more bearable. His IDE brought things like senders and implementors to the XML files. Automatic email probe management. Detection of problems before they actually happened, like missing service declarations, broken files, etc. It was a sorry state of affairs for those in the development project... attrition was horrendous and developers lasted 1.5 projects. However, the mere insanity of the development process they had been forced to use had us laughing out loud many times during Bruno's presentation.

Then, Fernando Olivero and Juan MatÃas Burella showed us the master thesis work they are preparing: using Croquet to assist in teaching object oriented programming. To do this, they have designed a language which is actually a subset of Self. They plan to introduce programming students to this first, to then progressively introducing additional concepts and techniques ending with students learning something like Smalltalk. Most interesting!

After the last break, we saw roadmap presentations for Cincom and GemStone, given by Alan Knight and James Foster respectively. Not everybody is aware of the fact that Alan is an actual soccer referee, and since he knows his soccer he added several photos and videos to his presentation --- one such video played in an ActiveX control embedded via an innocent looking windowSpec inside a VisualWorks window!

James Foster followed on with an impeccable roadmap presentation including several demos of working technology such as Seaside and a new scaffolding framework (see here). I write impeccable quite purposefully, as GemStone presentations are always flawless. This, despite the fact that there was a nasty snafu and James' laptop ended up being left behind in the US by accident! But no worries: with little to no time to recover, there was essentially no evidence that anything had gone wrong. Such nice guys, these GemStone folks :).

After that, we had dinner in San Telmo and now finally this long day has come to an end. To be continued tomorrow...

Friday
Here are the notes for Friday at the conference. The day began with HernÃ¡n Wilkinson's Key Design Decisions presentation, in which he provocatively addressed a number of issues we are all very familiar with. He made the case for immutability of domain objects, full initialization of objects before they can be used (so e.g.: by the instance creation method as opposed to by the users of the class), and a number of others. This made such an impact that the presentation was heavily discussed over lunch.

Then we saw Claudio Acciaresi and NicolÃ¡s Butarelli's work on a thorough refactoring of the Collection hierarchy using Traits. It is interesting that while they saw several advantages to this (such as the elimination of code duplication and the possibility to create more diverse collection classes easily), in the end they commented it was not a slam dunk as Traits do come with their own complexity.

After the break Carlos Ferro showed how ExpertCare (as initially described by Dan Rozenfarb on Thursday) manages to make good question suggestions for telephone operators receiving health related phone calls. For example, it would be good if the system helped determine when to send an ambulance because of an emergency in as few questions as possible. It is not obvious how to do this because, as soon as one examines symptoms, the body systems they affect, and the syndroms they may imply, choices are not clear cut much less evident. Nevertheless, the strategies shown by Carlos allowed ExpertCare to detect an emergency in a median number of 1 question, with a maximum of slightly over 2 questions on average.

Then came Guillermo Amaral's talk on percolation. He did not just implement a few algorithms. Rather, he built a tool to model solids as a lattice of points, connected by arbitrary edge patterns, and then used several algorithms and procedures to determine the probability with which the material thus defined would allow liquids to pass through. Most impressive. To begin with the tool was graphical and included visual representations of the lattices, the connecting edges, the probability graphs (including choosing the color of the curves and graph combination)... a lot of serious work which led to the verification of possibly original conjectures in certain scenarios.

After lunch we had a persistency block. We started with Esteban Lorenzano, Mariano M. Peck and GermÃ¡n Palacios' talk on SqueakDBX, an interface to the open source database library OpenDBX. The idea of OpenDBX is to allow access to a multitude of relational databases via a common interface. SqueakDBX is the Squeak interface to OpenDBX, and as such Squeak can now talk to Oracle, My Sql, Postgresql, etc etc etc. This works so well that e.g.: SqueakDBX is faster than Squeak's own native driver for Postgresql.

Something that will be added to SqueakDBX is support for Glorp, which was quite nice because the presentation naturally blended with Alan Knight's talk on Glorp. We saw many of the features that make Glorp nice. For example, the mapping model allows to map objects to rows, or to inline objects in the row of another object (e.g.: for speed), or to save an object across many tables. Glorp can query this by examining blocks such as [:person | person name = 'Alan']. Much more complicated block expressions are possible. On top of that, Alan described Hyperactive Records, which are used in Cincom's WebVelocity product.

After that, I ran the Coding Contest's final round. It went very well because this time, unlike last year's, I didn't have trouble with having multiple active HTTP servers in the same image. Maybe it's because the lesson I learned in 2007 made me put in a number of automatic measures to prevent that from happening...
Image packaging stops any existing HTTP server forcefully. If after a GC there are still instances of them, image building fails.
The packaged image startup sequence kills any existing HTTP server forcefully again.
Also, I was quite happy that the participants did not find any bug in the contest. This makes the finals stressful for the organizer as well: basically the finals are a software release, and the thing has to work. If that means you get to fix the bug right then and there, too bad. Fortunately it went smoothly.

