The Weekly Squeak

Category: Uncategorized

  • ESUG accepted for Google Summer of Code

    Mariano Martinez Peck has announced that “We are incredibly proud to announce that ESUG was selected for the GSoC 2010.”

    Mariano and his colleagues put a lot of time and effort into preparing a joint entry via ESUG for all Smalltalk-related projects, and pulled together a long list of wonderful projects, mentors and a cool website.

    Although Google are still to confirm the exact number of projects that will be funded, Mariano would like to thank all the people who help them publishing project ideas, giving feedback on the submit text or the English. They will contact all the mentors again very soon to let you know the following steps.Maybe you are not aware of what our selection to this year GSoC really means for the Smalltalk community. And I wasn’t aware completely until few hours. Just to give you an example, even such big organizations like Ruby or PHP where not selected. From this viewpoint  you can see what we have achieved.

    Mariano makes a very clear case for the importance of this successful application:

    “Some people said and still says that Smalltalk is old and that it is dead. Ok, we have been selected by the major Informatics and Software company all over the world.

    “The point is that ESUG and the Smalltalk community was selected because of the seriousness mixed with passion of all the application, project and ideas. We have an incredible high quality list of ideas and mentors.

    “We have a unique opportunity to show the rest of the world why we love Smalltalk, why it is much better than other alternatives, etc. So, we invite all of you to make this happens.”

  • Dynamic Web Development with Seaside

    Dynamic Web Development with Seaside

    A print-on-demand, softcover copy of the book “Dynamic Web Development with Seaside” is now available from Lulu.

    Seaside is an source framework for developing highly dynamic and interactive web applications, and makes building web applications as simple as building desktop applications. The book gives you all the instruction and support necessary to get up and running in all the popular distributions of Smalltalk, with separate chapters on Pharo and Squeak, Cincom Smalltalk, Gemstone/S, GNU Smalltalk and VASmalltalk.

    The printed book is based on the free online version and the purchasable PDF version of the book, and will be updated regularly. The book costs around €28/£24/$40 and will be delivered within 3-5 working days, so order your copy now!

    The authors wish to thank the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG), inceptive.be, Cincom Smalltalk, Gemstone Smalltalk,  and Instantiations for generously sponsoring this book.

  • ESUG 2009 wrap up – Best Ever?

    DSC_5243-1

    All the participants should now have safely returned home after a hugely successful ESUG conference. Participants from around the world (including an Argentinian football team) shrugged off the economic climate to spend a week in Brest and share their experiences and aspirations with fellow Smalltalkers.

    Highlights included:

    Check out the photos for a flavour of the conference: Adriaan, Hernan, James, Yuri. and many more.

    Comments on the web have been very positive too:

    • “ESUG was a blast, totally.”
    • “Definitely the best Smalltalk conference I’ve ever been to.”
    • “a great conference”
    • “a pleasure to attend every year”
    • “fascinating, inspiring and enjoyable”
    • “it’s been intense”

    With reviews like that, next year’s conference in Barcelona is bound to be a sell-out, so remember to book early!

    (Photo from Yuri’s collection)

  • 16th International Smalltalk Joint Conference – Call for Contributions

    ESUG, the organisers of the 16th International Smalltalk Joint Conference, to be held 25-29 August 2008 in Amsterdam, have issued a call for contributions. Submissions are to be made by 1st June 2008, with notification of acceptance on 15th June 2008.

    About the Conference

    For the past 16 years, the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG) has organised the International Smalltalk Conference, a lively forum on cutting edge software technologies that attract people from both academia and industry for a whole week. The attendees are both engineers using Smalltalk in business and students and teachers using Smalltalk both for research and didactic purposes.
    As every year, this year’s edition of the largest European Smalltalk event will include the regular Smalltalk developers conference with renowned invited speakers, a Smalltalk camp that proves fruitful for interactions and discussions. This year’s conference will also see the 4th year of the Innovation Technology Awards, where prizes will be awarded to authors of best pieces of Smalltalk-related projects.

