Territorial: A new package for Geographical Information Retrieval for Smalltalk

Territorial is a Smalltalk library for Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR) in geopolitical objects. It was originally designed for a Phylogeographic Information Retrieval system based in BioSmalltalk.

There will be no scripts in this post, everything is explained in the Territorial User Manual (PDF). The Territorial library has two locations: SmalltalkHub is where I will commit latest changes. The GitHub repository for bug reporting and maintaining documentation until I find comfortable using GitHub from Pharo in Windows.

Territorial is also a never-ending task, a library like this couldn't ever be finished. But now it is public under the MIT license, ready to get your ideas, issues and patches. If you want to discuss about features, ports to platforms or other collaboration opportunities, please do not hesitate to contact me.

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Detecting system platform in Smalltalk

This is a short post describing how to detect the system platform (Operating System) where your virtual-machine is running. You can use the following expressions in several major Smalltalk flavors:

Pharo

" Pharo >= 4 "
Smalltalk os isWin32.
Smalltalk os isMacOS.
Smalltalk os isMacOSX.
Smalltalk os isUnix.
" Pharo 3 "
OSPlatform current isWindows.
" Pharo 2 "
OSPlatform isWin32.

VisualWorks >= 7

ExternalInterface currentPlatform.

Dolphin 7

OSVERSIONINFO current osName.
OSVERSIONINFO current isWinV5OrLater
OSVERSIONINFO current isWinV6OrLater
OSVERSIONINFO current isWinVista
OSVERSIONINFO current isWinXP
OSVERSIONINFO current isWinXPOrLater
OSVERSIONINFO current isNT

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Visualize commit history in Pharo

Overview

This is another GraphViz post for Pharo Smalltalk. A few days ago I committed a working version of GraphBuilder. It was mostly coded by Lukas Renggli and I updated the package to work with the current Pharo images and added minor features (like displaying commit date in the nodes).

Installation and Usage

To install the package, open the Catalog Browser, select and install GraphViz, or evaluate the following expression:

Gofer new
 smalltalkhubUser: 'hernan' project: 'GraphViz';
 package: 'ConfigurationOfGraphViz';
 load.
((Smalltalk at: #ConfigurationOfGraphViz) project version: #stable) load: #('Tools').

The usage is pretty simple and just requires to select the repository to analyze:

GBAncestryBuilder select.

Depending upon the repository selected, it could take some time to complete since it needs to fetch all repository packages (so please, use it with caution).

On completion, two files are generated in the dot subdirectory on the working directory, one for the textual DOT language and the other one in PNG format.

Examples

Follows some outputs from analyzing several repositories:

History of OrderPreservingDictionary, a special class of Dictionary where order is preserved:

Visual history of Connectors, a Morphic package to make connected drawings (you may want to check Roassal for a more updated visualization engine):

And finally, a graph of CommandShell, an Unix command shell simulator for Squeak and Pharo Smalltalk:

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