And the participants? Their reactions to the changes in the finals were varied and interesting. Some were getting positive scores within 15 minutes. One finally got a positive score in the last minute. One cursed in frustration :). The results are as follows.
Guillermo Amaral and Guido Chari, with over 26 million points.
HernÃ¡n Wilkinson, with over 2 million points.
Diego Geffner, with no certificate.
Congratulations to all of them!... although note that HernÃ¡n Wilkinson cannot get a prize due to being in the Organization Committee :). Therefore, the 2nd prize will be awarded to Diego Geffner.

See you in a bit for the last day of the conference!

Satuday
I just got back from the conference's last day. Here are the notes for today.

First, I did my presentation on the implementation of the Coding Contest. It had been quite a while since I wanted to tell that the numerical model behind all this work, including how to model the behavior of Dilbert, Alice, Asok, Dogbert, Ratbert and Wally was...

... y = arctan(x)...

This function is used to model the progress of work, the quality of the perception of how much a work unit is done, the inspiration of programmers, the stress of programmers, the irritation of programmers... everything. I even found out later that it has been used to model characteristics of bipolar behavior disorder.

But well, enough of that. The code will be made available shortly, and so you will be able to play with it. After that came Leandro Caniglia's presentation on instance behavior. I missed most of it because I had to leave the room after my presentation to talk to some people, so I cannot comment much on it. However, I did see that he got plenty of questions regarding the applications, which shows there was plenty of interest.

After the break came a presentation by Gabriel HonorÃ©, who wrote a Commodore 64 emulator in VisualWorks. Not only it works --- it runs at 100% on a Core 2 Duo @ 2GHz (his machine). In fact, not only it works... it works correctly!!! He played some games on the screen, he even brought up the game Truco (for an explanation of how to play the game, see here). Yep, the one that uses the SID chip for speech synthesis. And it worked, and sounded, perfectly. At this point, Gabriel decided to open inspectors on the components of the C64. So he brought up the VIC-II video chip and with a simple message send (IIRC, self color: 6), he changed the border of the screen to being green while the game continued to run. A suggestion to spy on the computer's cards was made. At least in my opinion, the emulator was so good that the emulated C64 even resetted itself faithfully... the particular way in which the video chip behaved while the machine rebooted was reproduced correctly on the screen as far as I could tell. Gabriel commented the code will be available, in free form, at the Cincom public Store repository in a few months

Finally, it was the turn of Gerardo Richarte to show SqueakNOS. After booting from an USB device, he went on to show how hardware devices are programmed in simple terms. Although I do not remember the exact figures for each, Smalltalk device drivers for things like network cards, the mouse, the keyboard and so on were at most 100 methods and 300 LOC. Most methods were one liners. Hardware interrupts are served by the image. And the slides for the presentation ran in a SqueakNOS image running with no OS under it. What is more, at the end of the presentation Gerardo told us he was going to write a hardware device driver for the IDE hard drive controller at port 0x1F0 and read data from the hard drive. In about 5 minutes he was done typing something like 16 accessor like methods, and then invoked a read for sector 0 from drive 0 head 0 with command 0x20. 256 16 bit shorts came back, and the last 2 bytes were 0xAA55, what is expected of a boot sector.

Something like 15 years ago I wrote a program to detect bad and near bad clusters on FAT partitions. I did that in Pascal, and I can't tell you the trouble I had to go through to get that working right. Here, we have a device driver for the controller written in 5 minutes...

Then came the closing ceremony. While the best talk votes were tallied, we ran a prize draw amongst the registered people still present. Lo and behold the first person that came up was my sister! Sure enough, she was registered, but this was a ~1/200 chance... oh well, so we skipped her (besides she wasn't there at the moment) and continued on. In this way we handed out 9 books: 3 books given by Pragma (one of our sponsors), and a set of 6 of my books (3 hashing books, 3 mentoring course books). As I stated while at the conference, I'd like to thank ESUG for purchashing several of my books for their conference in Amsterdam.

Then came the prizes for the coding contest. Guillermo Amaral and Guido Chari claimed the Ipod Touch given by Instantiations, and Diego Geffner claimed the MP4 given by GeoAgris. Since the winners would have had to divide (I mean share) the Ipod Touch, the winner pair also claimed some of the bookstore gift certificates given by Snoop Consulting.

Finally came the prizes to the best two talks of the conference. In second place came SqueakNOS by Gerardo Richarte, which was awarded half of the remaining bookstore gift certificates. In first place came Gabriel HonorÃ©'s Commodore 64 emulator, and he received the remainder of the bookstore gift certificates plus the original August 1981 Byte magazine donated by Diego Roig-Seigneur.

Well, we in the organization committee think this year's conference went quite well, but we are also sure there are things to improve. If you have any comments to make, please send them our way at smalltalks2008 at gmail dot com. We look forward to hearing from you.

See you next year at Smalltalks 2009!

The 40th Anniversary of the Dynabook

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 18:19:48 GMT

The computer history museum presents: "The 40th Anniversary of the Dynabook". Here's is the complete event information.

