Hi Bill,

For a living I program in C# (VS2005) and VisualWorks Smalltalk. The 
latter in v3.1 because of the pricing of new releases.
For fun I use Squeak and Smalltalk/X (from www.exept.de). Both are free 
to use in commercial projects. Smalltalk/X (STX) is also still kept upto 
date by Exept.
I am thinking of switching from VW Smalltalk to STX; perhaps that is an 
alternative for you too.
STX runs on Windows and Linux, it has a good IDE, supports proper 
OS-look and feel window-style and can be used for the development of Web 
applications.

Kind regards,

 

Jan Hussaarts

 

*/Nothing/**/ endures but change/*

                               

-Heraclitus of Ephesos

 



Bill Schwab schreef:
> Jason,
>
> First, in re-reading, I noted that I failed to mention something: I am
> not saying that Squeak freezes when networks turn ugly.  I simply
> remember how hard I had to work at it the last time.  Given what I am
> reading about the threading that underlies it, my scepticism is renewed
> :( 
>
> Regardless of the state of sockets in the face of adversity (aka
> reality), Dolphin's overlapped call mechanism is quite useful, and might
> not be too tough to add.  There are many caveats to it, such as
> undocumented thread affinities, but when it works, it is _really_ nice. 
> I have had very good results with it.
>
> At the risk of becoming a broken record: my complaints about the Squeak
> GUI are not about look, they are about feel.  I can sell funny looking,
> but I cannot sell clumsy.
>
> Bill
>
>
>
>
> "Jason Johnson" wrote:
>
> On 8/11/07, Bill Schwab <BSchwab at ...> wrote:
>   
>> >From a developer's perspective, it is a tough transition. I can work
>>     
> in
>   
>> Squeak, but it is a bitter pill compared to Dolphin. From an
>>     
> end-user's
>   
>> perspective, I fear that Squeak out of the box would cause mutiny. As
>>     
> I
>   
>> have always said, the GUI feel the problem. I deal with busy users in
>> sometimes dire circumstances. They cannot be expected to remember
>> whether they have previously opened a dialog (modality can be a good
>> thing). I think I would be able to design and build around some of the
>> limitations.
>>     
>
> The Dolphin GUI is very very nice to be sure. It's a real shame that
> it didn't catch on more. For me it would seem like a no brainer for a
> small company: An easy language to use, a fast development
> environment.
>
>   
>> Tweak scares me a bit. The capability is fine (even great), but I have
>> reservations about dragging the compiler into it. I would much rather
>> see a higher level GUI editor that uses a time-aware variant of a
>> traditional event system for routing. While I am no big fan of native
>> widgets, I would probably opt for something like wxSqueak to force the
>> point.
>>     
>
> After the previous discussion wouldn't direct rendering be a better
> option? If sig's OpenGL API turns out to be nice maybe that could be
> used. What is really missing is to have the image be able to open
> extra native windows. The same kind of base canvas (or what ever you
> call them) windows as now, just more then one.
>
> In a related question, how much can one legally duplicate the look of
> Windows/Mac, or is there a legal problem there at all? It seems a bit
> arbitrary to say that you can't make windows that look like native
> windows, but you can freely call the OS to do it, no?
>
>   
>> I am glad to see that Andreas fixed some critical threading bugs. I am
>> somewhat surprised that it took so long for them to surface. How does
>> one square that with the popularity of Swikis and other server uses of
>> Squeak? I would have thought they would stress the VM enough to show
>> such bugs, but they apparently did not, or worse yet, the community
>> largely ignored the problems??? Insights would be appreciated.
>>     
>
> I think this was showing up on the Seaside sites from various people,
> but it was non-trivial to track down.
>
>   
>> I am not sure how to copy with the loss(??) of Dolphin's overlapped
>> threads. For those not familiar with them, Dolphin provides a way to
>> mark external functions to be called on a separate OS thread such that
>> only the calling Smalltalk Process is blocked. With a really good SSL
>> Socket implementation, I should be able to wean from them. By really
>> good, I mean that the image cannot hang when a network wire is pulled
>>     
> or
>   
>> a machine or DNS entry does not exist. The calling process should
>> block, but not the entire image.
>>     
>
> I wonder how hard it would be to add this.
>
>
> Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
> University of Florida
> Department of Anesthesiology
> PO Box 100254
> Gainesville, FL 32610-0254
>
> Email: bschwab at anest.ufl.edu
> Tel: (352) 846-1285
> FAX: (352) 392-7029
>
>
>
>   
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: jan.hussaarts.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 309 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/attachments/20070811/44808b07/jan.hussaarts.vcf