To my (admittedly biased by what I work on) mind there are two big things I 
think we could get out of Frost relatively easily, and neither of them 
requires dealing with the messy GUI stuff.

First, JDBC drivers. Squeak, and Smalltalk in general, could instantly gain 
drivers for all major databases, many of them using socket connections 
directly. In some cases it would be impossible to write that code directly 
in Smalltalk because the database vendors don't publish the protocol, but 
it's embedded in the driver.

Second, JSP. While the basic syntax of JSPs is quite simple, authors have 
the ability to embed fairly arbitrary Java code into the pages, so it's not 
easy to write a Smalltalk system that can run existing JSPs that include 
code. While the code is arbitrary, it's usually not all that complicated, 
consisting of calls to domain objects and to databases plus maybe some RMI. 
Using Frost this wouldn't require a whole lot of primitives.

Obviously there are a lot more things we could do, but these seem like two 
that are relatively easy pickings.

At 01:43 PM 12/16/2000 -0600, Les Tyrrell wrote:
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Eric Arseneau
> > > Sent: Friday, December 15, 2000 3:08 PM
> > > Subject: Frost & Pocket Java
> >
> > Here is something I was going to send a few weeks back but I never got a
> > chance to do it.  Maybe we can combine the Pocket Java stuff and Frost, as
> > they do some of the same basic things:
> >
> > I have had Java running inside of Pocket Smalltalk for about 2 years now,
> > but have not had the chance to go very far.  In the last few months I have
> > ported the work to Squeak.  Pocket Java now runs under Sqeak.
>
>This is also great news- I'm starting to think that we have a viable Camp 
>project here.
>
>I looked at your slides and have put in a link on the Frost Wiki under 
>"What is Frost?".
>I'd like to have see what opportunities exist for collaboration- for 
>instance, I have
>a hunch that Squeak's 2D and 3D graphical capabilities would be useful in 
>implementing
>the corresponding Java API's.
>
>- les

--
Alan Knight [|], Cincom Systems
knight at acm.org
aknight at cincom.com
http://www.cincom.com/smalltalk/downloads.html