Happy Birthday Dynabook!

Interview to the Argentinean Smalltalk organization committee

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:30:07 GMT

We had an extensive interview with Argentinean Smalltalk organization committee. You can read it here.

Thanks guys!

Magma OODBMS Release 41

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:04:55 GMT

Oct. 13th, Chris Muller has announced the realease 41 of Magma object-oriented database management system.

Here is the reproduction of the announcement to the squeak list by Chris:

I am pleased to announce release 41 of the "Magma" object-oriented

database management system has been posted to SqueakMap. Release 41

brings significant improvements in performance, scalability and

robustness, particularly on slow networks, as well as improved

transparency and operation.

Improved Performance and Scalability

At the core of the better performance and scalability are

architectural improvements to the networking module, "Ma Client

Server", which now maintains up to 50 simultaneous socket connections

instead of just one, and now also compresses request/response

ByteArray's when appropriate. The compression, alone, showed more

than 100% performance improvement on ADSL-speed network connections.

Thanks to ofset.org for funding this development.

Improved Operational Monitoring

An all-new performance and system-health monitoring package called

"Ma Statistics" was developed and integrated into all layers of the

Magma architecture. Performance statistics for the last half-hour

(hour, day, week, your choice) are captured in five-minute (also

adjustable) intervals. Is the server taxed or loafing? What was the

average response time for clients? What was the longest response-time

for any single request for any client? What was the average size of

each response? These and dozens of other statistics are now captured

while the server runs, with no performance penalty.

Improved Distribution

A MagmaForwardingProxy is a "bookmark" to an object in another

repository, further improving performance, scale, distribution and

database administration. These have been present for some time, but

have been heavily tested and improved in this release.

Improved Transparency

Transactions may now be as long as desired. In fact, transactions

may even span image saves! You may start an image, connect to a Magma

repository, begin a transaction, make some changes, save and exit the

image (not yet having committed), reboot the image later (objects in

the image are brought up to date with changes by other sessions),

continue any further changes, and finally commit successfully.

Improved Operation

With remote administration, release 41 better supports

headless-operation mode. The server now also keeps track of its

memory consumption relative to capacity and will take action to reduce

memory utilization, as necessary, before it becomes a problem

(although Magma servers have always operated with a relatively low and

fixed memory footprint, albeit dependent on number of clients and

activity).

SmallFaces, a widget toolkit for Seaside

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 03:27:00 GMT

The crucial benefit is getting rid of the tag idea, so basically you have widget objects for the web, for which can configure visual aspects (layout, appearance) and AJAX events (using SASE). SmallFaces includes common GUI objects as TextFields, Buttons, ListBox, CheckBox, CheckBoxGroup, RadioButton, RadioButtonGroup, etc.

Web applications are growing every day, and with the explosion of the AJAX technology few years ago, the web trends move towards desktop-like applications, making a fuzzy limit between both. Those who experienced pure desktop GUI developement (and believe the markup way to do things is fine for simple user interfaces, but do not scale very well when complex applications come), will feel the SmallFaces API a second nature.

See the following page at the Squeak swiki for instructions http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6088

Download and Installation Info

Prerequisites

1. Seaside and Scriptaculous

2. Phantasia (CSS) package from Monticello adding the following repository:

MCHttpRepository

       location: 'http://www.squeaksource.com/Phantasia'

       user: ''

       password: ''

Installation

3. Load SmallFaces-bll.1.mcz package from Monticello adding the following repository:

MCHttpRepository

       location: 'http://www.squeaksource.com/SmallFaces'

       user: ''

       password: ''

4. To see useful examples load SmallFacesExamples-bll.1.mcz package

Tested under

Official Squeak 3.9
Damien Cassou

Authors

Hernan Morales Durand, Norberto Manzanos and Juan M. Burella

Smalltalk at the Open Faculty Congress

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 02:59:51 GMT

Oct 8, 2008 - La Plata, Argentina.

At the University of La Plata (UNLP) starts the Open Faculty Congress ("Facultad Abierta" in Spanish) and there are three talks related to Smaltalk in the agenda.

Agenda

Basic course of UML 2.0
Oct 8, 9 and 10 at 6.30 pm to 8:30 pm
Classroom 4 ground floor - Faculty of Informatics
More information in spanish

Objects, Smalltalk and Technology
Oct 8 at 2 pm
Classroom 4 ground floor - Faculty of Informatics
More information in spanish

Smalltalks 2008 Coding contest has started

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:00:12 GMT

The Smalltalks 2008 coding contest has started. If you are interested in participating, please visit the official conference webpage at http://neuquina.lifia.info.unlp.edu.ar:8001/Smalltalks-2008

Here is the problem description (Spanish and English): http://neuquina.lifia.info.unlp.edu.ar:8001/files/WASmalltalks2008Files/smalltalks2008cc.txt

Go Smalltalk & Good luck!

