ESUG

Fuel 1.8 Released

admin — Sun, 27 May 2012 21:06:20 +0000

We are proud to announce Fuel 1.8 with a lot of new features and documentation. Of course, we don't stop working but it was time to freeze a stable version.

Fuel is an open-source general-purpose object serialization framework developed in Pharo Smalltalk environment. More information on our website

Fuel works out of the box in Pharo from 1.1 up to 2.0 and is an official part of Pharo as of 2.0 #098. Please check our documentation for complete installation and use guides.

Below, there are some remarkable changes.

Much more complete user guides.
Improved API for customizing how graph is traced.
FuelMetalevel: serialization of stuff like classes and compiled methods moved to an optional package.
Customize objects to be treated as globals.
Migrations: declare at materialization time class and variables renames.
Weak references properly managed. Thanks to Juan Vuletich and Levente.
Thanks Pavel for helping us improving FuelPackageLoader with wonderful ideas and bug reports.
Serialization speed up on large graphs by using specialized collections. Thanks Levente.
Encoder and Decoder: new reifications that clarify the design. Thanks Colin Putney.
Optimized serialization of "clean" BlockClosures, which don't need the whole stack of contexts. Thanks Juan Vuletich and Eliot Miranda.
Added a clear error hierarchy.
Debug facilities, including graph visualization using Roassal. Thanks Alexandre and Doru.
Many more new tests. Including those from extension packages, we have almost 600 tests.
Repository moved to http://ss3.gemstone.com/ss/Fuel.

If you are a Fuel user we are not aware of, please let us know!

We thank ESUG for sponsoring Fuel as part of the ESUG SummerTalk 2011.

Best regards, Martin and Mariano

More about...

CFP IWST'2012

admin — Mon, 21 May 2012 17:07:54 +0000

The International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies, is a European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG) Conference joint event, that focuses on research activities - namely academic creative work undertaken on smalltalk use, and more generally on object technologies.

IWST was launched in 2009, in Brest, during the 17th ESUG Conference. The second edition took place in Barcelona, and the third edition was held in 2011 at the heart of historic Edinburgh. Next edition will be in Gent, Begium this summer (28th of august).

ESUG gathers groups of professionals and hobbyists who share an interest in the Smalltalk programming languages and related technologies. The goal of the workshop is to create a forum around advances or experience in Smalltalk. IWST contributes to triggering discussions and exchanges of ideas.

As always, we make a point to have a very constructive paper review process that aims to provide in-depth comments and suggestions to all of them (no one-liners!) This makes it ideal to disseminate new research directions, and is a good venue for early stage PhD students to receive feedback on their work. In addition, we intent to invite best papers to a journal special issue as we did last year.

Looking forward to your submissions, and to meeting you in Gent!

Best regards,

Loïc Lagadec & Alain Plantec Co-chairs of IWST

International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies 2012

August 28th, 2012 Gent, Belgium.

ESUG 2012 Smalltalk joint event

Important dates

Submission deadline: June 15, 2012
Notification deadline: July 15, 2012
All accepted papers will be published in ACM DL, and the authors of the best papers will be invited to submit an extended version to a journal special issue (To Be Confirmed).

Goals and scopes

The goals 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 research articles. We will not enforce any length restriction. However we expect papers of two kinds:

Short position papers describing emerging ideas.
Long research papers with deeper description of experiments and of research results.

Topics

We welcome contributions on all aspects, theoretical as well as practical, of Smalltalk related topics such as:

Aspect-oriented programming,
Design patterns,
Experience reports,
Frameworks,
Implementation, new dialects or languages implemented in Smalltalk,
Interaction with other languages,
Meta-programming and Meta-modeling,
Tools

Links

Publication

Both submissions and final papers must be prepared using the ACM SIGPLAN 10 point format. Templates for Word and LaTeX are available at http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigplan/authorInformation.htm. This site also contains links to useful informations on how to write effective submissions.

