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This pages describes my effort to port the Pocket Smalltalk 1.5 IDE to VisualWorks Smalltalk.
The download section also contains a ready to run Squeak version of PocketSmalltalk!
Smalltalk is an object oriented programming language. The syntax is easy to
learn because it consists only of a handful reserved words and a powerful message
passing paradigm. All you need to learn is who to send messages to objects.
For example, the expression "2 sqrt" will answer the
square root of 2 by sending the message "sqrt" to the
object "2".
Pocket Smalltalk is a free Smalltalk implementation for PalmOS and other small devices. It consists of a Smalltalk compiler to create Palm applications and an IDE which currently runs on Windows. The IDE is written in Dolphin Smalltalk (the free 2.1 version).
Because Dolphin Smalltalk is only available for Windows, PocketSmalltalk currently only runs on Windows 9x/NT/2000. However, I'd like to use to on Linux and Solaris machines. VisualWorks runs on all these platforms. It is a professional, very fast Smalltalk system which has a free non-commercial edition.
There's already a project to port the IDE to Squeak, another free and very portable Smalltalk system. Squeak however is much slower (especially on Solaris with remote X) and its look and feel is, I can't say it nicer, simply strange. While VisualWork's portable UI emulation isn't as good as a native Windows application, it's at least sufficient in my opinion. Therefore, I decided to give VisualWorks a try.
2000-12-10 - I manually created windowSpecs
for QLauncher, QWorkspace and QPackageBrowser and created just enough framework
classes to make them run.
2000-12-09 - I spent a few hours filing-in the Dolphin
source code (pst.pac) into VisualWorks NC 5i.2 and adding compatibility
methods to the VisualWorks image.
Until now, I didn't have to actually modify any existing VisualWorks or Dolphin source code.
Launcher, Workspace and PackageBrowser are already working...
Please note: Not everything is uploaded yet - please come back later...
| Download | Here's the original PocketSmalltalk 1.5 beta source distribution, I started with. |
| Download | This is the PocketSmalltalk 1.5 beta binary distribution. It should contain everything you need to start developing application for the Palm. It works only on Windows. |
| Download | This is a ready to run Squeak version of PocketSmalltalk 2.0 alpha which I created by filing in the provided source code, reading in the PocketSmalltalk core sources and arranging and recoloring the browsers nicely before saving the Squeak image. It works only on Windows. |
| Download | This zip contains all sources for the VisualWorks port of PocketSmalltalk 1.5 plus a report which gives you a clue (hopefully) in which order you need to file them in. You need to download VisualWorks for your platform to try this out. |
| Download | And last but not least, a binary distribution of my latest VisualWorks version. This includes only a Windows VM at the moment. |