Newbie Squeak questions...

Doug Way dway at riskmetrics.com
Thu Dec 20 20:54:20 UTC 2001


Henrik Gedenryd wrote:
> 
> Todd Kueny wrote:
> 
> > 1) Are there many other commercially sold (non-smalltalk-programming) apps
> > using Squeak as a base?
> 
> Not very many. I can't name any but that doesn't mean there are none. A few
> efforts went down with the dotcoms in the last year or so.

For some actual examples of Squeak apps (commercial and non-commercial), you may want to look at the "Production Squeak" swiki page:

http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/556

> > 2) It looks like there is no good way to access a database from Squeak
> > (probably ODBC).  Is this true?  I am also interested in integrating database
> > access into a Wiki.  I thought I saw something about Squeak and MySQL, but I
> > couldn't find it.
> 
> There is MySQL support somewhere, I've heard talk about PostgreSQL as well.

The "Databases and Persistence" page on the Swiki has some info on MySQL support:

http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/512

> > 4) It looks like the Squeak license would require us to turn over all classes
> > we created back to squeak.org, which is okay.  We would probably deploy our
> > proprietary software components as VM plug-ins.  Are there any other such
> > commercial plug-ins?  It looks like this plug-in approach would not violate
> > the license???

I think the spirit of the license indicates that applications written on top of Squeak do not need to be made public, only changes to existing classes or to the VM are supposed to be made public.  In any case, I think it's more of a moral obligation than a legal obligation.

> > 6) What's the best documentation for Squeak (if any)?
> 
> The usual answer used to be there isn't any, but there are currently to
> recent Squeak books out, with extremely confusing, generic and
> non-informative names. The white one is intro-level, and the blue one goes
> deeper into various more sophisticated Squeak-specific technologies.
> Although you wouldn't seem to need the first one, you might as well get both
> ;-)

In addition to the books, take a look at the Squeak Swiki if you haven't already:

http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak

The Swiki is the largest online source of Squeak documentation.  Parts of it aren't that well organized, but there's a lot of stuff there, and you can use the search feature to find things.

Anyway, good luck with your commercial efforts... there are plenty of people on this list to answer more specific questions if you have them!

- Doug Way
  dway at riskmetrics.com




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