[Newbies] sandboxing a world

[David T. Lewis]

On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 01:23:56AM -0700, David Holiday wrote:
> Hi all, 
> 
> I'm just now getting into squeak and finding it a delightful programming environment. I am, however, curious as to why some features don't seem readily available. First and foremost, why isn't there a stripped down version of the VM that runs Squeak programs and nothing else? That is, why isn't it possible to distribute Squeak program to users in the way Java developers distribute Java programs? 
> 
> To put this another way, let's say I'm a Squeak developer and I want to distribute my program to a community of people that does X. Under the current paradigm, all the people that do X also have to be Squeak savvy people if they are going to make use of my program. They have to be savvy enough to know what it is, install it, run it, install my program, and run my program. Moreover, they have to know enough about the Squeak interface to know what to do if they accidentally close my program window. Conversely, with Java, the user doesn't have to know anything about Java beyond downloading JVM. In this way, I can distribute my program to everyone that does X without having to worry about whether or not they also know anything about Squeak. 
> 
> So why isn't something like this available? 

Hello David,

Here are a couple of links that explain how to approach distribution:

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5892

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3563

One of the things you will notice is that no special VM is needed. The
VM is just a program that brings the object environment to life. All of
the really interesting things happen in the objects, and you have full
access to them as soon as the VM brings them to life. For that reason,
preparing your application for deployment is a matter of preparing it
to present the things that constitute your application, and hiding or
removing the rest.

HTH,
Dave