email@noblebell.com wrote:
Hello,
I am new to Smalltalk and want to learn it. I have experience in C# and Java and BASIC of various flavors. I downloaded the Dolphin Smalltalk system for Windows and went through some of the tutorials. I really got discouraged by the hefty price tags of both Dolphin and Cincom.
My question, can I develop shareware applications in Squeak that are standalone and also crossplatform?
Firstly, in my opinion Smalltalk is far superior to C#, Java and BASIC :-). But then again, that's just my opinion.
You can develop shareware applications in Squeak, and they're mostly guaranteed to be cross-platform. It's possible that you may come across OS-dependant behaviour if you use external interfaces such as TCP/IP, files, 3-D graphics etc, but this applies to all programming languages.
To distribute your applications, you have several options:
1. You could distribute your "image". This is essentially a snapshot of your application, and makes it trivial for somebody else to run your application. For examples of images, see the "Pre-configured images" section of http://www.squeak.org/Download/. Images range from 4MB up to 100MB depending on how much stuff you put in them.
2. You can distribute "Monticello" files (.mcz files). These are what we developers use to share code with each other, but aren't too difficult for ordinary users to load. Monticello files range from a few kilobytes to a few megabytes (if you try really hard :-) ). Examples of these are splattered all over http://www.squeaksource.com.
3. You can save Morphic projects as .pr files. I don't know much about these. I think there was something in Squeak called "Bobs super swiki" or something which lets you play with these, but that may be obsolete by now.
Regards, Michael.