On Thursday 25 July 2002 01:28 pm, Lily Smith wrote:
> One of my assignments was to add a radio button group and then deal
> with
> the user input. Even my teacher does not know how to implement a
> radio button group. He spent half an hour in class, trying to show
> us how to add
> a radio button group. He failed. Then he wanted us to complete that
> assignment ourselves. God! It is even difficult for a SmallTalk
> senior to
> find out something common! How can SmallTalk be popular? Look at
> how easy
> it is to add a radio button group in Microsoft VB!

Didn't you find my July 21 response to your question at all useful? I 
realize it may have required some reading of Smalltalk source to 
understand, but I figured that would be educational.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/squeak/message/47212

Anyway, what you describe is not generally a Smalltalk problem. It is, 
rather, an omission in Squeak (that is, Squeak doesn't really contain 
all of the "usual" kinds of UI widgets in any consistent fashion).

Most other Smalltalks, though, do contain these, and even have UI 
builders to make using them somewhat easier. This is, in part, 
because most of the other Smalltalks are more or less focused on 
being "application development" systems for people making business 
applications. Squeak isn't. Similarly, the other Smalltalks lack 
Squeak's rich Morphic graphics framework, tile scripting, and many 
even lack built-in multimedia support.

Note that  (just as with BASIC and VB) there is no standard Smalltalk 
user interface strategy/class library. Each vendor does it 
differently. At least at the language level (as opposed to the UI 
level) there's much less variation between Smalltalks than there is 
among languages in the BASIC family.

And there are a number of books and other tutorial works that cover 
the different Smalltalk dialects (even Squeak).

However, you are right in that Squeak lacks a good overview. There is 
information about much in Squeak, but it's spread out over several 
books and much of the Internet.

Ideally, there should be some integrated way to get Squeak help in the 
environment itself. There have been a few efforts in this direction, 
but nothing has reached critical mass (for instance, see 
http://sqdb.squeak.info).

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE