Call for papers for IWST in Edinburgh
25 February, 2011
Alain Plaintec has published the call for papers for the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies which will be held on 23rd August during the ESUG 2011 conference in Edinburgh. The goal 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 short and not-so short research articles, of two kinds
- Short position papers describing emerging ideas.
- Long research papers with deeper description of experiments and of research results.
Contributions can be on a wide range of topics, including meta-programming and meta-modeling, new dialects or languages implemented in Smalltalk and experience reports.
Key dates:
- Submission: 17th June
- Feedback: 15th July
- Workshop: 23rd August
Squeak 4.2 final now out!
3 February, 2011
Squeak4.2-10966.zip is now available at http://ftp.squeak.org/4.2. This is intended to be the actual-released 4.2 image, unless, as Chris Muller says, “we find some problem, which we won’t!”.
Some of the new features in this release are:
- Preparation for adoption of Cog VM
- Significant class-library and IDE improvements, with many speed improvements
- High-precision Clock (microsecond precision)
- Cleaned-up code base, with better support for unloading optional packages and fonts.
- The last of the underscore assignments have been replaced with ANSI assignments.
- Refactoring and unification of Smalltalk and SmalltalkImage globals.
- API for stdio access (requires recent VM)
- Improved command-line interface
- Better Documentation (see Help > Help Browser)
- SUnit now supports timeouts
- More UI work including a tweaked look and feel, and support for translucent fonts
- Support for classic MVC has been restored to Squeak for better support of slower devices
- System Reporter (found under Help > About this system) – a tool to simplify and standardise the reporting of your image’s set-up.
See Help > Welcome Workspaces > Welcome to Squeak 4.2 for more details of the changes in this image.
Note that users on Macs may find that the mouse buttons work in an unexpected order in this image. This is expected behaviour to allow for the grand reunification of mouse button handling in the upcoming version of the VM, which will restore the standard behaviour. In the meantime, use the Swap Mouse Buttons preference to keep things sane.
Congratulations to Chris Muller who has been leading the effort to get this release out the door, as well as the many contributors who provided updates, error checking, bug fixes and moral support for the process.
Welcome to the Real World – Kinect in Squeak
21 January, 2011
The newly-launched Microsoft Kinect has been causing a lot of excitement in hacker circles since its recent launch, due to its open interfaces, and the Smalltalk community has already got some great uses of this device.
The Kinect is a device, intended to be used as an accessory for the X-Box, which interprets 3D scene information from a continuously-projected infrared structured light, allowing live controller-less interaction by interpretation of movement and posture. This makes it a great complement to existing project teams working in Smalltalk.
Ricardo Moran was a member of the team from the Grupo de Investigación en Robótica Autónoma at CAETI in Argentina who won the 2010 ESUG Innovation Technology Awards with Physical Etoys, their Arduino-based interface to Squeak which allowed them to monitor and control robots as they drove round the conference hall. They spent their prize money wisely, buying a Kinect! Building on the work done by Stephen Howell in getting the Kinect working with Scratch (a visual programming environment developed at MIT), they have now shown how to use the Kinect to control activities in Etoys, using the existing OSCeleton framework to provide the skeleton interpretation interface. Their approach is documented in more detail on their blog.
Another approach to integrating data from the Kinect is that taken in Nikolay Suslov’s separate and equally impressive implementation which uses the lower-level OpenKinect driver to access the raw colour and depth information and pass this into his bespoke Krestianstvo images, where he then does the detailed video processing and interpretation in Smalltalk, which reduces his reliance on external, platform-specific code. His blog gives more details of his implementation as well as source code, and pre-built images.
Cuis 3.0 released
15 January, 2011
Juan Vuletich has just announced the release of version 3.0 of Cuis.
Cuis is a free Smalltalk-80 environment originally derived from Squeak by Juan with a vision of creating a simple and powerful environment by stripping out the layers of complexity that have accreted as Squeak has been developed over many years. In particular, this has meant major re-design of Morphic code in Cuis.
Version 3.0 includes the core of a new architecture for cleaner separation of view and model for text morphs, as well a first version of a powerful theming framework developed by Casey Ransberger, giving simple control over every aspect of the appearance of the Cuis user interface. A number of sample themes have already been developed to demonstrate the power of this framework: DarkTheme as shown above demonstrates dark, translucent windows for late-night Linux hackers.
Download the Cuis 3.0 package for yourself to see the new code in action – it runs happily on existing VMs.
Bringing Multimedia (back) to Squeak
6 January, 2011
Sean DeNigris has been doing some great archaeology recently, and with help from some of the original Sophie team, he has managed to get some of Sophie’s rich multimedia capabilities working in mainstream Squeak images.
Sophie is a multimedia editing environment that was originally written in Squeak, although more recently it has been rewritten in Java.
The screenshot above shows a video being played by the QuickTime plugin, and being presented as a morph in Squeak. Sean shows in his blog post how to get this up and running in a few minutes in Squeak on OS X. There’s also a great discussion on the squeak-dev mailing list.
