Adrian Lienhard

Seasidehosting now runs Pharo

I'm happy to announce that www.seasidehosting.st now supports Pharo!

There are no special settings or configurations needed. Get a Pharo/Seaside image, for instance from www.seaside.st/download/pharo, install your application, and upload it to seasidehosting.st.

Before, Pharo was not supported because the special VM used did not run closure images. Since many people asked for support of Pharo, we've updated the VM. It took some time, but as promised, we managed to finish it before the upcoming Pharo 1.0 release.

I'd like to thank ESUG and netstyle.ch for their continuous support of SeasideHosting!

Posted by Adrian Lienhard on January 28, 2010

Pharo Sprint in Lille, France

Aoround 20 people attended the Pharo sprint in Lille, France, which took place from 17th to 20th October 2009. Our main target was to finish version 1.0. We managed to fix several long-standing problems and eventually the unit tests – over 7000 in total – all passed. As a result we published a first release candidate replacing the current beta version.

Another area of work was to start off 1.1-alpha. Since we are going to provide maintenance updates for 1.0 after its release, there are now two parallel update streams. For version 1.1 we defined the following milestones:

New preferences system

Integrate Alien

Improve code quality (e.g., make selected Lint tests pass)

Continuous integration system

It was a great sprint with many enthusiastic people who were eager to take Pharo one step further. Thanks to everyone, and especially to Stef and his group for the hosting and INRIA for the financial support.

Posted by Adrian Lienhard on October 22, 2009

New comment

PhD thesis awarded the Ernst Denert-Stiftung Prize

My PhD thesis, Dynamic Object Flow Analysis, has been awarded the 2009 Ernst Denert-Stiftung Prize for Software Engineering. This renowned prize is awarded every year for the best dissertation and carries a value of €5000. I received the award during the annual GI conference (Gesellschaft für Informatik E.V) in Germany last week.

My thesis is available online and can be ordered as a book (see Publications).

Receiving the award from Prof. Dr. Ernst Denert during the annual GI conference.

Congratulations

Congratulations!
Looks like you did quite a good job, though! :)

Peter Osburg

(10/09/09 - 8:17 am)

New comment

Pharo Goes Beta

More than 1.5 years after Pharo was born, we are happy to announce the first beta release! At this point, there are still known problems, but no major changes will be introduced anymore.

The system is stable enough to get serious testing now. Various people already reported that they are using Pharo in their (commercial) projects.

In spring of 2008, Pharo was started as a fork of Squeak 3.9. The name "Pharo" evolved from suggestions like Beacon, Tombolo, Atoll, Lagoon, Lighthouse, etc. Our mission statement is the following:

Pharo's goal is to deliver a clean, innovative, open-source Smalltalk environment. By providing a stable and small core system, excellent developer tools, and maintained releases, Pharo is an attractive platform to build and deploy mission critical Smalltalk applications. Pharo is MIT licensed and is steered by a board of benevolent dictators. The board makes final decisions if no consensus can be reached within the community. Pharo fosters a healthy ecosystem of both private and commercial contributors who advance and maintain the core system and its external packages.

Until today the core image has seen 400 batches of updates. The following list gives an overview of important achievements:

Integration of Polymorph GUI and widgets

Integration of FreeType font support with subpixel anti aliasing

Menu cleanups and operating system menu support for OS X

Removal of EToys, MVC, MorphicExtras, SqueakMap, Sound, and various cruft

Full block closure support

MIT license clean

Reduction of the memory footprint

Many enhancements, such as regex, new input sensor, new preference browser

800 closed issues in the bug tracker

The increasing number of people that contribute and use Pharo indicates that the project is on the right track. Here are just three excerpts from mails posted to the mailing list during the last two months:

"Pharo is the most exciting thing to come along for me in quite awhile!" – Steve Wirts (June 19)

"[...] you have an organization which is able to deliver"
– Janko Mivšek (June 23)

"I absolutely believe Pharo is 100% on the right track, and a critical component in a potential Smalltalk resurgence." – Robert Peters (July 9)

Also the download statistic of the Pharo image shows that Pharo has already found quite some interest (lines show number of downloads per month for the Squeak-dev resp. Pharo image):

Thanks to Damien Cassou for building Pharo images and providing the statistics

What's left for the final release of 1.0? The list of open issues for milestone 1.0 tracks the remaining tasks. Also, we need to decide on the packages (developer tools) that are integrated in the official Pharo image by default. But we don't plan to keep the beta tag forever, so stay tuned...

Posted by Adrian Lienhard on July 31, 2009

New comment

Pharo Sprint in Bern (July 4, 2009)

Yesterday, we sprinted for almost 12 hours and I am quite amazed what we achieved during this time.

We focused on fixing and integrating the issues relevant for the upcoming 1.0 release. In total, 18 batches of updates were pushed into the stream. During the sprint, the bug tracker has been updated 135 times!

We also made progress fixing failing tests, improving the speed of OmniBrowser (David and Alex), writing the Pharo by Example book (Oscar), and creating a first version of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharo.

The 10 participants were: Alexandre Bergel, Andreas Leidig, David Röthlisberger, Fabrizio Perin, Lukas Renggli, Niko Schwarz, Oscar Nierstrasz, Philippe Marschall, Stef Ducasse, and me (taking the pictures).

Many thanks to http://scg.unibe.ch to host the sprint and sponsor the pizza!