PTerm now supports Pharo 9 and Pharo 10

PTerm, the (only) terminal emulator for Pharo has been initially developed and maintained on Pharo 7. Due to some major API changes, PTerm was not compatible with higher version of Pharo such as 9 and 10. Porting it to Pharo 9 and 10 was long time in my to do list, but i didn't have spare time for such task. Fortunately, with the help of Kris, after many issues and pull requests, PTerm finally works on Pharo 9 and 10.

Web based VNC client with AntOS docker image

Long time ago i developed WVNC, a simple protocol based on Web socket that allows to connect to VNC server from browser. WVNC consist of

• A server side plugin (for Antd web server) that (1) acts as a bridge between VNC server and the web server; (2) defines the base protocol on top of websocket for streaming screen data and events to client. JPEG is used as data compression to reduce stream bandwidth.
• A client side API called wvnc.js that implements the protocol defined by the server plugin, decodes JPEG data from the server and renders the data on HTML5 canvas

The protocol works really well for my personal need as i used it on a daily basis to access to my VNC home server from work :), using nothing but the web browser. However, setting up WVNC from scratch is not a trivial task, as it depends on my Antd server which is not a popular web server, thus Stack overflow is not an option :). I've received many contacts from readers on the howto instruction.

As WVNC is finally a part of AntOS eco-system, and AntOS is available as an all-in-one docker image, anyone can now easily run their own web-base VNC client via a single command line without the headache of building every thing from scratch.

CI & automation: Multi-architecture build of software with Jenkins and Docker

Multi-arch software building and distribution is a complex and time-consuming maintenance task in which maintainer/developer need to compile somehow their software for all supported architectures, often, on a single machine. Automation solution such as Jenkins allows to automatize this task and facilitating continuous integration and continuous delivery. Multi-arch software building on a single machine involves the use of different techniques:

• Cross-build: using a cross-toochain to build the software for each target system. This solution is simple but with the cost of polluting the host system with many toolchains which maybe incompatible one to another. Maintenance and update of these toolchains are complicated to manage.
• Virtualization solutions such as docker address these problem by using a sandboxed/containerized image with all tools necessary to build the software for each target architecture. Docker facilitate the setup, maintenance and update of different building environments using images.

This post introduces the basic steps of setting up an automation server that allows to build and distribute multi-arch software using Jenkins and docker.