Linux may be Dolphin's salvation.

I just can't see how Object Arts support themselves. I can't imagine
there are enough paying customers and haven't been any releases in a
while.

Linux really needs a decent development environment. I don't know what
it would take to port it over to one of the windowing environments such
as Gnome and KDE for the GUI part. I guess it depends how tightly bound
they are to the WIndows OS. But I think the customers are there waiting
for some sort of a stable easy to use GUI environment.

Since the VM controls everything, I assume if you rewrite the VM for
Linux then most Dolphin classes will run unchanged under Linux. They
could do it on the cheap by outsourcing the VM to Russia and/or India
since its a well defined entity.

Someone said they got Dolphin working on top of WINE, Minus the RichTextBox
control.... From what I understand, Dolphin 6 will no longer rely on that
control. Dolphin 6 could possibly run on top of WINE. It is something I
intend on testing as soon as I get my hands on a copy of it.

D6, is closing to the beta, and I did not see any sign of OA folks
complaining. So I do not see much point in post like is dolphin dying,
dolphin slavation, etc.

As for Linux, yes it would be nice to have something Dolphin like there, but
it is a lot of work, since Dolphin GUI is tightly coupled to the windows. I
suspect that another approach _might_ have better effort/rsults ratio. Just
to have ability to run headless dolphin apps on linux (no gui just files, db
& sockets). Development could reside on windows, and one could in lagoon
check "deploy for linux". Having that operational would be much less work
since no work on complicated gui development would be needed, and on the
other hand, linux is still much more server environment, where headless apps
make much more sense, and one could do much with them.

rush
--
http://www.templatetamer.com/
http://www.folderscavenger.com/

On 7 Apr 2005 20:33:40 -0700, "ImOk" <[hidden email]> wrote:

>I just can't see how Object Arts support themselves. I can't imagine
>there are enough paying customers

Maybe you don't have enough imagination. ;-)

>Linux really needs a decent development environment. I don't know what
>it would take to port it over to one of the windowing environments such
>as Gnome and KDE for the GUI part. I guess it depends how tightly bound
>they are to the WIndows OS. But I think the customers are there waiting
>for some sort of a stable easy to use GUI environment.

As Borland's fiasco with Kylix proved, Linux users don't buy software.
Buying software is an heresy that only windows and mac users
perpetrate.

On Fri, 8 Apr 2005 09:41:17 +0200, "rush" <[hidden email]> wrote:


>As for Linux, yes it would be nice to have something Dolphin like there, but
>it is a lot of work, since Dolphin GUI is tightly coupled to the windows.

I vote for a MacOSX port first. :-)

Fernando wrote:
I, as Linux fan, would see Dolphin running natively on Linux, but I must
agree with Fernando that Linux people (mainly Linux developers)
*don't* buy software :(

They are happy with they C,C++,Perl and other stuffs.......then surely
isn't profitable to OA people develop a Linux port with all the work
that this means.

On Fri, 8 Apr 2005 09:41:17 +0200, "rush" <[hidden email]> wrote:

>D6, is closing to the beta, and I did not see any sign of OA folks

BTW, is there any list of new features in D6?

"Fernando" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:[hidden email]...
> BTW, is there any list of new features in D6?

I am not aware of it, at least not as an "officilal list". But let's give
some more braething space to Andy & Blair :)

rush
--
http://www.templatetamer.com/
http://www.folderscavenger.com/

"German Arduino" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:42565e23$[hidden email]...
...
> I, as Linux fan, would see Dolphin running natively on Linux, but I must
> agree with Fernando that Linux people (mainly Linux developers)
> *don't* buy software :(
>
> They are happy with they C,C++,Perl and other stuffs.......then surely
> isn't profitable to OA people develop a Linux port with all the work that
> this means.

Not only that, but there are already versions of Smalltalk in the form of
VisualWorks, Squeak, GNU Smalltalk and Smalltalk/X for Linux, and most are
free.  I think Linux would be a tricky place for Dolphin to compete at the
moment.

If people dislike the development environments of the existing Linux
Smalltalks so much I would suppose that they could write their own
development UI for an existing Linux Smalltalk.  That might be easier than
trying to port a Windows specific Smalltalk to Linux.

Chris

Rush,

> D6, is closing to the beta, and I did not see any sign of OA folks
> complaining. So I do not see much point in post like is dolphin dying,
> dolphin slavation, etc.

While I have not yet had time to read the salvation thread, I tend to
agree.  In the interest of _full_ disclosure, I can't help wondering
whether the orginal dying thread prodded OA to move toward the beta, but
it really does not matter.


> As for Linux, yes it would be nice to have something Dolphin like there, but
> it is a lot of work, since Dolphin GUI is tightly coupled to the windows. I
> suspect that another approach _might_ have better effort/rsults ratio. Just
> to have ability to run headless dolphin apps on linux (no gui just files, db
> & sockets). Development could reside on windows, and one could in lagoon
> check "deploy for linux". Having that operational would be much less work
> since no work on complicated gui development would be needed, and on the
> other hand, linux is still much more server environment, where headless apps
> make much more sense, and one could do much with them.

I almost agree, and would probably make considerable use of the product
you describe.  However, I would much rather see an Object Arts Smalltalk
for Linux.  It would probably _not_ be a Dolphin port, as the only way
to do that would be via WINE, and I am not thrilled about the idea of
using even open source reverse engineering and emulation of Microsoft's
accumulated bugs.

However, I think OA could use Dolphin to create most of what would be
needed by filtering/translating by and from Dolphin.  Add a
Linux-spcific View hierarchy supporting the most basic lists, text
fields, etc., and the result would be able to run natively on Linux.

Have a good one,

Bill

--
Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
[hidden email]

rush wrote:

> ... I suspect that another approach _might_ have better effort/rsults ratio. Just
> to have ability to run headless dolphin apps on linux (no gui just files, db
> & sockets).

Much of the GUI can be implemented with a web-server serving HTML pages,
which is a reasonable approach, even when deploying on Windows.

-Panu Viljamaa