Following his announcement of the release candidate last month, Timothy Falconer of Squeakland has now announced the full release of Etoys 4, which you can now download from their website.

The Squeakland Fall newsletter has the Etoys 4 release notes which detail the changes you’ll find, in English and Spanish. The newsletter also has some thoughts by Scott Wallace on this release which completes the hand-over of Squeak Etoys from Viewpoints Research to the newly formed Squeakland Foundation.

To publicise some of the work being done using Etoys, the Squeakland site has a new feature: the Squeakland Showcase. Everyone can now share their projects directly from Etoys to the website, where the Etoys community can then benefit from the many surprising and useful Etoys examples that are available.

Timothy invites anyone using Squeak or Etoys, to consider adding their name to their Squeakers list. More than 175 people from 35 countries have signed, which really shows the enthusiasm and reach of Etoys throughout the world.

Timothy adds “Special thanks to the Squeakland software team, particularly Bert Freudenberg, Yoshiki Ohshima, and Scott Wallace for their tremendous efforts in the last month. Your hard work really shows!”

Noury Bouraqadi wrote to the squeak-dev mailing list with news that French Smalltalk users are holding their eighth annual SmalltalkParty in Paris on Saturday 28th November 2009.

The empahsis is on short presentations, so there promises to be plenty of interesting presentations. Items already planned for discussion include:

• Speed dating with Smalltalk—Smalltalk in 15 min
• Pharo: a Smalltalk vision
• Profiler in Smalltalk
• Mondrian  visualisations
• Seaside by example
• Small Parser—an executable grammar-based parser
• Helvetia: A framework for DSLs
• Coral: a Smalltalk scripting Langage
• F-Script 2.0 news

The session will be held at Ecole des Mines de Paris, Boulevard Saint Michel – Paris and runs from 09:00 to 17:00.

For more information (in French) see the SmalltalkParty webpage.

The SqueakDBX team have been very busy recently working on their OpenDBX plugin which allows Squeak users to perform relational database operations (including DDL and DML as well as SQL) through an open source library.

Their new release, Version 1.1, now supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, Sqlite3, Oracle and MSSQL on Windows, Linux and Mac, as well as incorporating a number of performance refactorings.

They’ve also found time to build a new website for SqueakDBX, which contains lots of documentation and links to useful resources.

To get a better idea of the features of SqueakDBX, and of the work that the team have been doing, have a look at their ESUG 2009 presentation. You can also follow their work at http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakdbx

Timothy Falconer wrote to the squeak-dev mailing list to announce the Squeak Etoys 4 release candidate, in preparation for final release on 21st October.

This release is the product of nine months of work by the Etoys software team, and several weeks of sprinting by Bert Freudenberg, Yoshiki Ohshima, Scott Wallace and Timothy.

The Etoys team are now looking for your input: Timothy says “Please help us test the new Etoys! We want to make sure that it’s rock solid before getting used in schools and homes throughout the world”.

You can download the Etoys 4 release candidate at http://squeakland.org/download under “Release Candidates”.

Highlights of Etoys 4 include:

• loading and sharing projects directly to the central Squeakland Showcase
• fully “license clean”, so that it can be included in Linux distros
• improved toolbar and viewer
• optional drop-down categories for the project info box
• lots of fixes and new translations throughout

To learn more about what’s new in Etoys 4, you can watch an interview with Scott Wallace or an introduction to the new beta showcase.

If you find any problems in the release candidate, you can try the Etoys chat channel, or post in the forums, or if you’re able to reproduce the error, add a ticket to the issue tracker.

Timothy passes on special thanks to everyone who made suggestions or helped the team to test the betas, saying “We’d be nowhere without our community!”

Following on from their high-profile presence at ESUG this year, the Argentinian Smalltalk community are preparing to host their third annual domestic Smalltalk conference, Smalltalks 2009.

Running from 19th to 21st November in Buenos Aires, the conference’s goal is to “gather both the Argentine and International Smalltalk community to get connected sharing our work and experience with regards to Smalltalk or related topics”.