Sep 19th, 2008 - Claus Gittinger talk at the UBA campus

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 17:59:07 GMT

This is a short summary of the talk given by Claus Gittinger, founder of Exept Software AG and creator of Smalltalk/X, on Friday
September 19th, at University of Buenos Aires campus.

The introduction of the talk was a presentation of Smalltalk/X, it's history and technical things which are very different from
other Smalltalks.
The motivation of making his own Smalltalk came when he read the famous Byte magazine in 1981. Since at that time it
was very slow to have a byte-code interpreter, his first idea was to make something which compiles Smalltalk.
The process to achieve this was to:

Take a Smalltalk file (file out format) for a class
Translate it to c (using stc), implementing all semantics of the original Smalltalk including contexts, blocks, etc.
Compile it by the c compiler, obtaining .o or .obj files
Make a dll with a collection of .obj files



Claus Gittinger during the talk. You can see some videos here

In 85, the Smalltalk/X system consisted of a bunch of dlls, a startup main and a runtime system dll. Also, at this stage was
possible to collect other dlls and create standalone applications, without the Smalltalk development environment.

In 86-87, he created a byte-code interpreter and a byte-code compiler, written in Smalltalk.
In 88-89, he added a JITter, which takes byte-codes and produce machine code, on the fly, in the executing image.
When starting Smalltalk/X, initially everything is compiled (via the stc) to machine code. If some methods are changed with
the browser, the system will generate byte-code methods and when executing for the first time, the system will generate
machine code methods.
As a result, Smaltalk/X has an image but doesn't need one.

Another interesting feature of Smalltalk/X is how window events are handled.
Each topview and all of its subviews are grouped together in a WindowGroup, which runs on it's own process.
All events (keyboard, mouse etc.) are read by a separate process (called the event dispatcher), which reads the event
from the operating system, puts it into a corresponding event-queue for the windowgroup, and notifies the view process
about the arrival of the event (which is sitting on a semaphore, waiting for this arrival).
As a result, the hole system is not blocked by a long (or endless) operation occurring in one WindowGroup.

Then, the main topics were related to Method Lookup, Inline Caching and Garbage Collection methods.
Finally, Claus made a short demostration of expecco.

Thanks to Felix Madrid (fmadrid at the google email) for this resume and the photos :-)

Exciting News for Dolphin Users

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:49:12 GMT

Object-arts announces a partnership with Lesser Software with the aim of creating the next generation of Dolphin Smalltalk called Dolphin NG Development. Great news for the clients who are working in this great environment.Â

Here is the full announcement available at the Object-Arts website:Â

We are pleased to announce that over the last few months we have entered into a partnership with Lesser SoftwareÂ with the aim of creating the Next Generation of Dolphin Smalltalk. This new version of Dolphin will be targetted towards professional software developers and will leverage the experience that Lesser Software have built up over a number of years in high performance Smalltalk virtual machines and development tools.

Lesser Software's current product set includes LSW Vision Smalltalk, whose virtual machine retains full bytecode compatibility with the original Digitalk Visual Smalltalk Enterprise (VSE) platform. Existing VSE developers can migrate their codebase to Vision Smalltalk, usually within minutes, gaining the ability to run their applications on a fast, modern and fully supported virtual machine.Â

Similarly, as a result of the new agreement, Dolphin users will have access to the full Dolphin development environment and class library (including MVP) running on top of the Vision Smalltalk substrate. The new system will be completely source code (rather than bytecode) compatible with existing Dolphin Smalltalk X6 projects, so adopters of the new platform will instantly gain a number of key benefits:

Speed. The Vision VM is Just-In-Time (JIT) compiled and is FAST. The current Dolphin VM is based on a very fast interpreter. In some circumstances this has advantages over JIT compilation but if you want SPEED then JIT is the way to go. Early estimates indicate that the new Dolphin will be between 2x and 5x faster than Dolphin Professional X6.
Multi-threading. Currently, the Dolphin VM is single threaded (although with an ability to run external calls on separate threads). The Vision Smalltalk VM is true multi-threaded which will allow Dolphin applications to take full advantage of the modern generation of multi-processor and multi-core machines.
Unicode Support. Internally, the new VM is entirely based on Unicode. For many of our international customers the ability to use Unicode in their applications will be a huge benefit.
Smalltalk Link Libraries (SLLs). In the same way that Digitalk Smalltalk introduced the concept of SLLs, the Vision Smalltalk platform also allows Smalltalk code to be distributed as collections of small, pre-compiled units that in many ways are simailar to Windows DLLs. Dolphin Smalltalk users will be able to deploy their applications either as SLLs or fully bound into executable files as they are today.
64 bit OS Support. Whilst the current Vision Smalltalk VM is 32 bit, development is underway on a full 64 bit version. Once this is ready, new Dolphin users will be able to benefit from this immediately with no additional effort.
Maintenance and Support. The Vision Smalltalk platform is fully supported and is being actively developed by Lesser Software.Â With this new way forward both existing and new Dolphin developers can be sure of a supported route into the future.

