Hi Stefan / All,

You are not alone! I am developing an application in Squeak for a handheld (Intermec. Futhermore my employer is co-developing the program in java and using the project as a testing ground for Squeak.

I had little Smalltalk experience before this, so there has been a lot a of learning to do. It's all good fun, but coming from Visual Basic, it's not a picnic. On the other hand smalltalk has the novel feature that it actually does something useful.

The only real set back I've experienced was a random problem with Morphic. Windows would occasionally get draw with their contents distributed all over the desktop - i.e. buttons completely off their containing window, or unclipped text morphs. This was particularly bad running on the handheld (Win PPC).

I was rescued as my boss had a good mate who is something of a smalltalk guru. The problem turned out to be a result of event calling. We found that by waiting for a system cycle to complete, we prevented the mis-drawing:

deferEvent: aSymbol "Defer the triggering of the event till the next world cycle."

WorldState addDeferredUIMessage: [self triggerEvent: aSymbol]

I haven't gotten too far with stripping the image - just adding my code to a "basic image" and running an abandon sources. Though this is a lively topic on the lists at present.

As for installs, the Java project uses .cab files to install the app, as these extract without futher user intervention. I've yet to use these to ship my squeak version. At present I'm transferring stuff on a flash card.

Good luck with you project!

Mark (London, UK)

Hello,

the topic "Squeak on Handhelds" has been discussed several times on this list in the past. I'd just like to ask, what's the state of the art, if there are people working with/ on Squeak for Handhelds, an maybe if there's some help needed.

Background: Smalltalk is my favorite programming language, and a couple of years ago i worked with Visual Age for Smalltalk. In the past years I played around with Squeak, but i'm far away from beeing a Squeak-expert. At the time i have to implement a UI for a Handheld running WindowsCE (iPaq). The UI shall control actions served by an ejb/ servlet-container (jboss) via HTTP-GET-Requests to a servlet. For the first version of the control-sw we used ewe, a free Java-Implementation for Handhelds (www.ewesoft.org). Unfortunately the UI was not "sexy" enough for our customer. Now I'm trying Squeak, because Morphic as a lot of possibilities to implement graphics/ animation/ sound and other "sexy" things. (btw. "sexy" in this context means: colorful, animated, playful etc.). For the first tests I used the SqueakVM 3.0 compiled for ARM (http://www.is.titech.ac.jp/~ohshima/squeak/WinCE/) and a default 3.2-image. Everything seems to work fine, i built funny buttons, lists and so on. Networking works fine too (WLAN).

I'd like to know if there are any pitfalls - for now everything seems to be a bit too easy. Do you have any hints/ tips for stripping down the image? Any ideas on how to implement an automatic installer (an executable that installs the sw on the iPaq)? I heard of the possibility to "close" the image (prevent the user from opening a world-menu etc.).

Thanks in advance for any hints, tips or resources. And if there's any help needed, let me know.

regards, Stefan