The conference will have two streams: “Research and Education” for research and education work done with Smalltalk in universities and public or private
entities; and “Industry and Development” for presentations related to Smalltalk software developed by companies or individuals, both public and private.

In addition, the event will host a Smalltalk programming contest.  As in previous years, well known personalities from the international community will attend the conference.

All those connected with Smalltalk, be it faculty, students, researchers, developers or entrepreneurs, are invited to participate, free of charge, as presenters and members of the audience.

In addition, early registrants get a great-looking T-shirt for free, so get your bookings in now!

It has been two months since the Squeak Oversight Board first put forward their “New Community Development Model”. At the time the proposal caused a lot of heated debate on the squeak-dev mailing list, with concerns being expressed that similar efforts in the past had had little lasting impact, and had caused great frustration for those pushing those earlier efforts.

The motives of the Board were to “get rid of as many hurdles as possible in the contribution process [and]  to enable the community at large to improve Squeak, the core of the system and its supporting libraries”.

So, two months down the line, how’s it doing?

If sheer volume is any criterion, it looks like a great success with over 500 packages uploaded as patches to 3.10.2 and over 40,000 downloads from the trunk (see bottom of the linked page for up to date statistics).

The results of all this activity are available to use and test in the daily updated image published at http://ftp.squeak.org/trunk/ (needs a recent VM). If you want to contribute, you can add new patches at http://source.squeak.org/inbox/, or ask one of the current developers for access to the developers repository at http://source.squeak.org/trunk.

If you just want to get an idea of what’s going on, check out the commit logs that are getting posted to the squeak-dev mailing list, and to the #squeak irc channel on freenode.

All the participants should now have safely returned home after a hugely successful ESUG conference. Participants from around the world (including an Argentinian football team) shrugged off the economic climate to spend a week in Brest and share their experiences and aspirations with fellow Smalltalkers.

Highlights included:

• Presentations from a range of speakers from industry and research backgrounds, including  Cloudfork, DeltaStreams, WebVelocity.
• Tutorials for Seaside, Aida, SqueakNOS, and many, many, more.
• The Innovation Technology Awards, awarded to Retrobjects which is a great C64 emulator, PhidgetLab which uses eToys to interact with real world objects, SqueakNOS: a lightning-fast bootable Squeak image, and Glamour which is a flexible engine for scripting Smalltalk browsers.
• Updates on various Smalltalk platforms:  VisualWorks, VA Smalltalk, Object Studio, Gemstone and Pharo.
• And lots of great opportunities to network and socialise, including the inaugural ESUG Blind Date!

Check out the photos for a flavour of the conference: Adriaan, Hernan, James, Yuri. and many more.

Comments on the web have been very positive too:

• “ESUG was a blast, totally.”
• “Definitely the best Smalltalk conference I’ve ever been to.”
• “a great conference”
• “a pleasure to attend every year”
• “fascinating, inspiring and enjoyable”
• “it’s been intense”

With reviews like that, next year’s conference in Barcelona is bound to be a sell-out, so remember to book early!

(Photo from Yuri’s collection)

ESUG 2009 has got off to a successful start, with a packed programme of events lined up for the next few days.

After an introduction from Stefan Ducasse for ESUG and local organisers Alain Plantec and Loic Lagadec, Georg Heeg looked at Smalltalk’s history and future direction and James Foster ran through news from the Gemstone world, including brief discussions of Metacello and Scaffolding.

After lunch there were a series of shorter presentations including the “academic strand” of the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies.

In the evening, Instantiations sponsored the reception event in the evening, and took the opportunity to announce free editions of Visual Age Smalltalk for academic and open source usage, which was very well received!

Attendees also had the opportunity to see the entries for the ESUG 2009 Innovation Technology Awards. A record-breaking 21 applications were entered this year, and the results of the voting will be announced at the conference social event on Thursday.

