Smalltalk: Links, News and Resources

Angel López published two very interesting and complete

articles with links, news and resources about our beloved

Smalltalk.

The links are:

Article 1

Article 2

Enjoy!









Pic Info: 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/emaringolo/187719974/sizes/m/in/photostream / License

PasswordsPro 3 released!

After months of design and development of new ideas and tons of hours of testing, finally PasswordsPro 3 is ready to be downloaded! 

All the current customers that want to migrate to the new version only must drop us a mail and we will send the new license for the version 3.

Several friends helped me in this process with ideas, suggestions, really thanks you very much to all them, and let me give a very very special thankful to my friend Claudio Bianchi, owner of FreeSharewareDepot by the invaluable help I received from him, with ideas and their clear vision about the shareware market. Thanks you Claudio!

PasswordsPro is a passwords and notes manager that permits to store in a single file lots of passwords, userids, notes and so, having to remember only one password that protect the whole file.

To stay tunned with the news of PasswordsPro follow us in Twitter, visit our website or visit our Facebook page and remember that you can try PasswordsPro for free for 30 days with no limitations. Download it now and enjoy!

Zinc HTTP Components

From the Zinc page:

Zinc HTTP Components is an open-source Smalltalk framework to deal with the HTTP networking protocol. This is a new project (started September 1st 2010) that is currently under heavy development. Our long term goals are very ambitious: we want to reach the level of functionality, scope, architectural clarity and maturity of the Apache HTTP Components library. Our short term goal is to offer working HTTP client functionality to support fundamental features in a Smalltalk image. For the time being, Pharo is our reference platform.

Today I read a mail from the author of Zinc, Sven Van Caekenberghe in the Pharo list, about the status of the framework then I had the idea of write this small article highlighting the Zinc features and status.

Next the afore mentioned mail:


Hi,

This is a list of the most important changes to Zn since May 1st 2011:

- added brand new ZnClient to replace all other HTTP clients (who became deprecated)
 this is an object to build, execute and process HTTP client requests,
 it has a rich protocol to construct requests and to access responses,
 it has various error handling options,
 it can reuse an existing connection to a specific host:port,
 it can handle sessions, cookies, redirects and authentication,
 it has many options (settings) with sensible defaults.
 here is the simplest example:
     ZnClient new
       get: 'http://zn.stfx.eu/zn/numbers.txt'
 and here is an example using some features to make a better HTTP request:
     ZnClient new
       systemPolicy;
       accept: ZnMimeType textPlain;
       http;
       host: 'zn.stfx.eu';
       path: 'zn/numbers.txt';
       contentReader: [ :entity | entity contents lines collect: [ :each | each asNumber ] ];
       ifFail: [ :exception | self inform: 'I am sorry: ', exception printString ];
       get
- added support so that HTTPS works out of the box if Zodiac is present.
 this should work when Zodiac is loaded and the necessary plugin is present:
     ZnClient new
       url: 'https://www.google.com/search';
       queryAt: 'q' put: 'Pharo Smalltalk';
       get
- added a new subclass, ZnManagingMultiThreadedServer, that keeps track of open
 worker connections so that they can be properly closed when needed.
 to use this server with the Zn Seaside adaptor, you can do this:
     ZnZincServerAdaptor new
       port: 8080;
       serverClass: ZnManagingMultiThreadedServer;
       start
- refactored ZnNetworkingUtils, it is now (also) a factory for creating socket streams
- added ZnDispatcherDelegate for straight-forward dispatching to mapped urls (thx Nick Ager)
- cleanup of the cookie handling API
- fixed support for HTTP proxies (thx Alexandre Bergel for reporting)
- localhost URLs are now excluded from being proxied
- working around SocketStream>>#atEnd issues by using #peek
- implemented support for proxies that require authorization
- introduced ZnConnectionTimeout process variable
- added ManagedServers class variable to ZnServer to dispatch the system's
 #startUp/#shutDown messages to all server instances that are #register-ed
- implemented client side support for If-Modified-Since and Not Modified
- changed ZnMimePart>>#fieldValueString to return an empty string instead of 'nil'
 when the field is empty or absent (Thx Lukas Renggli)
- added support for dealing with certain defaults in ZnUrl
- added code to throw a ZnMissingHost exception when a bogus ZnUrl is used to connect to a HTTP host
- added ZnMimeType wildcard constants #any and #text
- added ZnHttpUnsuccessful and ZnUnexpectedContentType exceptions
- added a nice example to ZnEasy class>>#getPng: (Thx Lukas Renggli)
- added ZnUtils class>>#parseHttpDate: for use in ZnCookie>>#expiresTimeStamp
- added optional delegate #close-ing to ZnServer hierarchy
- added some Pharo 1.2 compatibility (ZnMultiThreadedServer>>#exceptionSet:)
- lots of small fixes, cleanup and improved documentation.


