On 03-Jul-05, at PM 12:09, Blake wrote:
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.
I would like to extend Blake's point: there are even more aspects that should be fulfilled by Squeak if its 'general acceptance' IS a target for its development team.
At the moment Squeak is a rather exotic, although sympathic environment for Smalltalk afficionadios. Although Smalltalk itself is a clean language with well-defined boundaries, the extravagancy with which Squeak handles GUI is a rip-off...
The MVC-based GUI solution seems to be a bit outdated by Morphic but Morphic is _highly_ undocumented, it has hardly any usable, general purpose and good-looking widget set. If Squeak would like to remain the secret weapon for creating interactive electronic dashboards for 4-8 year old schoolboys (no one older would really appreciate such primitive graphics in the days of alpha blending, glass effect widgets a la Tiger etc. - sorry for the hard expression), so be it. On the other side, if Squeak would like to step up and earn some limelight in the general programmers' population, definitive steps should be undertaken to make its graphical subsystem on par with (or at least approaching to) e.g. Qt, wx or Java foundation classes.
wxSqueak is a heroic effort (kudos Rob Gayvert !!!) but it has inherent weaknesses in the deployment area: Squeak has by-nature a HUGE footprint base system (by 'base' I do not mean barely usable ;-) which could be done by shrinking the image into only 3-4 MBs), wx libraries may add a factor of two to overall package size, not to count the mixed licensing situation.
A modern, native GUI subsystem would be great in Squeak, as well as a fine-tunable shrinking system which clears the deployment image on a per-module basis.
I would really like to see Squeak growing and taking the right direction in the future!
Cheers, Geza