[Newbies] Looking at Squeak

[Michael van der Gulik]

email at noblebell.com wrote:

> Hello,
>  
> I am new to Smalltalk and want to learn it. I have experience in C# 
> and Java and BASIC of various flavors. I downloaded the Dolphin 
> Smalltalk system for Windows and went through some of the tutorials. I 
> really got discouraged by the hefty price tags of both Dolphin and Cincom.
>  
> My question, can I develop shareware applications in Squeak that are 
> standalone and also crossplatform?
>  

Firstly, in my opinion Smalltalk is far superior to C#, Java and BASIC 
:-). But then again, that's just my opinion.

You can develop shareware applications in Squeak, and they're mostly 
guaranteed to be cross-platform. It's possible that you may come across 
OS-dependant behaviour if you use external interfaces such as TCP/IP, 
files, 3-D graphics etc, but this applies to all programming languages.

To distribute your applications, you have several options:

1. You could distribute your "image". This is essentially a snapshot of 
your application, and makes it trivial for somebody else to run your 
application. For examples of images, see the "Pre-configured images" 
section of http://www.squeak.org/Download/. Images range from 4MB up to 
100MB depending on how much stuff you put in them.

2. You can distribute "Monticello" files (.mcz files). These are what we 
developers use to share code with each other, but aren't too difficult 
for ordinary users to load. Monticello files range from a few kilobytes 
to a few megabytes (if you try really hard :-) ). Examples of these are 
splattered all over http://www.squeaksource.com.

3. You can save Morphic projects as .pr files. I don't know much about 
these. I think there was something in Squeak called "Bobs super swiki" 
or something which lets you play with these, but that may be obsolete by 
now.

Regards,
Michael.