[ UK Smalltalk User Group ]

The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, March 31st.   In this meeting, Juan Vuletich will present a Vector Graphic implementation in Cuis Smalltalk. Graphics for interactive software have traditionally been constrained for performance reasons. The consequence is that most software has serious trouble adapting to higher resolution screens, requires platform specific widget kits, provides limited functionality, and has sub optimal visual quality. But improvements in computing power over the last couple of decades enable a brighter future: Cuis Smalltalk provides a VectorGraphics based implementation of the Morphic UI framework that addresses all these issues. Juan Vuletich is a long standing member of the Open Source Smalltalk community. He started Cuis Smalltalk 12 years ago and has led it ever since. He has been contributing kernel code to Squeak and the Squeak VM for over 20 years. He holds an Ms.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Buenos...

 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 ...

The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, January 27th. For this presentation, guest speaker Michael Engel will bring us back to basics with a bare-metal Smalltalk-80 system for the Raspberry Pi. In 2020, the Xerox PARC research laboratory celebrated its 50th anniversary. One of the most important developments coming out of PARC is the Smalltalk system, which integrates a programming language, operating system and graphical user interface. Today, most of the Smalltalk systems run in hosted mode on a conventional operating system. This contradicts Dan Ingalls' idea that "an operating system is a collection of things that don't fit inside a language; there shouldn't be one". Accordingly, original Smalltalk systems, e.g. for the Alto workstation, ran on the bare metal of the computer. In this talk, we will discuss an approach to create a bare-metal Smalltalk-80 implementation for the Raspberry Pi , a popular family of ARM-based systems. In...

 The UK Smalltalk User Group will have an extra meeting this year on Wednesday, December 30th. feenk 's Tudor Girba will present the latest in moldable development with Glamorous Toolkit . Moldable development is an approach to programming through which we make the inside of software systems explainable. Glamorous Toolkit makes it practical. And beautiful. 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 1 January 2025: The recording of the presentation is now available on YouTube:  

The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, November 25th. Stephen Travis Pope will present Siren9 and CSL6 - Frameworks and Applications for Sound/Music Creation and Processing. The Siren system is a general-purpose software framework for music and sound composition, processing, performance, and analysis; it is a collection of about 350 classes written in Smalltalk-80 (40 kLOC or so). The current version of Siren (9.0) works on VisualWorks Smalltalk and supports streaming I/O via OpenSoundControl (OSC), MIDI, and multi-channel audio ports. The CREATE Signal Library (CSL) is a cross-platform C++ framework for digital audio signal synthesis, analysis, spatialization and interactive sound/music application development. CSL was developed at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) starting in the late 1990s. This presentation will introduce both package and demonstrate their use together to construct real-time compositional and music synthesis soft...

 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 ...

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! Updat...