Program chairs

Loïc Lagadec and Alain Plantec (LabSticc CACS/CNRS, University of Brest, France)

Program committee

Gabriela Arevalo Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina
Alexandre Bergel University of Chile
Andrew P. Black Portland State University, US
Marcus Denker Rmod, INRIA Lille - Nord Europe, France
Luc Fabresse Ecole des Mines de Douai, France,
Tudor Girba CompuGroup Medical Schweiz, Switzerland
Andy Kellens Software Languages Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Mickaël Kerboeuf LabSticc, University of Brest, France
Jannik Laval LaBRI, University of Bordeaux, France
Mariano Martinez Peck Ecole des Mines de Douai, France,
Lukas Renggli Google, Switzerland
Jorge Ressia Software Composition Group, University of Bern, Switzerland
Bastian Steinert HPI, Software Architecture Group, Germany
Hernan Wilkinson 10Pines, IT consultancy, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Roel Wuyts IMEC Leuven, Belgium

Registration ESUG 2012 Open!

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:22:40 +0000

We are pleased to announce that registration for the 20th ESUG Conference in Ghent, Belgium is now open!

To register, please proceed to the website or go directly to http://registration.esug.org

Important: do not forget to book your accomodation directly at one of the hotels in Ghent before June30th! More here.

August in Ghent is tourist season and there are a number of other conferences running at the same time at ESUG. So please book your hotel early, preferably before June 30th!

We have ensured availability of a number of rooms at various hotels in Ghent until June 30th. After that date, the option expires and you will need to search for other places to stay. Make sure to book your hotel as soon as possible and mention the reservation code "ESUG" (this is important to get the rates and/or available rooms!)

GSoC: 13 Projects Selected

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:11:30 +0000

13 projects have been selector for Google Summer of Code:

Concrete Type Inference
ARM jitter for Squeak VM
Interactive & social online Smalltalk tutorial
Nautilus
Package management with Fuel
Bootstrapping the core
TestSurgeon
SciSmalltalk
HMI (Human-Machine Interface) with Amber
Rizel - Multidimensional Profiler
Export Excel files
Finish Physical Etoys port to Sugar
Esse, a framework for visualizing, storing and exploring ideas

More information at http://gsoc2012.esug.org

Cuis 4.0 Released

admin — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 11:52:40 +0000

Cuis 4.0 is available at http://www.jvuletich.org/Cuis/Index.html. This is a very important release. It's been over 10 months since Cuis 3.3, but all this time means that there are a lot of big news now.

The biggest one is the public release of the Styled Text Editor, by Bernhard Pieber. Bernhard will do the announcement of this project himself, all I want to say is that Styled Text Editor is the driving force behind most of the new stuff in this release. I also want to add that I'm delighted to be able to work with Bernhard on his project, and that I'm more than happy with the wonderful effect this is having on Cuis itself.

Check http://www.jvuletich.org/Cuis/CuisReleaseNotes.html .

So, the main new features of this release of Cuis are the required support for External Packages. This is a very lightweight implementation of Packages, based on PackageInfo, but not on Monticello. Versioning is done with GitHub. Take a look at http://www.jvuletich.org/Cuis/CodeManagementInCuis4.html and http://www.jvuletich.org/Cuis/CuisAndGitHub.html .

Pharo 1.4 Released

admin — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:32:54 +0000

We are proud to announce the release 1.4 of Pharo!

You can find information about Pharo on http://www.pharo-project.org. In particular, you may be interested in:

How to join us and get help
Getting the Pharo By Example book (also available as a free PDF)
Watching the screencasts: http://www.pharocasts.com
Reporting problems
Read the forthcoming book: (yes we love and value documentation)
Read the Pharo vision document http://www.pharo-project.org/community/consortium

About this release

All in all, there were over 860 issues treated in the issue tracker.

Read it again, yes 860 is huge, take two minutes and have a look at the list of improvements! Now you got a feeling for the effort. And this not our own work but the work of our community! It is possible because people worldwide helped! We want to deeply thank them.

