[ANN] Ambrai Smalltalk on mac OSX

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Fri Jun 25 20:46:51 UTC 2004


On Jun 25, 2004, at 1:35 PM, stéphane ducasse wrote:

>> For those of us who care about such things, I think there's 
>> potentially a very nice model there for commercial use of Squeak: 
>> develop web apps on OS X using a native UI environment, and then 
>> deploy headless on linux or any other platform you care for.
>
> I try to understand what you imply :).
> You mean that some people would be interested to have an environment 
> on mac OS X that looks like a mac application and not squeak :) and 
> that they would deploy applications I imagine with Seaside
> running on other platforms.

Right - it wouldn't look like Squeak in that it wouldn't look like 
Morphic, although it would still be Squeak in every other respect.  It 
would be useless as an educational or simulation environment, but would 
be great for writing network code.

>  Do I imply correctly that this would be targeted at non squeakers?

I'd rather say, would expand the group of potential Squeakers.  Many 
Smalltalkers are unwilling to use Squeak because they don't like 
Morphic.  It's also a hard sell in corporate environments, whereas 
VisualWorks and Dolphin are easier - not *just* because of UI, but it's 
a factor.  This is silly and shortsighted of them, but it doesn't help 
matters to tell them so.

This isn't about making Squeak a good platform for developing native UI 
desktop apps - that's a huge amount of work, which I'm happy to leave 
to Ambrai and Dolphin.  It's certainly not about doing native UI 
portably.  It's just about putting together enough native development 
tools so that developers on some platforms (or even just one) get an 
improved look and feel for browsers, inspectors, debuggers, etc, with 
Morphic as a fallback for anything else.

Avi




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