My VAST wishlist

[jtuchel]

In the 2008 CEO update, Mike Taylor, the CEO of Instantiations asks for feedback on what people would like to see added to VA Smalltalk.
At the VA Smalltalk Forum 2008 I gave a presentation with some of my wishes, and now I just posted a little wishlist (It's the best time for wishlists now...) to my blog:
http://joachim-tuchel.de/2008/12/20/va- ... l-wishlist

I hope I can help get the ball rolling on collecting feedback for Instantiations. Sound off in comments on my blog or on this forum.

CU

Joachim

[marten]

A wishlist is always good - costs nothing and it's some kind of dreaming. What I would like to see ???

Better support for connecting other technologies

- cdecl calling convention under Windows
- easier connection with .NET
- general better and easier access to external c libraries (using wizards etc ...)

Better platform independent GUI

- look out for a modern widget system (perhaps GNOME ?, QT ?), but the Motif API should
be still used for compatibility. The new GUI look is especially needed for Linux - Solaris
looks pretty well, Windows ok, but Linux is really worse.

Reporting System

- Enhancements to the Reporting Systems (over all platforms)

General Stuff

- Designing Tool for modelling, with enhanced adaptable code generation
- Introductions of interface specifications for classes
- framework based on SST for Multi-Core CPU's and multiple images
- Bindings of a mighty platform indepentend image handling c library
- More facilitities for browsing around the system. Despite the fact, that the browser system of Smalltalk
is pretty well I still have to open another browser to look for a name of a special method. This is still time
consuming. Together with Intellisense I would like to see a much better help here when editing code.
- source code exchange possibilities with Visualworks and Squeak.


Marten

[louis_andriese]

As nicely expressed by Joachim Tuchel, the introduction of Seaside into VAST has also introduced a link with opensource-projects ant their high update-frequency. A place to share code amongst vast-developers is high on my wishlist.
It is such a waist of productivity if many people are porting the newest release of the jquery-stuff from squeak to VAST at the same time. Even downloadable .dat-files are better then redoing someone elses work.

Kind regards,

Louis

[tc]

Concerning GLORP, there is a 2004 and 2006 version at glorp.org. The 2004 version is ported to VA Smalltalk (but I've not personally tried it). Are there some key features in the 2006 version that are not in the 2004 version?

--tc

[jtuchel]

Taylor,

I don't have any details on your question concerning the differences between the 2004 and 2006 version. I know that Alan has started quite some work on ActiveRecord for Seaside on GLORP in late 2006. GLORP is still a work in progress (or let's say it's still a supported product ), so I guess I'd love to see a much younger version of GLORP ported to VAST.

Joachim

[tc]

Hello,

Is this still true?

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.smalltalk/browse_thread/thread/5e676426c0fcfe44/df5b1ed5e4834977?lnk=gst&q=objectlens#df5b1ed5e4834977

2) Is GLORP in a stable state ?

Depends what you mean by "stable". There are people using it, and
reporting reasonably good results, but it's clearly still far away from
being production level. In particular, it is lacking in the areas of
tools, documentation, error messages, and those sorts of things. There
are also things that don't work, and important features that are missing.
Whether that counts as "stable" for you is an open question <grin>

. . . if it is, does a port mean fixing the areas that are lacking or porting the 2006 version as is?

--tc

[jtuchel]

Taylor

I am not sure how Alan would phrase his words today, maybe he'd still say the same thing .
It is important to note that glorp.org is not the site to get an up-to-date version of GLORP. The primary source is the public Store Repository. I am not sure whether cincom already ships a supported version of GLORP or if that's coming in the next release of VW. It will be supported pretty soon, if it's not already.
So I think getting a newer version from the Store repository and using this as a base for porting is much better. I think the squeak port is not up-to-date at the moment as well.

Joachim

[jtuchel]

Louis,

thanks, I forgot that one. A public place to share code is absolutely important to motivate people to share code. I agree that if there is no easy envy-based solution in sight, a normal download of .dat files for individual projects would still be a great improvement.

