Squeak's "general acceptance"

Michael van der Gulik squeakml at gulik.co.nz
Sun Jul 3 09:48:34 UTC 2005


Blake wrote:
> If Squeak is to be accepted into the business community at large, I 
> would  say the website is way less imporant than the ability to slap 
> down a grid,  hook it up to a database, and do some sort of live 
> interaction.
> 
> It's not really exciting--though it'd be nice to see Smalltalk 
> principles  applied--but it's fundamental.
> 
> I have a project right now I'd like to do in seaside, but it requires 
> me  to be able to read and display a table on the web, something easily 
> done  in other environments, but not in Squeak.
> 
> Just an opinion. I keep looking for places to use Squeak in a business  
> context. Database connectivity and display is key.

Ironically, I started on such a project last weekend. I call it 
"tables", but currently its unusable. BobsUI used to be something similar.

Squeak has loads of potential and can eventually be much more powerful 
than what Delphi can do. Imagine:

- take an existing business system, made using Squeak tables.
- Take any page, which has a Grid, some buttons etc on it.
- Pop up a halo and move that button to where you really wanted it... at 
runtime!
- Add your own button/listbox/whatever (at runtime!), and code it there 
and then on the live system.
- Add a column to a grid (which automatically adds it to the table!).
- Each item in the grid would be an object. Double-clicking on one would 
show a UI for that object... without explicit coding (unless you wanted 
that)! (i.e. invoke object>>asEditMorph).
- Select a column showing a list of objects. Right-click "Show object 
attribute as column" and select which attribute of those objects you 
want to see. Voila! You've just done the equivalent of a join on two tables.

So yea. I aspire to one day do a demonstration where I build a fully 
functional business system to the requirements of a volunteer /during/ 
the 1-hour demonstration. Now that would be cool.

Mikevdg.




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