Koen De Hondt - Behaviour-Driven Development with Hera - 24 June 2026

By

At ESUG 2025, Hera was introduced as a BDD framework bringing full Gherkin expressiveness to Pharo. Since then, Hera has evolved significantly — both as a framework and as a tool adopted in real-world industrial settings.

After a brief introduction to Gherkin for writing given-when-then scenarios, various aspects of Hera will be highlighted. A functional overview will set the scene, followed by a dive into the code to show how Hera maps Gherkin features and scenarios to Smalltalk classes and methods. During a live demo, example Gherkin scenarios for a simple Pharo Spec application will be written to explain the full scenario development cycle.

Koen De Hondt has used Smalltalk since 1988, first as a student, then as an academic researcher, and then in industry. He holds a PhD in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (1998). In the nineties and a few years after the turn of the century, he was one of the driving forces behind the Belgian Smalltalk User Group (BSUG). In that time frame, he presented at ESUG conferences several times. In 2003, he left the Smalltalk community for other adventures. In 2023, he returned to the Smalltalk scene and started https://all-objects-all-the-time.st. He has been an active contributor to Pharo ever since. Software development tools are his main interest. He is the main author of the book “Application Building with Spec 2.0”.


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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tudor Gîrba: What exactly is Glamorous Toolkit? - 24 April 2024

By
Image
To some people Glamorous Toolkit is a Pharo environment. To others it’s a knowledge management system. Others might see a code analysis platform, a data visualization or an API browsing tool. Yet others see the graphical stack with its interactive editors. Glamorous Toolkit is all of these. But it’s really also none of these. These are merely examples of the many forms the environment can be molded to. And there can be many more. Glamorous Toolkit is primarily an environment that makes it possible to create many experiences seamlessly and contextually. This then leads to a new way of programming that we call Moldable Development. Tudor Gîrba is a software environmentalist and the 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 ...
Read more

A Tour of Architectural Abstraction with Objective-S - Wednesday, November 24th

By
Image
This month, the UKSTUG will take a look at Objective-S , an architecture-oriented programming language based on Smalltalk and Objective-C, by hosting his creator Marcel Weiher. As per Alan Kay, “Code seems large and complicated for what it does” . Objective-S addresses one source of this accidental complexity: using software architectural abstraction to directly expresses the much wider variety of architectural styles typical of modern software systems, compared to traditional programming languages that still follow the call/return architectural style of scientific programs from the early days of computing. Marcel Weiher started his forays into dynamic object-oriented computing by implementing Objective-C on his Amiga 35 years ago and hasn’t stopped since. Stops on the way have been at Apple, the BBC, Microsoft and various startups, as well as contributing to Squeak. He is currently a principal software engineer at Citymapper and PhD student at HPI, where he is trying to distill some ...
Read more

Amber with Silk - Wednesday, February 24th

By
Image
 The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, February 24th.   Christian Haider will guide us in a tour of the Amber dialect of Smalltalk and its Silk web framework. In his own words... Amber , created by Nicolas Petton, is a Smalltalk implemented in JavaScript running in a web browser. Silk , written by the Amber maintainer Herby Vojčík, is a web framework in Amber.    I was looking for a good solution for the web for a long time. At the last ESUG, I was bugging everybody about a Smalltalk in the browser, because I decided to redo the frontend of my current project in Smalltalk instead of JavaScript. There were some developments, but only Amber was available. So I tried it for real on a little side project ( sources ) to see if this route is viable - spoiler: it is!   Silk, the web framework, caught my attention and I fell in love with it. Silk is very simple, straight forward and powerful, just the properties I love Smalltalk for. A ...
Read more