At present, no pricing structure has been set for the new platform. However, following its release we still intend to continue to keep the current Dolphin products (DPRO and DCE) in existence. Hence, the Next Generation Dolphin environment will likely be positioned at a price point above that of the existing Dolphin Professional product.

If you are excited as we are about the potential behind this announcement you'll probably want to learn more about when development will commence on the Next Generation product. If so please follow this link to Dolphin NG Development.

Andy & Blair
September 2008

Claus Gittinger in Buenos Aires

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:09:01 GMT

The Smalltalks 2008 committee are pleased to announce that next Friday September 19th at 7 pm in "Ciudad Universitaria" (University of Buenos Aires campus) Claus Gittinger is going to present a technical exposition about Smalltalk/X and a "model base testing" product called expecco.

Also, the last Saturday September 13th, Claus Gittinger had been in a meeting of the group Smalltalking in Buenos Aires. Here you can read a blog post of Angel Lopez about the meeting where he talked about Smalltalk/X.

SqueakSVN

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:38:17 GMT

The Software Architecture Group from the HPI in Potsdam announced a Subversion integration project called SqueakSVN for Squeak.

Interview with Andres Valloud

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:36:08 GMT

We had an interview with Andres Valloud, technical engineer at Cincom Systems. We talked about his present work with virtual machines, hashing and more. You can read it here.

Baby IDE, based on new development paradigm

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:35:33 GMT

Trygve Reenskaug wrote to the Squeak dev mailing list to announce the release of BabyIDE, an IDE which which runs on Squeak Smalltalk, and is based on his exploration of a new development paradigm, called DCI. The aim of the DCI (Data-Context-Interaction) paradigm is to minimise any gaps between the programmer's mental model of the program and the program that is actually stored and executed in the computer, by presenting system operations as networks of communicating objects.
Here is a detailed overview: http://heim.ifi.uio.no/%7Etrygver/2008/commonsense.pdf

iSqueak, a squeak virtual machine port for the iPhone/Touch

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:49:51 GMT

Squeak iPhone/Touch port is now available at http://isqueak.org. Please, visit the http://isqueak.org project site and the announcement for more information.

SqueakNOS boots on OLPC

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:59:26 GMT

The amazing project SqueakNOS now boots in the OPLC computer. Here is a video.

SqueakNOS means "Squeak No Operative System". Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation, it runs on almost every operating system, and in bare hardware. SqueakNOS gets rid of the OS under Squeak, and implement all the functionality in Smalltalk. It can be downloaded a VMWare appliance in the SqueakNOS site to test it.

New version of Chalten

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:51:06 GMT

It's a new version uploaded to SqueakSource (for Squeak) and to the Cincom Public Repository (for Visualworks) a new release of the project called Chalten 2.0 that is an implementation of the Time Domain (not only of the Gregorian Calendar now).
Here are some examples:

"Create some time entities"
August twentieth, 2008 --> Creates an instance of the gregorian Date for 20/08/2008
August twentieth --> Creates an instance of the gregorian DayOfMonth for 20/08
August, 2008 --> Creates an instance of the gregorian MonthOfYear for August of 2008

"But, not only gregorian entities"
Shaban seventeenth, 1429 --> Creates an instance of the islamic Date for 17/08/1429
Shaban seventeenth --> Creates an instance of the islamic DayOfMonth for 17/08
Shaban, 1429 --> Creates an instance of the islamic MonthOfYear for Shaban of 1429

JulianAugust seventh, 2008 --> Creates an instance of the julian Date for 07/08/2008
JulianAugust seventh --> Creates an instance of the julian DayOfMonth for 07/08
JulianAugust, 2008 --> Creates an instance of the julian MonthOfYear for August of 2008

Av nineteenth, 5768 --> Creates an instance of the hebrew Date for 19/05/2008
Av nineteenth --> Creates an instance of the hebrew DayOfMonth for 19/05
Av, 5768 --> Creates an instance of the hebrew MonthOfYear for Av of 5768

"Converting dates between diferents calendars"
(August twentieth, 2008) asIslamic --> Return Sha'ban 17, 1429
(August twentieth, 2008) asHebrew --> Return Av 19, 5768
(August twentieth, 2008) asJulian --> August 7, 2008 (julian)

(Shaban seventeenth, 1429) asHebrew --> Return Av 19, 5768
(JulianAugust seventh, 2008) asIslamic --> Return Sha'ban 17, 1429
(Av nineteenth, 5768) asGregorian --> August 20, 2008 (gregorian)

"Measuring distances"
August twentieth, 2008 distanceTo: December thirtieth, 2008 --> Return an instance of Measure <132 days>
Shaban seventeenth, 1429 distanceTo: Muharram second, 1430 --> Return an instance of Measure <132 days>
Av nineteenth, 5768 distanceTo: Tevet third, 5769 --> Return an instance of Measure <132 days>

"Also, measuring distance expressed in diferents way (calendars)"
August twentieth, 2008 distanceTo: Tevet third, 5769 --> Return an instance of Measure <132 days>
Shaban seventeenth, 1429 distanceTo: December thirtieth, 2008 --> Return an instance of Measure <132 days>
Av nineteenth, 5768 distanceTo: Muharram second, 1430 --> Return an instance of Measure <132 days>

