This week in the Pharo-Project mailing list
Written on February 11 2011.
This blog post was written a long time ago and may not reflect my current opinion or might be technically out of date. Read with a grain of salt.
In the following weeks, I will try to provide a weekly digest of the activity going in the pharo-developer mailing list (and sometimes some bits from the Seaside mailing list).
This digest will be biased by my own priorities and usage of Pharo. There are chances that the commit you are waiting for ages that fix this broken hidden property in Pharo will not be part of my digest. Do not hesitate to comment if I forgot something important.
Laurent launched a new game last week: Comment of the Day Contest. The principle is simple: every day a class without comment is randomly chosen. Mailing list participants propose a comment and at the end of the day, the best comment is integrated. It has generated some nice discussions so far.
The Hudson server now builds a Seaside and runs all the tests in the Pharo 1.2 build. Continuous integration is definitely the big new thing in the Pharo community.
Esteban wrote a new article about the Reef framework. Simply put, Reef is a framework on top of Seaside that let you build dynamic components.
Joachim announced the release of JNIPort 2.0. This library allows you invoke Java code from Smalltalk. The big change of this version is the port to Squeak/Pharo (previous versions were only running with VisualWorks).
Tony published a great tool to manage external files with Monticello. When writing web applications you often have javascript/CSS/png files hanging around. It can be a mess to deal with Monticello on one side and Git/SVN on the other. TFFiler puts everything into Monticello. Very handy.
New COG VMs are available: SimpleStackBasedCogit and StackToRegisterMappingCogit. The latter one is faster but SimpleStackBasedCogit still exists just in case people find bugs with the StackToRegisterMappingCogit that are not in SimpleStackBasedCogit. SimpleStackBasedCogit is “mature”. See the whole thread for more technical details. Those VMs are no longer one-way street. With previous releases, once you had saved an image with a Cog VM you could not open it in a regular VM anymore. This is no longer the case.
Guillermo shared a nice trick to push and load all versions to/from Squeaksource with Gofer.
Oscar posted a link to a draft chapter about the Settings Framework. It will be included in Pharo By Example 2. Comments are welcome.
There was a discussion about syntax highlighting for Smalltalk code in HTML pages. Laurent uses highlight.js on the PharoCast website, Max Leske wrote a a brush for Syntaxhighlighter and Nick pointed that Pygments supports Smalltalk syntax.
Stephane announced that the talk of the Deep into Smalltalk school will probably be recorded. Deep into Smalltalk is five days of lectures about advanced Smalltalk topics given by a great selection of speaker. Make sure you attend if you’re interested by VMs, sockets, FFI or C-Smalltalk interactions.
Stephane decided to bring FileSystem into Pharo for real and posted a roadmap of what would be cool to have this package.
PharoConf in Annecy. Lots of tickets were processed. Congrats !
Marcus gave the state of the Hudson build server for Pharo and related project.
Of course, there were a lot of bug fixes and improvements.
See you next week !