We want to thank in particular Inria for its constant support, in particular for the salary of Igor Stasenko and for help in the infrastructure put in place.

We have accomplished this huge task for a better system because we were together. Do not forget that we are working on a consortium to support our system. Do not forget that our goal is to build a system so that we can make a living with our creativity and programming skills.

Read the Pharo vision document and join!

Thanks a lot for your participation, energy and fun.

The Pharo Team

Dr. Geo 12.04 Released

admin — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 17:25:56 +0000

Hilaire Fernandes is pleased to announce you Dr. Geo release 12.04, based on Pharo 1.4, for GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac OSX and OLPC XO laptop.

It can be downloaded an tested from http://drgeo.eu

New features

Numerous improvements for a better experience with tablet and interactive board.
Sketches can be deleted from the preview dialog
Removed windows decorations and borders grip in the Sugar theme
Remanaged menus
Improved canvas view for programmed sketches
Various optimizations
Handle connection error for remote sketches
Sketches can be loaded and saved on a server (FTP only now)
Dr. Geo settings to set the server account for remote sketch
Animated loader for time consuming operation

Bugs fixes

A few messages from the Pharo Smalltalk are also localized now
Uninitialized segment mark caused a save error
Fixes when creating middle point
#13787 Macro construction player, order mater

GSoC news: 13 stipendiums!

admin — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 10:25:54 +0000

Wonderful news, we got 13 "slots" from Google, that is, 13 students and their proposals will be accepted for Google and they will receive stipendiums if they will do their projects right. More exactly, part of 4500 USD immediately, part after interim evaluation and part at successful finish of their projects.

We have currently 18 paired projects, that is, projects paired with one student among their many proposals. You can see that from project table, see which are currently accepted (column Acc.):

http://gsoc2012.esug.org/projects?view=projectTable

Now mentors need to review and score those 18 project proposals to indicate which are the best among all that nice proposals and to come with number down to 13. This will happen until next Friday 20.April, when we will finally decide, which 13 students to accept. Google will then officially confirm them in few days after.

Best regards, Janko & Carla

GSoC Statistics

admin — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 09:57:15 +0000

Friday passed a deadline for students to propose how will they do the projects and we received 30 proposals from 23 students, which is in my opinion quite a nice number and I'm sure we can end up with quite a number of nice projects this year. And what is even more important: new Smalltalkers in community!

Next two weeks mentors will review and rank/vote for the proposals, Google will give us a number of stipendiums it will provide and in few days after Friday 20.April we will have a final list of accepted students and their projects.

Few stats (numbers of all participating):

32 projects
34 mentors
32 students
30 proposals
23 students wrote proposal

Students by Smalltalk skill:

11 None
9 Low
5 Medium
7 High

Students from countries:

5 Argentina
5 India
4 Russia
3 USA
2 Chile
2 Czech Republic
2 Malaysia
1 China
1 Croatia
1 Ecuador
1 Egypt
1 France
1 Germany
1 Sweden
1 Ukraine
1 Slovenia

Stay tuned!

Janko @ Carla

Smalltalk GSoC Admin Team: http://gsoc2012.esug.org

GSoC Deadline Friday

admin — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 15:08:16 +0000

Friday is the deadline! Many of your already did while other please:

1. on our website http://gsoc2012.esug.org:

Register there and provide as much contact info for mentors to reach as possible;
Write as best biography as you can. Good biography page is the best way to be accepted!
Choose up to three projects you are interested in. Mark a project you are most interested by clicking the button 'Very interested';
Mentors will soon invite up to two students per project to write a proposal;
Invited students write a proposal how to make a chosen project.

2. on Google GSoC site:

Register there as a student as well, and immediatelly, you can edit the registration until deadline anyway,
After invitation and writing a proposal copy the proposal on the Google website as well.

Why such a dual procedure? On our website we can pair your interest with available projects easier that on Google site, this is the main reason.