"Collect some entities"
(ChaltenYear number: 2008 calendar: GregorianCalendar) months
collect: [:monthOfYear | monthOfYear lastDate] --> Returns all the last dates of the 2008 months.
(ChaltenYear number: 2008 calendar: GregorianCalendar) dates select:
[:date | date is: Monday] --> Returns all Mondays of 2008
(ChaltenYear number: 5768 calendar: HebrewCalendar) dates select:
[:date | date is: YomShabbat] --> Returns all yom shabbats of 5768

"Let's create a filter for all dates..."
nonWorkingDays := TimeLineFilter named: 'Non Working Days'

"Now, we want Saturdays to be on that filter"
nonWorkingDays addDayRule: Saturday

"Now we want Sundays from January 1st of year 1000 to the end of time..."
nonWorkingDays
addRule: (nonWorkingDays dayRule: Sunday)
from: (January first, 1000)
to: TheEndOfTime

"Now we want all July 9th since 1816 because is the Independence Day in Argentina".
nonWorkingDays
addRule: (nonWorkingDays dayOfMonthRule: July ninth)
from: (July ninth, 1816)
to: TheEndOfTime

"Testing some dates..."
nonWorkingDays includes: (July ninth, 2008) --> Returns true
nonWorkingDays includes: (July eighth, 2008) --> Returns false
nonWorkingDays includes: (July twelfth, 2008) --> Returns true, it is Saturday

"But, how about to filter some like the hebrew new year day"
nonWorkingDays addDayOfMonthRule: Tishri first
nonWorkingDays includes: (Tishri first, 5769) --> Return true, it is the next hebrew new year
nonWorkingDays includes: (September thirtieth, 2008) --> Return true, it is the next hebrew new year (in gregorian)

"21/08/2008 is a Thursday"
timespan := TimeSpan from: (August twentyfirst, 2008) duration: (48 * TimeUnits hour)
settleDate := RelativeDate timespan: timespan using: nonWorkingDays negated

nonWorkingDays includes: (August twentyfifth, 2008) --> Returns false because 25/08/2008, a Monday, is a working day
settleDate absoluteDate --> Returns 25/08/2008

"Now a new non working day is added to the filter"
nonWorkingDays addDateRule: (August twentyfifth, 2008)
nonWorkingDays includes: (August twentyfifth, 2008) --> Return true.

"Now 25/08/2008, is a not working day"
settleDate absoluteDate --> Now it returns 26/08/2008 because the filter has changed

"Working with time zones"
buenosAiresDateTime := TimeZonedDateTime
dateTime: (DateTime
date: August twentieth, 2008
timeOfDay: (TimeOfDay hours: 19 minutes: 35))
zone: TimeZones buenosAires.

greenwichDateTime := TimeZonedDateTime
dateTime: (DateTime
date: August twentieth, 2008
timeOfDay: (TimeOfDay hours: 22 minutes: 35))
zone: TimeZones greenwich.

buenosAiresDateTime = greenwichDateTime --> Return true, it is the same instant but measure in diferent zone
buenosAiresDateTime distanceTo: greenwichDateTime --> Return a measure <0 days>, because it is the same instant

buenosAiresDateTime := buenosAiresDateTime next: (TimeUnits hour * 3)

buenosAiresDateTime = greenwichDateTime --> Return false, the hour is the same but the zone is different
(buenosAiresDateTime distanceTo: greenwichDateTime)
convertTo: TimeUnits hour --> Return a measure <-3 hours>, just the offset between zones

ESUG 2008 Innovation Technology Awards.

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:39:41 GMT

The three winners of this fifth edition are:

Dr Geo II by Hilaire Fernandes. Dr. Geo II is an interactive geometry framework, Morphic-based, which can be embedded and mixed with any existing Morph user interface element of the Squeak OLPC environment. It allows one to create geometric figure plus the interactive manipulation of such figure in respect with their geometric constraints. It is usable in teaching situation with students from primary or secondary level.
SeaBreez by Georg Heeg eK. It's a graphical editor suite that enables to setup and maintain a complete Seaside application.
iSqueak by John McIntosh, Grit Schuster and Michael Rueger. It's a clean re-implementation of the Mac OS VM for both Mac computers and iPhone/iTouch devices including a revised event handling. Based on the revised event system we introduce an extension to the morphic and tweak event handling that enables us to recognize gestures.

The full results are on-line at: http://www.esug.org/Conferences/2008/Innovation+Technology+Awards/Winners+and+Nominations

AIDA/Web 6.0 beta and AIDA/Scribo 1.0 beta released

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:39:31 GMT

AIDA/Web is a Smalltalk web application framework for building complex web applications with integrated Ajax support, rich collection of web components to build web pages programatically, MVC-like separation of presentation from domain, REST-like nice looking and bookmarkable url links, with integrated session and security management, a Swazoo web server and many more.

