Pharo Newsletter Summer 2018

Pharo TechTalks

• July 12: Towards Machine Learning in Pharo with TensorFlow   YouTube

• 23 Aug 2018: Pharo TechTalk August,  Link
• 11 Oct 2018: Pharo TechTalk October,  Link

ESUG 2018: Smalltalk Conference

The ESUG board is pleased to announce that the 26th ESUG conference/summer-school will be held in Cagliari, Italy 10-14 September 2018; with Camp Smalltalk 8-9 September 2018. The conference is co-organized by the University of Cagliari and the Agile Group of the faculty of computer science. Link

Pharo and AI

• TechTalk: Towards Machine Learning in Pharo with TensorFlow   Youtube
• Lecture: Intelligent System Construction by Alexandre Bergel Youtube
• TechTalk: AI (Neural Networks): Youtube, Sides

• KerasWrapper: Keras bindings for Pharo. This binding allows using Keras (implemented in Python) within Pharo. For the Pharo programmer, the fact that Keras is written in Python is completely transparent. GitHub
• TensorFlow library bindings for Pharo GitHub

Feenk Log

We were a bit silent the last couple of months. Quite a bit happened in the meantime, so here is a summary (for more fine-grained announcements, you can follow us on Twitter):

Bloc

- Scrolling. We finally have a good scrolling support tweet 

This might sound like a trivial feature, but it turns out it is not. We had a bug that forced us to rethink the support quite deeply in order to be able to debug it. To do this, we now can simulate time in Bloc, which is really cool:

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/989797367523233797

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/988753142299938817

- Pannable element is a combination of a scrollable element with a scalable element, and it offers the possibility either to zoom in/out + scroll, or to fit screen and resize when the parent resizes.

- PDF, SVG, PNG, JPG export (based on the underlying Moz2D support):

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/976580153802358786

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/976578060429484032

- Better curve support:

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/990967109193781249

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/990971530615107584

- Better debugging support for understanding bounds:

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/989138457288167424

Brick

- We now have simple list and columned list widgets. The list is both fast and scalable and supports rows of variable heights:

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/984744251920658432

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/984143821192744961

- Basic tab widget:

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/974420432240685062

- Looks: a mechanism for specifying element-specific composition and interaction.

GT

- Documenter saw some major improvements. Just a reminder, Documenter is the tool that enables live programming and previews directly within Pillar documents.

We now have a capability similar to notebooks like Jupyter:

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/996310432225820672

We use it extensively to document our code. For example, here is a tutorial about playing with looks in Bloc:

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/973899862482866176

And we can also express whole tutorials based on Epicea:

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/999975333972541440

- Diagrammer. We now have better editing support for detailed things such as arrow head:

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/976341449267531776

While Diagrammer is apparently a tool for diagrams, it has a rather generic design that can be utilized for all sorts of use cases. For example, one side effect is that now all elements can be visually edited:

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/982656456968241152

- Mondrian: Using the new pannable element, we can now zoom in/out and scroll, and we can also set element to fit screen. We can also drag elements around.

- Inspector: we now have an initial support for multiple views associated with an object. The support is similar to the one from the current inspector. 

Have fun, The feenk team

Blogs, Tutorials, Videos

• Video: Astares UML Support for Pharo youtube
• Blog: Dr. Geo and Dynamic Media Link
• Blog: Watch method calls in Pharo Link
• TechTalk: Designing Code Quality Assistants by Yuriy Tymchuk and Myroslava Romaniuk youtube
• Video: Pharo ZeroConf youtube
• Slides: Dockerizing Pharo slideshare
• Blog: Querying US Government Data Sets With Pharo and XMLParser Link
• Thesis: Reproducible moldable interactions Link
• Tutorial: Demonstration of a dynamic update on a remote device running PharoThings Link
• Video: Context visualization of Object Factories Link
• French: Utocat et Inria font avancer la recherche sur les smart contracts Link
• Syntax on a Postcard: SVG
• Exercism exercises for Pharo (in progress) GitHub
• Free chunk management in the Cog VM Link

New Libraries and Frameworks

• PngSuiteExplorer: Simple Pharo Widget for viewing the result of running the PNG test suite GitHub
• ZTimestamp: a Magnitude, a point in time, an alternative to DateAndTime and TimeStamp GitHub
• Smalltalk TOML parser GitHub
• ChartJS for Seaside GitHub
• Telescope is an engine for efficiently creating meaningful visualizations GitHub
• A Smalltalk GraphQL Implementation GitHub
• P3: A lean and mean PostgreSQL client for Pharo GitHub
• TensorFlow library bindings for Pharo GitHub
• KerasWrapper: Keras bindings for Pharo  GitHub
• CORMAS (COmmon pool Ressources and Multi-Agent Simulations) GitHub
• Punycode encoder/decoder SmalltallHub
• jdt2famix: This project offers the mechanism for producing MSE files that can be loaded in moosetechnology.org out of Java code GitHub
• roslyn2famix produces MSE files that can be analysed with moosetechnology.org out of C# Visual Studio Solutions GitHub
• Heimdall is a login identification system directly usable for seaside. GitHub
• PrismCodeDisplayer for Seaside: a  is a lightweight, robust, elegant syntax highlighting library GitHub
• StCAD - now open source: Link
• GT Documenter is the tool for creating and consuming live documents inside the development environment. GitHub
• Chrysal: Experiment with new ways of managing configurations GitHub
• Pharo - "Containers" for collections and data structures Link
• Git Thermite is a visual tool to assess GIT commits, GitHub Pull Requests, and Monticello commits GitHub
• PHARO-HDFS: API to access, create and delete files on Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) GitHub

Updated Libraries and Frameworks

• MatplotLibBridge v. 0.1: A bridge to provide the ability to Pharo user to use Python's Matplotlib. GitHub
• OSSubprocess v1.0.1: Link
• Polymath 0.101: PolyMath is a numerical computing and data analysis library on top of Pharo. GitHub
• Willow-Mixpanel is now part of the ba-st Web Stack family Link
• Iceberg (Git for Pharo) version 1.2 and 1.2.1

Real-time News? 

• Twitter. Get all the news as they happen: https://twitter.com/pharoproject
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PharoProject/
• Join our discord server and chat in real time! You can join by following this link: http://discord.gg/Sj2rhxn

Pharo Consultants

Job Corner

• HRWorks is looking for Pharo Software Developers Link
• Thesis: Transferring Visual Age Smalltalk into Pharo (HRWorks, Freiburg, Germany) Link
• ObjectProfile  Santiago, Chile: Engineering position (with a strong research activity) in the field of artificial intelligence and software engineering. Link
• ZWEIDENKER GmbH is looking for Pharo developers (Cologne, Germany). Contact mail@zweidenker.de for more information.