>Still, there are potentially some features which would be great for the
>Squeak application tool, but might not fit in as well with the Squeak
>vision.  Native window support is probably a good example... it's
>essential for a good application tool, but it would add a fair amount of
>complexity to Squeak (threading issues), and it would compromise
>portability to platforms such as PDA's which have no native windows.

There might be also a "low road" native window support - in conjunction
with some mechanism to call external DLLs.  Dolphin Smalltalk has IMHO a
lean and still very powerful external interface which works well for
Windows but isn't Windows centric - I think.  Dolphin's GUI is solely based
on this API.  If Squeak would feature a similar exterface interface, one
could probably implement host widgets without too much effort.  If the
mechanism would be exactly the same, one could even think about just
porting the GUI framework from Dolphin to Squeak but there're probably
legal problems so I wouldn't recommend this.

To support different kinds of GUIs, Squeak would need an architecture,
which uses a special builder object as a factory for GUI objects.
Basically, all kinds of GUIs feature things like Buttons and Listboxes and
the GUI factory should be tailored towards the needs for portable
development tools, that is the Pluggable* classes.


bye
--
Stefan Matthias Aust  //  ...and now something completely different