AIDA/Web is known by its simplicity but still allows building most demanding web applications of many sorts. It has everything you need for a real web app, together with Ajax (which is not additional but integral part of Aida).

It is also a mature one, running web apps in production since 1996. It is used in many intranet business apps from Gas billing system for all gas in Slovenia to logistics management system called e-logis and recently a CMS like system for Quality and Business process management.

Reference: http://www.aidaweb.si/

SqueakDBX: beta release for OpenDBX plugin

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:03:06 GMT

A team of students from UTN (National Technological University in Argentina) co-ordinated by Estaban Lorenzano has just announced the first beta release of SqueakDBX, a package to allow Squeak to access OpenDBX functionality, so allowing users to perform relational database operations (DDL, DML and SQL) through a truly open source library. OpenDBX can interact with major database engines such as Oracle and MSSQL besides open source databases such as Postgresql and MySQL. SqueakDBX can also integrate with GLORP.

From the release notes, the key features for this release are:

Tested on 3.10 and Pharo.
Support for Linux and OSX.
- Proved on windows (through MinGW), but some changes in OpenDBX are still needed (next version will have full compatibility).
Tested on PostgreSQL, MySQL and Oracle.
- MS SQL Server, Firebird, Interbase, SQLite, SQLite3 and Sybase tests will be available as soon as possible.
Transactional management.
Automatic conversion of resultset columns (a String) into squeak types.
- Large objects (clob, blob, arrays, and so on) are not yet supported.
Special OpenDBX options: multi-statments, compression, paged results.
Automated database connection release on garbage collection (although manual disconnection is recommended)
Error handling

Some benchmark testing has been carried out, and the performance of the drivers appears to be comparable with native drivers.

The team are very keen to get feedback, bug reports, experiences on different platforms etc, and welcome any contributions. Sources can be download from SqueakSource (it requires FFI installed). Full documentation, installation and getting started instructions can be found at the SqueakDBX wiki page.

This project has been selected as part of ESUG SummerTalk 2008.

Information source: http://news.squeak.org
More information in the track in the ClubSmalltalk Spanish Group

Interview with Luca Bruno, the creator of Smalltalk YX

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 23:52:37 GMT

We had an interview with Luca Bruno, who answered some questions and give us good answers. He's part of a new generation of Smalltalkers and computer programmers.

Read the complete interview here.

Argentinian Smalltalk Congress: Smalltalks 2008

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:53:40 GMT

Announcement

First invitation to participate in the second conference.

Place

This year, the site chosen was the Universidad Abierta Interamericana.

Dates

November 13 through November 15.

Costs

Once again, entry, coffee and pastries will be completely free.

Talks

The conference will be divided into two modules, Scientific Research and Software Industry.

Contest

A coding contest will be held this year.

Keynotes

Guest lectures by outstanding personalities.

Hands-on

Tutorial sessions.

Scope

This is an international conference; smalltalkers from everywhere will be attending.

Important Dates

Conference: November 13 through November 15.
Paper submission deadline (research): August 31.
Presentation submission deadline (software development): September 30.
Contest registration deadline: September 30.
Conference registration deadline: November 7.

REGISTRATIONS CAN ONLY BE MADE THOUGH THE CONFERENCE WEB PAGE (NOT AVAILABLE YET)

Important Addresses

Universidad Abierta Interamericana: Av. Montes de Oca 745.
Conference site: http://neuquina.lifia.info.unlp.edu.ar:8001/Smalltalks-2008
Email contact: smalltalks2008 at gmail.com

Download the GLASS appliance

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 05:00:01 GMT

GLASS

The plattaform GLASS (Gemstone, Linux, Apache, Smalltalk and Seaside) has a GLASS Virtual Appliance to download (VWware image, you will need to install the VMWare Player). It's the best way to test it without any kind of instalation. Please, before download be sure that you have a 64bit processor. The Wmware is running with an Unbutu/64 OS.
Another tip: Read how to configure the network or your services will be unavailable.

Download from: seaside.gemstone.com/downloads.html

ESUG 2008

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 04:55:59 GMT

August 25-29, 2008, Amsterdam

ESUG is getting a record number of registrations. The European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG) is a non-profit users organization that supports all kinds of Smalltalk initiatives, especially free-open source ones that benefit the whole Smalltalk community.
For more information, please refer to: http://www.esug.org/

News from ESUG 2008Â

July 2008 - ESUG 2008 is breaking records

The number of registered attendees for the upcoming ESUG Conference in Amsterdam passed 90 already!

August 2008 - ESUG Conference 2008 Camp Smalltalk registration required

Access to Camp Smalltalk during the weekend before the ESUG Conference in Amsterdam requires registration! If you want to attend the Camp please send an email before Wednesday 20th with the following header: [Camp] your name and first name to denker at acm dot org

August 2008 - ESUG Conference 2008 is booked out!

ESUGÂ announce that the conference is booked out! This year there will be 155 participants!

