Thierry:

Re:
>I am impressed by the Squeak technical efforts but I don't understand
>the 'marketing' directions.

One difference between Squeak and Java is that Squeak isn't being
"marketed" at all, at least not for the same reasons. Squeak is not
making money or playing a stategic role for any business. It does
have many enthusiastic fans who try to communicate the reasons for
their enthusiasm to others, and who are even willing to donate
time and programming cycles to this end.

Re:
>Also, if the Squeak VM technology is ahead of Java. What will stop the
>Java people from 'copying' some of your ideas.

Nothing at all, and I wish they would! It would be lovely to see
a Java system in which classes and methods could be created and
changed at run-time, which supported a truely interactive
programming environment, and which really allowed applications
to run identically across a wide range of platforms. Face it,
Smalltalk is not likely to replace Java any time soon. Many
programmers, like you, will be forced to use Java. It would
be great if Java would take some of the good ideas from Smalltalk
and Squeak so those folks who *must* Java could have as
many of the benefits of Smalltalk as possible. And at least
Java is a major improvement over C and C++.

If you'd really like to use Squeak as a plug-in or helper app,
it is easily done. (I recommend the "helper app" approach, since
that lets Squeak have its own window that can persist across
web-page changes. However, it has been made to work as a Netscape
plug-in on the Mac. It only took two days to do this, most of
which was understanding the plug-in API and figuring out how to
make Squeak run as call-backs from Netscape. I suspect it would
be pretty easy to make it run as a plug-in on other platforms
as well.

Security issues *are* an issue, but you could disable the file system
access primitives in your VM as a first step.

Even if you do all the above, you may have a hard
time justifying the use of Squeak to your management. One of the
best arguments is that it puts you in control of your own destiny.
You have the source code for the VM, so you can fix problems. You
aren't at the mercy of the bugs and incompatibilities in Java
implementation. That can save you a huge number of headaches.

Good luck!

	-- John