Pharo News Blog

Pharo 1.3 is in release candidate mode. The last action needed for release is to package the OneClick image with the right Cog VM. On this side Igor is working on a few critical fixes that should be ready in a couple of days. So you can put the Champagne in the fridge now.

Pharo 1.4 is in alpha mode. Note that starting from 1.4 only one image will be released. Releasing two images actually needs too much effort for our community. Furthermore the core developers usually work on PharoCore and it's hard for them to follow bugs on a image (Pharo) they don't use.
So one small image with easy package loading (and unloading) seems a better way to go. Only one Pharo.

About infrastructure, continuous integration server is moving from Hudson to Jenkins. The Hudson server will be stopped when the migration is finished. For Cog VMs, Pharo 1.4 and current projects, check the Jenkins server.

Want to know more about Pharo's future ? Read the roadmap that has been presented at ESUG conference - among other nice presentations.

The Pharo Project is proud to announce the release of Pharo 1.2.1, the third major release of this clean, innovative, open-source Smalltalk environment.

On Tuesday, March 29th 2011, update #12345 was issued to Pharo's 1.2 development line, a line that started back in June 2010 and was frozen in January 2011. Next, Pharo's continuous integration machinery successfully started building various artifacts based on this 'Pharo Core 1.2', the most important one being 'Pharo 1.2' proper, the full featured development image.

Pharo Core 1.2.1 passes 7.836 unit tests, Pharo 1.2.1 no less than 10.760. A large, international community of developers worked hard for several months to iron out all problems and to make Pharo compatible with various Smalltalk libraries and frameworks, among them Seaside 3.0.3 which passes its 1.599 tests.

True to the Pharo philosophy, this release contains numerous small changes, refactorings, cleanups and bugfixes improving the overall quality. Important changes include:

– Cleaned the Pluggable hierarchy
– Added new undo framework
– Cleaned Morph and PasteUpMorph
– Added DummyUIManager, a UIManager for operating without a UI
– Added NewTextMorph
– Removed left overs from MVC: PopUpMenu, SelectionMenu and CustomMenu
– Cleaned Utilities, Preferences and TheWorldMenu
– Included SimpleMorphic preview
– Removing empty classes
– Added new TextEditor and SmalltalkEditor
– Added new, clean and simple Glamorous, Glamorous Orange GUI Themes

– Added new Pro GUI Theme
– Added Cog compliant behavior
– Added better blocks debugging
– Better support for separating SmalltalkImage and SystemDictionary
– Fixed package dependencies, providing a good platform for kernel images
– Removed old JIT experiments
– Migrated to MethodReferenceWithSource and friends

– Added more pages under the Help system
– Improved the number of commented classes

– New Finder tool (replacing Messages Names and Method Finder)
– New Recent Changes tool (replacing Recent Submissions)
– Improved SpaceTally
– Fixed pointer finders tools
– Integrated SUnit 4

Started Continuous Integration: use Hudson/Jenkins to automatically build images, run tests, and compile VMs

For the Core 1.2 Image development line, 693 issues were resolved.

The full featured Pharo development image is built automatically by loading the Metacello configuration aptly called ConfigurationOfPharo. Important changes include:

– Updated to latest Metacello and all configurations used to use symbolic versions
– New tools: Metacello Configuration Browser, Memory Monitor, and Autotest
– Updated versions of Shout, RoelTyper, OCompletion, OmniBrowser, AutomaticMethodCategorizer, RefactoringBrowsers, Nile, ProfStef
– Added XML-Support, and more Help
– Removed NewInspector

For the Full Dev 1.2 Image development line, 57 issues were resolved.