Lively Kernel

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 21:23:56 GMT

Google Talks: Lively KernelÂ

Lively Kernel is a web environment based on Javascript but the philosophy of Squeak.

Here we present the presentation of Dan Ingalls at Google talks.

For more information and even to test the environment please go here:Â

http://research.sun.com/projects/lively/

Seaside and Ruby on rails

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 21:12:05 GMT

In this video, we can see an example of a "hello world" in Ruby on rails and the same example done in Seaside. It's interesting to see how to do an example in Ruby on rails, which is a "copy" of the Seaside framework. Ruby is a language very influenced by Smalltalk, but it is still a language.
In this video the author James Robertson is using a MAC OS and VisualWorks Smalltalk.

Welcome to ClubSmalltalk

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 10:00:00 GMT

ClubSmalltalk.org is a non-profit organization which congregates Smalltalk programmers and enthusiastics. In 2008, we are going a step forward with this new website.
The big idea behind this website is to provide a source of information about Smalltalk in general.

The Smalltalk community has not good sources of information, or they're all over the net, and sometimes it's difficult to find them.

If you want to contribute, you're welcome!

OOP 2008 in Munich, Germany

info@clubsmalltalk.org (Administrator) — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 07:49:20 GMT

A short video by James Robertson - a photo and video montage

ClubSmalltalk RSS

20th International Smalltalk Joint Conference - Call for Contributions

Call for Submission on Special issue on "Advances in Dynamic Languages"

Special issue on "Advances in Dynamic Languages"

Special issue of Elsevier's Science of Computer Programming (SCICO)

Context

Submission Guidelines

Important dates (tentatively)

Guest editors

Slides from RMOD at Smalltalk 2011

Smalltalk 2011, your conference

Interview to Mariano Martinez Peck, the last winner of the ESUG's Innovation Technology Awards

Invitation to 5th Argentine Smalltalk Conference by FAST

ESUG 2011 has finished and again argentinians smalltalkers have won prizes

Cuis 3.0 available

Smalltalks 2010 video talks availables!

Citilab Cornella interviews to Leandro Caniglia and Hernan Wilkinson at ESUG

Smalltalks 2010 Invitation and Registration

Smalltalks 2010 declared of provincial interest

ESUG 2010, Innovation Technology Awards winners

Aida/Web 6.1 released

Skype interview to Dan Ingalls by Goran Krampe

Smalltalks 2010 Call for Papers extended deadline

New Important dates

NAMCO demands takedown of Pacman game created by kid using Scratch

Google buys the Java technology from Instantiations

Interview to Juan Vuletich

Gaucho, a direct manipulation environment for programmers in Pharo

XMLRPC Support for Pharo/Squeak will be supported by ESUG

Smalltalks 2010 Call for Papers

Smalltalks 2010

4th Argentinian Smalltalk Conference - Research Track: Call for PapersNovember 11th – 13th, 2010

Important dates

Papers

Program Committee

Program Chairs

GemStone Systems acquired by SpringSource

ESUG call for contribution + student volunteer programs

About the projects voted in the Smalltalk GSoC

New Smalltalk website, www.world.st

Pharo Sprint in Argentina

Calling for Students -- Smalltalk Google Summer of Code 2010

About

For potential students

PhD positions at INRIA

Smalltalk 2009 Photos

James Foster presenting Gemstone/S at Smalltalks 2009

Smalltalks 2009 video presentation

FAST has a new website

Seaside for Dolphin 2.9.0-alpha4 available

Dan Ingalls and Stéphane Ducasse will be at Smalltalks 2009

Retrobjects gets the first place at ESUG 2009 Innovation Awards

The Argentinian team at ESUG 2009

Smalltalks 2009 Coding Contest

Smalltalks 2009 - Argentina's third Smalltalk conference

New Smalltalk book by Andres Valloud

SqueakNOS will be presented at the 6th ESUG Innovation Technology Awards

Interview with Gerardo Richarte, Smalltalk, Hacking and OS.

ClubSmalltalk & PasswordsPro Promotion

A great promotion from ClubSmalltalk and PasswordsPro

PasswordsPro's developer explains the product

Get the Promotion!

The SqueakDBX team has announced the first stable version of the OpenDBX Wrapper

Interview with Gabriel Honoré, the creator of a Commodore 64 emulator in Smalltalk

Bertrand Meyer in Argentine

Smalltalks 2008 repercussion in local newspaper

Smalltalks 2008 Notes

The 40th Anniversary of the Dynabook

Interview to the Argentinean Smalltalk organization committee

Magma OODBMS Release 41

SmallFaces, a widget toolkit for Seaside

Download and Installation Info

Prerequisites

Installation

Tested under

Authors

Smalltalk at the Open Faculty Congress

Agenda

Smalltalks 2008 Coding contest has started

Sep 19th, 2008 - Claus Gittinger talk at the UBA campus

4th Argentinian Smalltalk Conference - Research Track: Call for Papers
November 11th – 13th, 2010

Information source: http://news.squeak.org
More information in the track in the ClubSmalltalk Spanish Group