[ UK Smalltalk User Group ]

For our May meeting, Object Guild's Jonathan van Alteren and Erik Stel will give us a preview of Expressive Systems. Expressive Systems is a framework inspired by Richard Pawson's work on Naked Objects . It allows Object Guild to rapidly develop flexible applications by focusing on the design of behaviorally complete objects in the business domain. By using a novel web application architecture based on CodeParadise , it allows direct manipulation of business objects by the user. The goal of the framework is to better support problem solving activities and to empower users by giving them a first-person experience. The framework is currently in a (private) alpha phase of development. There are plans to open source the framework in the future. Jonathan has been developing business applications for various Dutch companies since 2001, in roles varying from programmer to solution architect. In 2018, he got hooked on Pharo/Smalltalk and never looked back. Erik has developed both techn

The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be held on Wednesday, April 27th 2022. Newspeak is a programming system in the Smalltalk tradition, whose current incarnation runs in the web browser.  Newspeak is designed to provide the liveness Smalltalkers expect, as well as features atypical of Smalltalk such as modularity, security and good interoperability with the surrounding ecosystem.  In this talk, we'll explain how and why Newspeak differs from Smalltalk and demonstrate the Newspeak IDE. Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language and a well known researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. He was awarded the senior Dahl-Nygaard prize in 2017. He is currently a Technical Fellow at F5 , and has held positions at Google, SAP Labs, Cadence, and Sun. He has authored or co-authored several books including the Java Language and Virtual Machine Specifications , and the Dart Programming Language .   Prior to joining Sun, he worked o

 The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be held on Wednesday, March 30th 2022. Come to hear news about Glamorous Toolkit, the moldable development environment. We were busy over the past year: beside everything else, GT also became a multi-language notebook + programmable knowledge management platform. By this we unify the flows of programming, data science and knowledge management. And there might be a couple of other surprises, too. Tudor Gîrba is a software environmentalist and CEO of feenk.com where he works with an amazing team to make the inside of systems explainable. Much of the work is embodied in Glamorous Toolkit ( gtoolkit.com ), a novel environment that enables Moldable Development.  This will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page to receive the meeting details. Don’t forget to bring your laptop and drinks! Update 4 June 2022: The recording of Tudor's presentation and o

For this month's meeting, we'll open the floor to the whole audience and let people show what they are working on. If you have an interesting project to show, or if you'd like to get some help with some hard problem, just show up and be ready to present! This will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page to receive the meeting details. Don’t forget to bring your laptop and drinks! Update 29 May 2022: The recording of this session are now available on Vimeo: Steven Travis Pope - Resurrecting Score-11 Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas - Pharo powered data stories with Lepiter Sean DeNigris - A Glamorous Toolkit-based Dynabook   Ken Dickey - Nested morph coordinate systems in Cuis David Buck - PigeonTalk   Torsten Bergmann - Nucleus + OJO Tim Rowledge - MQTT and Smalltalk   Keith Holman - Profiling Pharo code using flame graphs

For our January meeting, we'll be hosting GemTalk 's Martin McClure who will talk about a new Smalltalk IDE - Sparkle. If you're setting out to develop a Smalltalk IDE from scratch, what design decisions do you make? You'd love to "fix" the things that have long annoyed you in existing IDEs, but new designs risk creating their own novel annoyances. The Sparkle project-in-progress is creating a new and not entirely conventional development environment for GemStone Smalltalk. Come see factors that have influenced its design, get a demo of the current state of the tools, learn about the project's next steps, and share *your* IDE annoyances. Martin heard about Smalltalk in 1975, *finally* got his hands on a running Smalltalk system ten years later, and hasn't let go since. In his 25 years on the GemStone team, Martin has worked on many aspects - some VM internals, some user interface design, but mostly all the things that go in between. In his rare spare t

For our December meeting, Florin Mateoc will show us JsSqueak , a JavaScript implementation of (JavaScript compiled) Squeak. Whereas SqueakJS or TruffleSqueak are implementations of the Squeak stack VM which run the Squeak bytecodes, JsSqueak compiles all the Squeak code to JavaScript (including the VM plugins), it exports the image state as one big JavaScript storeString, and then loads them, and runs the JavaScript implemented minimal VM (mostly primitives) and the JavaScript-translated Squeak methods as one combined JavaScript application. The compiled JavaScript application can be run either in a browser or in Node.js While JavaScript, especially with its newest additions, is a very powerful language, which allows us to implement most Smalltalk-specific features (e.g. processes/green threads are implemented using generator functions and recursive yield* for all invocations, DNU is implemented using proxies and proto manipulation, the Smalltalk parallel class hierarchy is implemente