You can obtain Pharo 1.2.1 through various downloads:

Pharo has a large user base spread all over the world. Hence there is a growing collection of success stories, projects using Pharo that choose to go public with this. Recently, the following were added:

Test coverage is about assessing the relevance of unit tests against the tested application. It is widely acknowledged that a software with a “good” test coverage is more robust against unanticipated execution, thus lowering the maintenance cost. However, insuring a coverage of a good quality is challenging, especially since most of the available test coverage tools do not discriminate software components that require a “strong” coverage from the components that require less attention from the unit tests.
Hapao is an innovative test coverage tool, implemented in the Pharo Smalltalk programming language. It employs an effective and intuitive graphical representation to visually assess the quality of the coverage. A combination of appropriate metrics and relations visually shapes methods and classes, which indicates to the programmer whether more effort on testing is required.

http://hapao.dcc.uchile.cl/

* Next meeting
We want to rotate the time so that people in other timezones can more easily join.
Next meeting takes place on January 4, 2011. Time to be decided (please let us know what a good time for you is)

* List of potential projects/topics to discuss: http://code.google.com/p/pharo/wiki/Projects

* Source code management and history to track all versions and all changes. Current representation of source in the .changes and .sources files is very weak. What we would like to have is a proper code model. ESUG is paying a small company to rewrite from scratch SqueakSource. INRIA is looking into providing Webdav access on their infrastructure. Another missing area is descriptions of the external packages to answer where the code is stored, who the maintainer is, etc.

* Comments: we need more and better comments. We have HelpSystem but it is not used so far. The main obstacle is that one needs to subclass from CustomHelp, which creates an unnecessary dependency on the help package. This can be solved using the builder/pragma approach like done for Settings.
-> suggest this change to Torsten

* How can we make more people, especially newcomers, involved?
-> Separate issues by apparent difficulty and make a more detailed casts how to contribute.
-> attribute the contributions, e.g., on the website like we did for http://pharo-project.org/pharo-download/release-1-0, or via a dedicated twitter feed.
-> ask people to more often hang around on IRC

We are excited to announce our second release of Pharo!

This release contains many bug fixes, improvements, performance optimizations, and new features that didn't get into version 1.0.

Specific information about what is new in this release can be found on http://www.pharo-project.org/pharo-download/release-1-1.

Thanks everyone who has contributed and helped to bring Pharo one step further!

Pharo is a modern open-source Smalltalk language and environment. Pharo’s goals are to provide a robust and clean core and to implement innovative extensions of the language and its environment. By providing a stable and small system and excellent developer tools, Pharo is an attractive platform for mission critical Smalltalk applications.

Pharo 1.0 is the first release since the project started in May 2008. Many companies have already successfully adopted Pharo. Seaside, the Smalltalk web framework, switched to Pharo as their main development platform. A book on Pharo has recently been published (also available as a free PDF). Pharo has a growing community and is supported by research institutions such as INRIA. Pharo is licensed under the MIT License (with some original parts remaining under the Apache License).

Download the Pharo 1.0 one-click image and get started within seconds. Read more about what this release offers.

The main goal of the sprint is to reduce the number of open issues for Milestone 1.1. The sprint is hosted by the Software Composition Group of the University of Bern. For details and registration please see the sprint wiki page.

End of last month the release candidate 2 was announced. As feedback for RC2 has shown, there are still a few open todos and one unresolved problem (IPv4 vs. v6 network implementation).

As announced in another blog post, www.seasidehosting.st now supports Pharo.

There's also a Screencast that demonstrates how to deploy a Seaside/Pharo application on Seasidehosting.

The PDF version of the new book “Dynamic Web Development with Seaside” is available for download now.

The links to the Nabble sites can be found on the Community page. Also many other related mailing lists, such as Seaside, GemStone/S, and Metacello, are on Nabble now.

Mariano Martinez Peck announced Metacello configurations for Pharo. The goal is to define a catalog of packages that are stable and known to work in Pharo. The Pharo 1.0 and forthcoming versions can be built automatically from these configurations, which are stored in a dedicated repository on SqueakSource.

Laurent Laffont created a blog to publish Pharo screencasts. Contact Laurent if you want to share a screencast or if you have an idea for a new screencast that Laurent can produce.

Romain Robbes announced WorkingSet, a small tool that helps you navigate your code in Pharo. It tracks the entities you've changed recently, and lets you access them quickly.

We started collecting companies that are using Pharo. 20 are already on the list – certainly more to come soon! If your company is missing or if you have an interesting project to share, let us know!

Since the traffic on the pharo-project mailing list is quite high and often related to the development of the Pharo core system, we created a new mailing list, pharo-users, targeted to users of Pharo.