Promoting Squeak/Smalltalk

Diego Fernández diegof79 at gmail.com
Fri Feb 1 03:29:33 UTC 2008


I would like to help. But I don't know where to contribute.
There is any effort to make something like a "multi-smalltalk source  
package"?

On Jan 31, 2008, at 6:35 PM, stephane ducasse wrote:

> I agree
> Now we need people helping on that.
>
>
>> - If you choose an Smalltalk, you can't migrate easily to another  
>> one.
>>
>> The "core" framework is more or less the same for all Smalltalks  
>> (collections, streams, exceptions, SUnit).
>> But when you start using another things like networking, databases,  
>> UI... porting from one Smalltalk to another still requires a lot of  
>> work.
>>
>> Another issue on porting are tools for  "source code packages". For  
>> example the code of Aconcagua (the unit framework created at  
>> Mercap), is very portable: it was created on VisualAge, and them  
>> ported to work on GemStone, Squeak and VisualWorks.
>> Camp Smalltalk Rosseta was used to port the initial version from  
>> VAST to Squeak and VW, but the required work was not trivial, and  
>> maintaing "source code packages" for each Smalltalk flavor is  
>> really tedious.
>>
>> I know that there is a Monticello package loader con VW Public  
>> Store, but having an open source package format with multiple  
>> smalltalks in mind would be nice. (Even more nice would be having  
>> an open source multi smalltalk versioning system... imagine how  
>> nice would be if SqueakSource packages, and VW Public Store  
>> packages are accessible from the same public repository and  
>> versioning system).
>>
>> - The integration with other tools could be really difficult
>>
>> In VisualWorks you have  tools to integrate an smalltalk  
>> application with the rest of the enterprise: webservices, ActiveX,  
>> JNIport.
>> But in Squeak, no :(
>> The webservices package seems to be unmaintained, and you have a  
>> great FFI support, but compared to Ruby or Python, the  
>> communication with systems in Java or C# requires a lot of work.
>> For example, a lot of enterprises  (Banks, travel agencies, etc)  
>> uses JavaEE for the middle tier. But there this is a potential  
>> market for Seaside in the web tier: the framework is superior and  
>> more flexible than JSP, Ruby On Rails or PHP.  But is not easy to  
>> communicate your Seaside front end to the Java/C# backend. You can  
>> use and ad-hoc HTTP or plain socket messages, or buy a license of  
>> VW and use WebServices or RMI. But the immediate cost of this  
>> compared to just develop the web application in Java or JRuby, is  
>> difficult to justify.
>>
>> Also integration from other applications to Smalltalk is difficult  
>> (a nice thing of GNU Smalltalk is that you could use the VM as a  
>> library in C -the people in VW is working in something similar, and  
>> I think that St/X also have something like this).
>> Thanks to this Python became more popular: Python is used as  
>> scripting language in a lot of games because is really easy to  
>> integrate from  C/C++. (for example in Linux you could make an  
>> filesystem driver using Python and FUSE!)
>>
>>
>> Well that are to me aspects that we as developers can resolve, and  
>> can have impact on the whole community: with better integration  
>> with other systems, an small consultant could sell a Seaside based  
>> solution more easily. With tools to work on multiple smalltalks I  
>> think it would be less duplicated work, and more shared packages  
>> between smalltalk implementations.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Jan 30, 2008, at 4:16 AM, Damien Cassou wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> On Jan 29, 2008 11:45 PM, David Zmick <dz0004455 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> I have been wondering how to make smalltalk a more "popular"  
>>>> language,
>>>
>>> I can find different options:
>>>
>>> - distribute flyers (http://damien.cassou.free.fr/)
>>> - present Smalltalk/Squeak/Seaside
>>> (https://svn.squeak.org/Advertisement/presentations/squeak_jm2l_en/)
>>> - help people working on the Smalltalk entry point (the dev-images,
>>> the documentation...)
>>> - live on #squeak irc and answer questions
>>> - develop programs with Smalltalk/Seaside and advertise
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Damien Cassou
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>




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