Who has no job? (was Re: O'Reilly Squeak book?)

David Chase chase at world.std.com
Thu Apr 18 20:28:59 UTC 2002


At 08:39 PM 4/18/2002 +0200, Cees de Groot wrote:
>Charles Hixson <charleshixsn at earthlink.net> said:

>>This could all be answered if there were a good way to create a "stand 
>>alone executable".  I notice that Dolphin sells that as their high end 
>>product.  But this is so basic that no professional application can be 
>>created without it.  (Well, maybe some, but none that I could use at my 
>>job.)

>Strange world you live in. 'foo.exe' is all OK, while 'foo.exe bar.image'
>is suddenly "unprofessional". Well, I am glad that your users are
>so professional as to reject the majority of applications out there ...

Bingo.  You have just provided The Example of what's getting in the
way of the wider spread of Squeak.  Mr. Hixson gave you some useful
advise, and you prefer to make fun of it.  Whether the users are irrational
or not, does not matter; they want the appearance of a single file.  I
know this because we fielded numerous "irrational" requests for this
in the Java world, and we did the work to give it the look and feel of
a "single executable".  The customer may be irrational, but the customer
is "always right".

>It would be relatively easy, by the way, to patch the VM so that it looks at
>the end of itself for the object memory image; I wouldn't be surprised if such
>a patch is already floating around, but if not, I recall doing this sort of
>stuff back when I used MS-DOS with .EXE files, and it is quite feasible (and
>if there are more environments like the one you seem to work in, it might be a
>useful feature to have a sort of "freeze" button that wraps up VM and image in
>a single file).

If you care about getting more people behind Squeak, then you'll
do this "relatively easy" thing.  Plan B (what we did) was to
make the VM notice how it was invoked, and if it was invoked
under a non-standard name, then go looking (based on rules
that are easy to explain, and ideally are encoded into a
"makeApp" packager) for the image to load.  We eventually
repackaged it into even more files, so that the VM itself was
in a DLL and thus eligible for text sharing among different
applications.

And if it looks like I am trolling, read again.  This is better-
than-average advice, based on my own experience trying to sell
a product with the very same problem.

yours,

David Chase




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