[ UK Smalltalk User Group ]

For our last 2025 meeting, Norbert Hartl will present Soil - an object oriented database implemented in Pharo. Soil is an object oriented database implemented completely in smalltalk/pharo. It makes it easy to build a persistent solution without the burden of mapping everything to some external DSL/database. It supports storing arbitrary graphs and enables transparent access to them. It has binary search indexes to make lookups of huge collections quite efficient. It is the main database behind ApptiveGrid - low code tool to build business processes. Norbert Hartl is an experienced software engineer and entrepreneur with a strong track record of delivering business projects and developing key libraries and frameworks. As the co-founder of ApptiveGrid and PharoPro, he focuses on creating efficient, zero-dependency software solutions that drive business innovation and streamline operations. This will be an online meeting. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in ad...

For our October meeting, Hernán Wilkinson and Juan Vuletich will tell us about recent developments in Cuis Smalltalk . These range from kernel functionality like Ephemerons and the Sista Bytecodes set to app developer tools like a visual GUI Designer and additional Layout policies. Hernán Wilkinson Passionate programmer. Smalltalk lover. Founder of 10Pines and FAST (Argentine Foundation of Smalltalk). Professor of the FCEyN at the UBA. Teaches OO and Agile techniques at the university and the industry. Key Note Speaker of many national and international conferences. Contributes to many Smalltalk opensource projects. Promotes self organized organizations and agile methodologies. You can follow him in Twitter at @hernanwilkinson Juan Vuletich Juan Vuletich is the founder and lead developer of Cuis Smalltalk. He is a long-standing Open Source Smalltalk community member, having contributed kernel code to Cuis, Squeak and the OpenSmalltalk VM for over 25 years. Juan has been...

Earlier this year, the Pharo development team announced the availability of Pharo 13 . For our September 2025 meeting, Pharo's release manager Esteban Lorenzano will give us a tour of the new version - what's changed, and what remains the same. Esteban Lorenzano studied Computer Sciences at Universidad de Buenos Aires, and worked since 1994 in several object-oriented and low-level technologies, in different software companies, serving in various positions from programmer to senior architect. In 2007 he co-founded Smallworks to offer Pharo-based agile development projects. Since 2012 he dedicated full time to developing the Pharo code and community. He works with the INRIA-EVREF team in Lille, France, as core developer for Pharo, being responsible with the coordination of new releases and the implementation and maintenance of several Pharo libraries. This will be an online meeting. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's  Meetup pa...

For our August presentation, Newspeak 's creator Gilad Bracha will share some recent developments in Newspeak. All Newspeak applications now support interactive online collaboration out of the box. No programming is required to enable this. We utilize the Croquet system to support this, but use it in a unique way, so that no special programming is required. Instead, we leverage Newspeak's class hierarchy inheritance and platform objects so that all Croquet adaptation is done automatically. This is an interim step toward Newspeak's long-standing goal of orthogonal synchronization. We'll explain what all this means, show how it's done, and speculate on next steps. This will be an online meeting. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's  Meetup page  to receive the meeting details. Update 19 September 2025 : The recording of Gilad's presentation is now available on Youtube:

This April, the UKSTUG will be hosting Pharo's Esteban Lorenzano to talk about Pharo-CIG - a C++ Interface Generator. The Pharo FFI (Foreign Function Interface) system is an excellent tool that enables Pharo users to create bindings with external C libraries. However, there's a significant drawback that often discourages its use: the bindings must be manually created, a process that can be slow and prone to crashes. Pharo-CIG proposes a solution to bridge that gap. Esteban Lorenzano studied Computer Sciences at Universidad de Buenos Aires, and worked since 1994 in several object-oriented and low-level technologies, in different software companies, serving in various positions from programmer to senior architect. In 2007 he co-founded Smallworks to offer Pharo-based agile development projects. Since 2012 he dedicated full time to developing the Pharo code and community. He works with the INRIA-EVREF team in Lille, France, as core developer for Pharo, being responsi...

For our March meeting, Craig Latta will show how to leverage AI language models in a livecoding environment. Using a tool creates context for complimentary tools. For example, selecting an object in a Smalltalk inspector creates useful context for browsing the class of that object. This is a potent idea in an integrated development environment, where multiple tools operate on related information. The extensive context in a live environment enables powerful collaboration with contemporary AI language models. Tools built from that collaboration could greatly augment human capability. Craig Latta will show some foundations for them, and suggest ways of easing their construction through the systematic description of existing tool functionality. For a preview, please see Craig's blog at thiscontext.com . Craig Latta is a research computer scientist in Berkeley and Amsterdam, with interests including livecoding, music performance, and interactive visualization. The discover...