On Mon, 21 Jun 1999 13:05:31 -0700 Nathan Young <nyoung at silcom.com> wrote: 
>Here's my question about databases, and a related question about
>applications.  Can I connect to an external data source from within
>squeak?  Or is there another way to get at information that's not in
>your image without reading it from a file?  The related question:  Is
>there a way to encapsulate a squeak project into an application that
>could be used by people without making them get into squeak?

Nathan,

Those are good questions for which there has been a fair amount of discussion, but as yet incomplete answers. One answer to the database question is Stephen Pope's recent port of the MinneStore database:

I've just up-loaded new builds and clean source filesets for the STP12
goodies version STP12_2.4c and the SMS (SqueakMinneStore) object
database to the usual places -- see
http://www.create.ucsb.edu/squeak/STP12.html and
ftp://ftp.create.ucsb.edu/pub/stp/OODB/SMS-2.4c/ respectively.

Other possibilities (i.e. some r&d required) are:
- does the data source you want to use hav a TCP socket interface. If so, it should be fairly simple to get something going.
- is there an API (DLL or equivalent) available? If so, then a little VM (i.e. C) work would be required.

As to encapsulating a Squeak application, the simplest is to distribute an image that contains the app (possibly with lots of unneeded stuff stripped out) and a VM. While it's not a single file executable, neither are most things these days. Recent discussion has highlighted some of the issues in putting everything into one file, but there probably isn't a cross-platform way of doing this.

Hope this helps a bit.

Cheers,
Bob