It would be sad if things like the jQuery port were ignored simply because there is no popular location to load it from.

Also, thanks for joining the discussion.

Cu next year

Joachim

[jtuchel]

Marten,

I absolutely agree on your portable GUI wish. VAST is great for building GUIs, and Instantiations provides two of the best GUI building tools (even compared to non-Smalltalk tools) (I am speaking of WBPro and the Composition editor). But the GUIs you can build with them lack some functionality.

I would vote for SWT as the underlying GUI library for several reasons:
* Much more funding than all the others you mention
* A big following due to its connection to Eclipse RCP
* Very nice looking, rich GUIs
* Good chance of adapting future GUI standards (like Windows 7 etc.)
* Available on Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris (all VAST platforms) and on MacOS X (Carbon available, Cocoa coming)
* Very similar architecture to Common Widgets/Extended Widgets (because it's designed by the same people)
* Instantiations has a lot of knowledge in SWT (the provide on of the best SWT Design tools available: SWT Designer)

My understanding of SWT is that it's a runtime that's independent from Java (Eric, is that true?) and is partly extended in Java for non-native emulations (quite similar to what VAST does), so it should even be possible to use it as a foundation of VAST. I must admit I have no idea whether that would be possible licence-wise, and of course I have not done any research of the technical feasibility...

Just my 2 cents

Joachim

[tc]

Hello,

Concerning a place to share code, I think we do that to some degree in the form of goodies. Some of the current goodies are user contributed. If anyone has a port or goodie to contribute, we always give that person/company full credit when posting the code for download. Contributions can be sent to vast-support@instantiations.com.

--tc

[louis_andriese]

Taylor,

yes, I know about the VAST goodies-section, and it's a nice start. However, it lacks the code management features provided by both the cincom public store and the open squeak repositories. More importantly, the fact that developers need to submit to their code to Instantiations instead of just publishing it doesn't really facilitate opensource-type development efforts. Providing a port of an opensource project, with all its updates by multiple developers, would be virtually impossible this way.
So a publicly available repository would be excellent. But it seems to me that the easiest way to move forward would be a system that facilitates users to log in, upload and version their .dat-files.

kind regards,

Louis

[marten]

Taylor,

yes, I know about the VAST goodies-section, and it's a nice start. However, it lacks the code management features provided by both the cincom public store and the open squeak repositories. More importantly, the fact that developers need to submit to their code to Instantiations instead of just publishing it doesn't really facilitate opensource-type development efforts. Providing a port of an opensource project, with all its updates by multiple developers, would be virtually impossible this way.
So a publicly available repository would be excellent. But it seems to me that the easiest way to move forward would be a system that facilitates users to log in, upload and version their .dat-files.

kind regards,

Louis

Perhaps with the upcoming 8.0 and Seaside it may be a good project to write a WWW-frontend in Seaside to a back ENVY manager repository ...

[tc]

Hello,

Handling of fonts. There is no documented way of using the platform’s standard font in your GUIs

I know any font available for a platform can be chosen but what does use the standard font mean? How does one specify a standard font in other languages?

Thanks.

--tc

[jtuchel]

Taylor,

I am talking about an easy way to simply build an XP or Vista or Linux/Motif Dialog which automatically looks like it should, meaning it uses the standard font of the hosting platform. I know you can change the font for every widget, and there are ways to tweak the environment to use a specific font as default. But why should this be a user's job?
Achieving this for the build platform at first would be a good start, the next step should be to help us build on XP and deploy on Vista, which includes switching the font to Vista's standard font.

Regards

Joachim

[jtuchel]

Let me add another thought: It should be easy to query the system for its current dialog font and include some autmatism to let the GUI switch to this setting at runtime. This would of course mean that the GUI developer has to be careful about the layout, because labels and boxes may grow/shrink dependent on the font setting...

joachim