Pharo mailing list weekly digest #2

Written on February 18 2011.

End of the week, time for the Pharo weekly digest. This week was quite busy on the mailing list, if I overlooked something important, please comment this post.

At some point, this digest will probably be hosted on the main Pharo website. If you want to help, you are more welcome !

I’ll be absent until Wednesday (Italy!), so I’ll probably miss some threads for the next digest :/

Pharo promotion

• The Pharo board calls for Pharo support in the industry. It wants to create a legal infrastructure to collect funds to perform engineering tasks. The end goal is to streghten Pharo. The consortium is not limited to research groups and companies; individuals are welcome! If you are interested in Pharo, download the letter, sign it and send it back. It is crucial to get a stronger open source Smalltalk. Beware that there are two versions of the letter, be sure to get the latest one. See the thread

• Stef created a LinkedIn group for Pharo. It is quite successful (76 members so far).

Events

• Laurent proposed to do some virtual sprint next week from monday to wednesday (evening – France timezone). Check the Doodle if you want to join. (full thread)

Misc

• Discussion about the new GUI visual designer developed in HPI. This GUI designer targets Squeak but could be porter to Pharo. If I understood correctly, the authors use Signal while Pharo has an explicit preference for Announcements. The discussion moved to the old debate about GUI construction (should we use something like XML to describe a user interface ?), on the topic of how to integrate a big framework into Pharo and how to serialize smalltalk code. If you have followed the thread and if I missed something, please comment ! (full thread)

• There was a doubt that the introduction of the Hudson build server was putting too much stress on Squeaksource (which is clearly unstable). Stéphane mentions a new cool server. I once heard about a SqueakSource-like project written in iliad and running on top of (GNU Smalltalk)[http://smalltalk.gnu.org/]. Is there a correlation ? (full thread)

• Janko announces a new version of Aida: Aida/web 6.2 Spring edition is out. Aida is a web framework written in Smalltalk. Janko uses it in production for years now. It is good to see that things are also moving outside the Seaside sphere. (full thread

• A recurring question on the Seaside mailing-list is how to make a multilanguage (I18n) application in Seaside (or Smalltalk in general). Sebastian wrote a blog post some time ago to explain his approach. There is a dedicated chapter in the collaborative Pharo book as well. If I remember well, some others do not follow the same approach. Please comment if you do.

• A very important issue was reported and closed.

• Two new success story were added on the website: a workflow platform called Issys Tracking and DrGeo, a scriptable tool used to teach geometry and mathematics in high school. More info on the Pharo Website.

• The Cog Unix VM is now built with Hudson. The RMoD Team in Lille will soon get a Mac Mini to build the Mac VMs. (full thread)

• A good reminder of how to call an external executable from an image. (full thread)

• Dale explained how to load the latest Seaside in Pharo 1.2. Very nice and clear post. (full thread)

• RPackage is now built on the Hudson server. According to ticket 3609, RPackage wants to replace PackageInfo.

• Awesome news from the Cloudfork project: OpenID and OAuth support in Smalltalk. More info on a dedicated blog post. This project will help a lot when it comes to integrate external APIs.

• The state of WeakAnnouncements was discussed in this thread.

• Huge¨ thread could we agree to remove caseOf: and caseOf:otherwise:. I reckon that I didn’t follow the whole stuff but the conversation seems interesting for those enlightened enough to understand. The discussion covers the new compiler Opal. (full thread)

• Olivier tries to use the LDAPlayer in Pharo. He needs to send requests to an LDAP server for a Seaside application. (full thread)

• German gave us a state of the XMLRPC Project which is funded by ESUG. He will focus on Pharo 1.1.1 and 1.2. It is broken in Squeak 4.2 at the momend.

• Levente proposed a fix for the UUID plugin problem. That will surely cures the headaches of some people.

• Nicolas pointed some stuff in the String API and possible replacements to make it more smalltalkish. (full thread)

• HwaJong Oh works on a COLLADA file parser and wants to render it with AlienOpenGL. Fernando said that he has stopped to maintain the AlienOpenGL package but that it should be complete and stable enough to perform the task (full thread)

• Guillermo updates us about the state of Pharo 1.2. Hopefully we’ll see the official release quite soon ;) (full thread)

• Fernando likes the PragmaMenuBuilder. You should look at it if you haven’t yet. The discussion moved to the local and global searches for pragmas. (full thread)

See you next week !