    The conference features the following events:

    • Camp Smalltalk – There will be a Smalltalk camp on 23-24 August
    • Developers Forum
    • Technology Forum

    Developers Forum
    This year we are looking for your experience with using Smalltalk. 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-Modelling
    • Security
    • New libraries & frameworks
    • Educational material
    • Embedded systems and robotics
    • SOA and Web services
    • Interaction with other programming languages

    Technology Forum
    We are proud to announce the 4th Innovation Technology Awards. The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, €500, €300 and €200 during an awards ceremony at the conference. Developers of any Smalltalk-based software are welcome to compete.

    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.

    We hope to see you there and have fun together.

  • Squeak by Example now available in French

    Squeak by Example has been a hugely successful introduction to Squeak since its publication last year, and it has now been made available to a wider audience, following the publication of a French edition Squeak par l’exemple. As with the English edition, the book has been made available in print from print-on-demand specialists lulu.com for around €17/$20/£11, or can be downloaded from the site as a pdf.

    Squeak par l’exemple was produced thanks to the hard work of the team of translators: Martial Boniou, Mathieu Chappuis, Luc Fabresse, René Mages, Nicolas Petton, Alain Plantec, Benoît Tuduri and Serge Stinckwich.

  • Squeak Etoys – Students Build Their Own Games In Four Days

    The Software Architecture Group at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut (who have produced a great online Seaside tutorial and associated book) have recently been involved in using Etoys in the classroom. They kindly sent us this report about the experience of two of their members when introducing Squeak and Etoys to high school students.

    (more…)

  • Immersive Education the focus of 2008 Boston Summit (January 12-13 at Boston College)

    Boston Digital Media Summit

    From Aaron E. Walsh:

    Happy New Year, everyone. As we enter 2008 I’m happy to announce that the Boston Digital Media Summit (next weekend) is focused on Immersive Education and will feature Croquet in several sessions (see the schedule of events below; Julian’s keynote is on Day 1 — January 12th).

    Please join us if you’re in the Boston area or would like to make a trip for the event. The news release is below, and I’ve attached the PDF version as well.
    It’s also in HTML format along with related news items at:

    http://ImmersiveEducation.org/#NEWS

    The Summit schedule of events has been set, which you can also see at:

    http://mediagrid.org/summit/ (main page)
    http://mediagrid.org/summit/program.html (schedule of events)

    Best regards,
    Aaron

    (more…)

  • Problems with the Weekly Squeak RSS feeds

    WordPress.com (the free service that hosts The Weekly Squeak) has recently done some adjustments to its blogs’ RSS feeds. This adjustment led to the discovery of a bug in the Universal Feed Parser used by some desktop and web aggregators (such as Planet Squeak). The bug has been promptly fixed, but if you’re still experiencing problems we suggest switching to the Weekly Squeak’s Atom feeds (Entries feed, Comments feed) until your service is upgraded to the newest version of the feed parser.

  • Athena Smalltalk for embedded applications

    Athena Smalltalk architecture

    Alexandre Bergel has just announced on the Squeak Dev mailing list his work on Athena, a new Smalltalk environment intended to be embedded in Java programs. Athena comprises a set of tools to use the Smalltalk programming language in an embedded setting. It offers a small (100kB) virtual machine written in Java, a shell, and a set of tools to program Athena from Squeak.

    The Athena VM is based on work done by Timothy A. Budd on Smallworld, and is released under the MIT licence.

    You can see a video of Alexandre’s talk about Athena at the Squeak BOF at OOPSLA 2007.

  • Smalltalk to the rescue? Microsoft EX-execs sue Red Hat

    https://i0.wp.com/www.mathgamehouse.com/mt/insider/brucehorn/xerox-paloalto.jpg

    Some Microsoft EX-exec’s sue Red Hat for patent infringement. How “EX” you say? Well the last one arrived Oct 1st. The patent is for a windowed GUI. Hummm that’s a good one. Wait didn’t Dan do that?

    Smalltalk to the rescue?? Help is on the way!