There’s still lots of gems to be uncovered in the Sophie code base, but this is a great starting point!
An early Christmas present from Aida
17 December, 2010
Janko Mivšek is delivering his Christmas presents early this year, with the announcement of the first beta of the “Christmas edition”(6.2) of Aida/Web. Aida/Web is a Smalltalk web application framework with integrated Ajax support, a rich collection of web components, REST-like URLs, and integrated session and security management and much more.
Among the many new features in this version are mobile device detection and rendering, HTML5 support, WebSocket support for bidirectional communication between server and browser, nestable AJAX-enabled forms, and the introduction of a unified JSON-based message format between server and browser.
Aida/Web is supported on six Smalltalk platforms: Squeak, Pharo, Gemstone/S, VisualWorks and ObjectStudio, Dolphin Smalltalk, and Smalltalk/X.
See the Aida/Web download page from more information. Janko has also provided an interesting analysis of the codebases of Aida/Web, Seaside and Iliad.
The Return of the Connectors
10 December, 2010
Chris Muller has recently updated Connectors to work with Squeak 4.2 images. Connectors gives you the ability to turn Morphic into a drawing environment for making connected diagrams. This tool was developed by Ned Konz many years ago and hasn’t been able to load in an up-to-date image for some time.
A Connector is a Morph that looks like a line and has a constraint on either end that keeps the ends attached to some other Morph. You can specify properties such as width, borders, fills, end-decorations for each connector, as well as determining the path the connector takes and what labels it should have. The package also comes with other tools to aid in the creation of smart drawings. See the tutorial for more information.
The updated package is available on SqueakSource.
New tools for Squeak
2 December, 2010
The staff and students at the Hasso Plattner Insitute have set up a new site to share the impressive work they are doing using Squeak. The projects they are showcasing include some gorgeous UI Widgets and a new UI Designer (shown above).
Each project is available at the Institute’s SqueakSource server, and can be loaded using Metacello configurations. All configurations were tested and run in the current Squeak (Trunk) versions (4.1, 4.2). The site is built using Trac project management software, which provides for issue/bug tracking if you do find any problems.
Many thanks to the Software Architecture Group, led by Prof. Dr. Robert Hirschfeld at the Hasso Plattner Insitute (University of Potsdam), for sharing these great projects.
(Note that Firefox currently gives a warning about the site due to an incomplete certificate chain, but this should be fixed soon).
Smalltalks 2010 – conference report
18 November, 2010
Smalltalks 2010 took place last weekend, meaning that the post-conference reports have started hitting the blogs, and they’re universally enthusiastic about the content, organisation and atmosphere of the event.
Organised by Fundacion Argentina de Smalltalk (FAST), and hosted this year by Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, in Concepción del Uruguay, Smalltalks aims to “strengthen the Argentine and international Smalltalk communities through the exchange of works, experiences and anecdotes connected with this technology or related matters”. This year’s speakers included Gilad Bracha, Eliot Miranda, Lukas Renggli and many many more (see the conference home page for a full listing and descriptions of talks).
German Arduino described it as an “excellent event, with very very good organization—thanks to the hard work of FAST people—and high level technical talks”.
Felipao Banados was attending his first Smalltalk conference, and was also impressed: “I remember talking with classmates and hearing things like ‘Yeah, Smalltalk, nice. But where can you work on that afterwards?’ Well, there ARE a lot of interesting places to do it, and there is a need for smalltalk programmers.”
Andrés Valloud posted some rocking photos of the social event, and reported that the conference even got coverage in the local paper, including a video interview with Hernán Wilkinson.
As James Robertson wrote: “Sounds a lot like ESUG to me – and that’s a good thing.”
Hear the Mouse Roar on Multi-Core!
5 November, 2010
Stefan Marr has just announced on his blog the relase of RoarVM, the first single-image manycore virtual machine for Smalltalk. RoarVM is based on the work on Renaissance VM by David Ungar and Sam S. Adams at IBM Research, and was ported to x86 architecture by Stefan.
From his post: “The RoarVM supports the parallel execution of Smalltalk programs on x86 compatible multicore systems and Tilera TILE64-based manycore systems. It is tested with standard Squeak 4.1 closure-enabled images, and with a stripped down version of a MVC-based Squeak 3.7 image.” Support for Pharo 1.2 is currently limited to 1 core, but this is being worked on!
Here’s some indicative figures for this new VM (using an adapted version of tinyBenchmarks on an MVC image):
1 core 66M bytecodes/sec; 3M sends/sec 8 cores 470M bytecodes/sec; 20M sends/sec
As Stefan notes “The RoarVM is a research project and is not as optimized for performance as the standard Squeak VM”. For comparison:
Squeak 4.2.4beta1U, MVC image, OS X 555M bytecodes/sec; 12M sends/sec
so you’ll need a few cores active before you start to see improvements over your existing image! There are also a number of known issues with the current implementation.
You can download the code from the RoarVm page at GitHub, contribute to the discussion on the vm-dev mailing list, or follow #RoarVM updates on Twitter.