(Photo from Adrian van Os’ site)

Chris Muller announced release 42 of Magma to the Squeak-dev mailing list. Magma is a multi-user object database for Squeak and Pharo images and which provides transparent access to a large-scale shared persistent object model. Magma release 42 brings unprecedented scale and availability of persistent domain models to Squeak users.  In particular, a single logical repository can now be served from multiple servers simultaneously, each hosting their own physical copy which are kept constantly up to date automatically.

There’s lots more information, introductory material and documentation at the Magma homepage.

The US Squeakfest finished last week, following on from the previous Brazilian event, and it was a great success. Perhaps the best way to give a flavour of the excitement of the events and the enthusiasm of the attendees is to quote Timothy Falconer’s report:

As I write this, I’m flying home from Squeakfest USA.  Sitting here, staring at my laptop, I’m completely unable to find appropriate words to describe the magic and friendship of the last few weeks.  So many passionate talks, so many stirring examples, so many last minute details and surprises.

I’m tired.  That much is clear.  Blame it on three conferences in four weeks and roughly fifteen thousand miles of travel in between.  Were it not for my many Squeaker traveling companions, I’d have curled up to hibernate long ago.  Truly the best part of the last month has been the company I’ve kept: Rita, Yoshiki, Marta, Kim, Scott, Alex, Bert, Ted, Bill, Randy, both Kathleens, Avigail, and Milan. Sharing the adventure with people of such talent and humor has truly been an embarrassment of riches.

As for the presentations, workshops, and hallway talks, there’s just too much to say.  With dozens of sessions between the two Squeakfests, my mind’s a blur with memories of enthusiasm and insight, along with strengthened motivation to support and expand our vibrant Etoys community.

Rather than summarize my recollections, I’ll instead point you to the video on the Squeakland website http://squeakland.org/resources/audioVisual/#cat865 (scroll down to Squeakfest Brasil and Squeakfest USA).

We managed to capture nearly all of Squeakfest USA on our live webcast feed, though we lost the first half of the presentation from South Korea.  Also, the final roundtable wasn’t posted at the request of one of the participants. My apologies for the audio problems on the first morning.  If you start at the beginning, know that the sound does get better.  Also, if the video screen is at times too hard to read, the blame rests with the web stream, which reduced quality to improve bandwidth.  We will be posting better video from both events in the future, particularly of the children’s workshop, so stay tuned.

I’d like to give a special thanks to Rita Freudenberg, our education director, who earned the “most traveled” award for her trips from Germany to both Brazil and Los Angeles.  When you total her air distance, she flew more than 40,000 kilometers (25,000 miles), which means she effectively circled the globe for Squeakland in the last month.  Her insight, passion, and hard work in the last eight months were instrumental in both Squeakfests.  As with her husband Bert, her continuing efforts on behalf of the Etoys community are unparalleled.  Also a big thanks to Marta, Bruno, Kim, and Kathryn for tending to the many details of both conferences.  Your hard work really showed.   Most of all, I’d like to thank everyone at Viewpoints Research Institute for their time and talent in the last year.  Your guidance has greatly helped Squeakland Foundation as we take and carry the Etoys torch into the future. Wow! What more is there to say? Let’s hope that ESUG 2009 proves to be as inspiring!

Nicolas Petton recently announced on the squeak-dev mailing list the first public release of Iliad, which is succintly described on the Iliad website as a “a flexible, lightweight but powerful Smalltalk web framework.” Originally developed on GNU Smalltalk, but ported to Squeak/Pharo, Iliad features:

• standalone stateful widgets
• nice urls with a simple routing system
• simple API
• easy to setup and deploy (no complicated configuration step)
• javascript layer to update widgets using AJAX. If javascript is not enabled, the behaviour remains the same by making normal requests
• support for the Magritte meta-description framework, for simple generation of views on data

Iliad combines elements of the other leading Smalltalk web frameworks Seaside, Aida/Web and HttpView2. You can find out more about the installation and use of Iliad by reading the documentation on the Iliad site, and on the GNU Smalltalk site.