On Monday, November 8, 2004, at 05:59 PM, Joseph Frippiat wrote:

> ...
> I don't ask for solution, only for guidelines and advices.  Do you 
> think its "playable" ? Is it recommended to use Squeak to develop an 
> "industrial" project ?

Sure, there are some real Squeak apps out there.

> I have little experience in smalltalk.  I have played a little with 
> Squeak during the last years: it's a nice language and a nice 
> environment but I am afraid of the lack of stability. For example, I 
> saved a little project (written to play with morphic) and now I am not 
> able to load it anymore in a fresh image.  The project is not 
> important but in a case like this, is there any way to explore a 
> "lost" project when it is not possible to reload it and the 
> development image is lost ? What is the safest way to make development 
> to avoid losing everything?

Personally, I would not bother using projects if you are just doing 
development by yourself, and you have concerns about stability across 
Squeak versions.  When developing an application, I typically just save 
it in source code form (as a changeset, or you could use something like 
Monticello).  To save my working environment (open browsers, windows, 
morphs, etc), I just save the image, sometimes renaming the image to 
something else to save a backup copy.  I never use projects during 
development.  Images take up a lot more disk space than projects do, 
but who cares?  Disk space is relatively infinite these days, and 
images are much more robust.  I probably have over 200 images on my 
hard drive in various Squeak version directories... I'll start worrying 
about deleting them as soon as my disk space gets low. ;)  I do treat 
images as somewhat throw-away, although I usually have a few (such as a 
BFAV image) which I keep around for a while and update.

However, projects are useful for some things... they're ideal for 
publishing something like a tutorial (with open windows, morphs, etc) 
on the internet, where download size does matter.  And they're great 
for presentations.  But projects are more fragile when migrating across 
Squeak versions, compared with a simple source code format such as 
changesets or Monticello.  If you're migrating an application from, 
say, Squeak 3.4 to 3.7, when filing in your application as a changeset, 
you may find that you have to fix a few methods in your app.  (Same as 
with a lot of development environments other than Squeak.)  When 
migrating a project, you may have to worry about fixing instances of 
objects, making sure you don't have old windows and morph instances 
open which may have problems in the new version of Squeak, etc, etc.  
It's potentially doable, but it requires some expertise.

So, given your current situation (migrating between Squeak versions) 
and the problems you're encountering, I would recommend not using 
projects.

- Doug