Instantiations releases Beta of a Monticello Importer for VA Smalltalk

Porting open source contributions from Squeak or Pharo was a task that always started with setting up a working Squeak or Pharo Image and getting it up and running with Monticello. Not that it was particularly hard to do so, but for people who never used Squeak or Pharo or didn’t have the rights or chance to install it on their office machine, it sure was a hurdle.

That really is (was) a hurdle for interesting and elsewhere well-respected tools to be ported to VA Smalltalk. Instantiations now releases a new Monticello importer that should make the whole process a little bit easier. Combined with Grease which comes with a growing number of adaptions for differences in different Smalltalk base class libraries, this will hopefully soon move VAST closer to the rest of the Smalltalk world.

But here’s what John O’Keefe’s comment on the goodie has to say:

This configuration map contains beta code for the Monticello Importer
feature that is planned for release in VA Smalltalk v8.5.2. It supports
directly importing Monticello Packages (.mcz files) into the VA Smalltalk
library.

***IMPORTANT: The Monticello Importer Beta code works only on
Windows at the present time.

So hopefully we’ll soon see current ports of all the nice and spicy stuff like jQuery add-ons for Seaside, parsers, analysis tools and other stuff that the open source world has to offer for Smalltalkers.

Seaside 3.0.7 released

The Seaside development team was busy bundling all code changes together and build a new downloadable Configuration of the latest Seaside Code base. Nick just announced the official release of this new version:

We are pleased to announce the release of Seaside 3.0.7 This is a minor release of Seaside 3.0 and contains a range of

improvements and fixes from a variety of people. The changes can be view here: http://code.google.com/p/seaside/wiki/Seaside307Changelog

3.0.7 is not an extremely exciting new feature release (which is not to be expected given the release number), but fixes quite a few bugs and cleans up a few things and now officially moves from the KOM http adapter to Zinc, a young but stable and well-maintained HTTP server component for Squeak and Pharo.

2012 is (again) packed with Smalltalk Conferences all over the world

• STIC conference in Biloxi, MS, USA has just closed its doors, and we`ll soon be able to view videos of the talks. The next STIC was announced to be in June 2013 somewhere in Arizona.
• May 24th/25th there is the Pharo Conference in Lille, France.
• The ESUG Conference will take place in Gent, Belgium in late August (call for Contributions has just been issued)
• November will see the Smalltalks Conference in Argentina (has just been announced).

These are just the major events. There are several local groups that organize meetups more or less regularly in several cities all over the planet. And maybe we will even see a few more conferences, and camp smalltalks over the course of this year. So who said Smalltalk is a boring or sleepy community? Maybe they just didn`t check before they said so

Students wanted for Smalltalk projects for this year’s Google Summer of Code

ESUG is asking students from all over the world to apply as paid volunteers to work on Smalltalk-based open source projects:

Deadline: as soon as possible, because the deadline to register on
official GSoC website [3] is 6.April, which is, well, soon! But about
that later… 

Follow the link above to learn more about the details.

Real-World Application in Amber

Laurent Laffont gives us a glimpse of a real-world application written in Amber Smalltalk.

You can watch a video here.

The concept of writing all your application for both the web browser and server in Smalltalk is very fascinating. Just imagine Amber Smalltalk coupled with a powerful vcs like envy or git…

MiniSMock 0.3 uploaded to VASTGoodies

I finally found the time to upload the latest version (0.3) of MiniSMock to VASTGoodies.com. I would love to get feedback on it, so please let me know if it’s useful for you, if you find some bug or are missing some important feature.

STIC’12 presentations: videos will soon be online, STIC’13 will be in June

The Smalltalk Industry Conference 2012 in Biloxi is over. Judging from the list of talks and James’ Blog Posts it was a very interesting event.

Georg Heeg (director of the STIC) just announced that they’ve

 recorded all presentations. And after we will be back we will make slides and videos available. Please have a look at www.stic.st.

And also:

At the end of the conference we announced Smalltalk Industry Conference 2013 which we will organize in Arizona in June 2013.

Good news for all German speaking readers: We’re planning to record a new episode of Smalltalk Inspect in which Sebastian shares his insights and impressions. Stay tuned for that.

MiniSMock is just learning a few new tricks

MiniSMock is my minimalistic approach to Mock objects, which can be extremely helpful in testing legacy code as well as code that has a lot of dependencies and is hard to set up.

I wanted something that is extremely lightweight and fits well with SUnit, witout any complex setup rules or other hassle. There are much better and more complete Mock Object frameworks out there, but for my needs the most important requirement was that it’s simple enough to use right away. There really isn’t much to it, not even something that you could call documentation, since it is just one single class. If you want to take a look, feel free to download it from VASTGoodies and use it. Let me know if you find something that is missing.

Reflecting MockObjects – A new kind of intelligence?

Somebody just did exactly that and asked me if they could possible use it in their code base which is quite defensive and uses a lot of reflection to test whether an object is ready

Instantiations announces the immediate availability of VA Smalltalk 8.5.1

The STIC 2012 conference started today and I guess we’ll see announcements from all Smalltalk vendors there. Instantiations just announced the availability of Version 8.5.1 of VA Smalltalk. As the version number suggests, it is a maintenance release with a total of ca. 60 bugs fixed and a few new minor feature extensions and enhancements.

Development Tools

• Code Assist Improvements
• SUnit Expected Failures

Infrastructure

• Logging Framework Improvements
• Preference Settings Framework Improvements

Google sponsors Smalltalk projects

Google just announced the organizations that will get the chance to have students help on open source projects this summer. The European Smalltalk User Group is on the list!

So now it’s time for mentors and for students to apply: work in Smalltalk, have fun and help a friendly community, get a nice paycheck for it. But hurry: the deadline for student applications is April, 6th. If you want to know a little more about the details of who can and he they should apply, visit Google’s GSoC FAQ page.

So let’s see which project ideas will get chosen this year and what comes out of it.

Thanks to Carla, Janko and all who contributed project ideas!