And don't miss the Getting Started guide!

Indeed this is a very good framework, not only by its features, but also for it technical quality and the commitment of the developer, taking care of the support and documentation.

I should reimplement XMLRPC to use Zinc. Hope to have time soon.

Pic Info: 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kodomut/3950770038/ / License

Are you using IdeaSpace?

As a long time Dolphiner is not much time that I'm using IdeaSpace and let me comment that is a really handy and useful tool.

Basically IdeaSpace allows to group in a single window every Dolphin window that you are using in a development session, with exception of the Transcript.

Each window that is added to an IdeaSpace window have its own tab to make easy and homy to switch between one or more class browser's, view composer's, workspaces, package manager, etc.

A sample of one of my current projects, next:

Playing with Visual Works 7.8

Today I downloaded Visual Works 7.8 to evaluate somethings, and I like the new projects splash, a really handy application:

Also, changed the fonts, as the next image show:

One more time, I'm impressed with the load speed of the environment.

Producir con Smalltalk

Una costumbre que tengo es releer con cierta periodicidad cosas que escribí hace tiempo, justamente para verificar el efecto del paso de ese tiempo, es decir, si mantienen cierta vigencia o quedan completamente descolocadas.

Unos pequeños párrafos que escribí cuando empecé a ver las ventajas de Smalltalk, allá por el año 2000 o 2001 si mal no recuerdo son los que transcribo a continuación:

A lo largo de los años he tenido oportunidad de aprender muchos lenguajes de programación, cada uno pregonando ser quien iba a revolucionar la productividad y la manera de hacer software, la "interminable galería de luces de colores" como gusta decir Alejandro Reimondo , de Smalltalking.

Esta incesante aparición de nuevas tecnologías de desarrollo que tiran por la borda todo lo conocido y obligan a volver a invertir un montón de tiempo en aprender muchas nuevas inútiles cosas quitan el foco del productor de software de lo que debería ser su objetivo principal: Hacer evolucionar las soluciones que desarrolló para adpatarlas a los cambios en los negocios. Mueven el foco al aprendizaje de nuevas tecnologías, que ya son viejas antes que uno pueda aprender a usarlas.

Esta situación hace que el software se vuelva viejo antes de ser siquiera maduro, hace que con el paso del tiempo los productores de software estemos siempre forzados a migrar a la "nueva plataforma" casi sin pensar en nuevas funcionalidades de nuestros productos. Nunca podemos capitalizar lo que tanto trabajo nos dió desarrollar, sino que la palabra siempre presente es "migración", la cual invariablemente está asociada con un alto costo en tiempo y dinero, casi nunca recuperables.

Esta situación, conocida como "crisis del software", detalles más detalles menos, es la que se ha venido dando en los últimos años en forma alarmante, ya que ni más ni menos, atenta directamente contra el capital de los productores de software, que es el software que han producido para resolver necesidades específicas.

Lo que buscamos: Hacer evolucionar esas soluciones que hemos desarrollado con tanto esfuerzo, que se mantengan vigentes con el paso del tiempo, que no sea necesario empezar de nuevo cada año sólo para obtener lo mismo que teníamos, pero con otra presentación.

La respuesta (o al menos, la mejor respuesta que he visto) a esta situación: Smalltalk. Smalltalk es un ambiente de objetos (que no es lo mismo que decir que es un lenguaje de programación) desarrollado hace algo así como 30 años por un equipo patrocinado por Xerox.

¿Qué les parece? ¿Aún tiene vigencia lo aquí descripto?

Un artículo interesante y una lectura completamente recomendable en este mismo sentido es ¿Por qué objetos? que data del Año 2000 también. Las cosas no han cambiado mucho, ¿no?

O si! Tenemos varias nuevas opciones en Smalltalk, cada una con sus ventajas o no, depende de la evaluación y necesidades de cada uno, pero lo cierto es que ahí están y otras, como S8, prontas a llegar!