Agile Visualization with Roassal3 - Wednesday, October 28th

 The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, October 28th. 

Alexandre Bergel will talk about Agile Visualization with Roassal3.

Visualizing data is probably the easiest part in the field of data visualization. Numerous books and sophisticated libraries exist for that very purpose. One of challenges of data visualization is to identify the right abstractions that make a visualization reusable, composable, extensible, navigable, and produced at a very low cost. Roassal is a visualization engine for Smalltalk that leverage the experience of crafting and using data visualization. This talk will demo Roassal and presents non-trivial visualizations within the field of software visualization.

Alexandre Bergel is Associate Professor and researcher at the University of Chile. Alexandre Bergel and his collaborators carry out research in software engineering. His focus is on designing tools and methodologies to improve the overall performance and internal quality of software systems, by employing profiling, visualization, and artificial intelligence techniques.

Alexandre Bergel has authored over 140 articles, published in international and peer reviewed scientific forums, including the most competitive conferences and journals in the field of software engineering. Alexandre has participated to over 140 program committees of international events. Alexandre has also a strong interest in applying his research results to industry. Several of his research prototypes have been turned into products and adopted by major companies in the semi-conductor industry and certification of critical software systems.

Alexandre is member of the editorial board of Empirical Software Engineering. Alexandre authored the book Agile Artificial Intelligence in Pharo, Agile Visualization, and co-authored the book Deep Into Pharo.

Given the current COVID-19 restrictions, 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!

AppeX: Writing JavaScript in the Cincom Smalltalk™ IDE - Wednesday, September 30th

The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, September 30th. 

For this meeting, Niall Ross and Vlad Degen from Cincom will present AppeX, Cincom’s web application development framework. Together they will cover:

• The advantages of the AppeX design philosophy - lightweight, plays well with others
• How AppeX works in the Cincom Smalltalk IDE
• The advantages of WYSIWYG AppeX JavaScript development through debugging of running AppeX applications
• How you can use AppeX in the Cincom Smalltalk IDE to learn and improve your JavaScript, and to create and deploy JavaScript intensive modern web applications.
• The advantages of AppeX web development, using the Chrome DevTools in conjunction with AppeX for debugging.

Given the current COVID-19 restrictions, 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 October 2020: the recording of the presentation is now available on Vimeo. 

CodeParadise: a better place for the next generation of coders - Wednesday, August 26th

 The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, August 26th.

In this meeting, Erik Stel will present his current project - CodeParadise.

CodeParadise is a cloud based platform (to be) to learn to program using Object Oriented principles within a Smalltalk environment.

CodeParadise is still in very early development, but some of its results have seen interest from the community. Therefore a presentation will provide insight in the design, current status, and possibilities of the results so far.

The discussion afterwards can be used for both in-depth technical topics as well as the more philosophical topics about programming (as warmth and/or beer consumption will guide us).

Given the current COVID-19 restrictions, 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 13 September 2020: a recording of the presentation is now available on Vimeo.

Deploying to the cloud from Pharo - Wednesday, July 29th

The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, July 29th.

Peter Svensson will present his work on Cloudsdk-st.

Cloudsdk-st is an experiment in ways to work with cloud deployment from a Smalltalk image.

Traditionally cloud deployments run 'out of band' in separate build scripts or build/CI/CD systems. This project lets you define Docker images (using Dockerfiles) for Smalltalk, send them to the build system of a cloud provider directly and then choose what kind of service you want your image to be (cloud function or long-running VM).

Currently it only supports Google Cloud and has a very rough UI. Future plans include support for AWS and Azure as well as better feedback and a Spec2 UI.

Given the current COVID-19 restrictions, 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!

TruffleSqueak: A Squeak/Smalltalk System for the GraalVM - Wednesday, June 24th

The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, June 24th.

Fabio Niephaus will talk to us about TruffleSqueak, a Squeak/Smalltalk VM and Polyglot Programming Environment for the GraalVM.

He is a Ph.D. student within the Software Architecture Group at the Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany. He has strong interests in dynamic programming languages, virtual execution environments, and software development tools.

Fabio will talk about the motivation for his research in the field of Polyglot Programming. With a live demo, he will show how TruffleSqueak can be used as a polyglot IDE for other languages such as Java, Javascript, Python, R, or Ruby. He will also introduce us to the GraalVM ecosystem and discuss his experience in writing a Smalltalk VM in Truffle, GraalVM's language implementation framework.

Given the current COVID-19 restrictions, 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!

Kyma - an object oriented sound and music system - Wednesday, May 27th

The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, May 27th.

Alan Jackson will talk to us about Kyma, an object- oriented sound design environment built with Smalltalk technology.

Given the current COVID-19 restrictions, 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!

UK Smalltalk User Group meeting - Wednesday, April 19th

The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, April 29th.

Given the current COVID-19 restrictions, 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. Don’t forget to bring your laptop and drinks!