In my previous article, How to Create a Pharo Smalltalk Plugin, I outlined how to create a Pharo Smalltalk plugin. However, since then, I’ve discovered a more convenient way to produce these plugins using the PharoPluginBuilder and StarterPlugin. In this post, I wanted to inform and describe the idea of this simplified process of creating a Pharo Smalltalk plugin.
As businesses increasingly rely on software to deliver their products and services, ensuring that their production applications are running smoothly and efficiently becomes a must for maintaining what makes your app to be dependable on: application reliability, performance, and availability. One critical aspect of monitoring production apps is measuring resource usage, including CPU, memory, and network utilization and that’s very well covered by many solutions. As previously mentioned, I particularly like The TLIG Stack for that. These metrics can provide valuable insights into the application’s health, allowing teams to identify performance bottlenecks and detect potential issues before they escalate into larger problems. ...
Pharo is a powerful open-source Smalltalk-based programming language and environment that has been widely used for research and development in various fields. Specially Pharo at Inria, France’s National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology. However, the lack of a native plugin for TensorFlow, a popular open-source machine learning framework, has been a major limitation for high efficiency AI development with Pharo. I’ve written this post to let you know that, I’ve proposed a Google Summer of Code 2023 project to create a TensorFlow plugin for Pharo, which will unlock the full potential of Pharo for production grade AI development. ...
When working with Smalltalk, you may wish to access functionality that exists in a specific library or technology that you do not want to recreate. In such cases, you have two options: creating an FFI bridge or extending the Smalltalk VM with new primitives. In this article, we’ll explore the less common method of extending the Pharo Virtual Machine with an external plugin by creating a HelloWorldPlugin. The goal is to provide insight and clarity into the process of extending the VM in this manner, and to explain the steps involved in Pharo 9 as of February 2023.
Today, I’m excited to announce a new release of PharoDawnTheme, this dark warm color theme for the Pharo Smalltalk IDE. This theme is available for Pharo 9 and 10
When I was using Smalltalk in a daily basis I had the chance to understand quite well the things that would make productivity go high. Here are some sketches I’ve done. I didn’t do the debugger and the package manager system, and both of them have great impact on this but hopefully you can imagine how productive this could be.
There are many things we can do to have an Amber Smalltalk IDE that makes the difference in terms of developing experience and productivity. The best ones take a lot of effort that is currently unfunded. Maybe we should start a Kickstart campaign and change that. But in the meantime why not do smaller steps in the right direction? We could do small incremental improvements with what we already have. ...
Using an Announcer can give you a lot of flexibility for making your Amber components interact loosely coupled. And while developing, it is normal to rename a class. Today I was working with a product and I had this announcement class with a typo OrdedProductEditRejected which I’ve renamed to OrderedProductEditRejected. None of the current Amber IDE’s have a refactoring tool to help you to rename globally and changing the methods that are using the class, so you have to go old school and rename in every place yourself.
In November 5, 6 and 7th I was at Smalltalks2014 where I presented a talk about Startups and Smalltalk that mentions flow. I want to say a thanks to the organizers for having me there to bring this topic that gave me the opportunity to share this information among many Smalltalk enthusiasts, but also because I met new friends and found some old ones. One common theme I’ve found: I had many great and deep conversations with lots of them. There is something fundamental that is interesting about this technology that seems to make people to be really conscious and thoughtful.