ST Development Ideas

Here is an article which shares ideas from the most recent release of Pascal
(Borland Delphi).  Perhaps some of these ideas can be integrated in
Smalltalk.

http://bdn.borland.com/article/0,1410,29951,00.html

Popular non-standard parts of Smalltalk include GUI development and
Databases.  Could Delphi provide a model for standardizing these language
independant areas of application support?  What other areas need
addressing -- web networks?  And if Delphi doesn't do these things best what
language does?

News,

>Popular non-standard parts of Smalltalk include GUI development and
>Databases.  Could Delphi provide a model for standardizing these language
>independant areas of application support?  What other areas need
>addressing -- web networks?

Not likely, at least for GUI. The problem is always cross platform issues. Yes,
Borland does the Windows platform as good as anybody, but they are seriously
lacking in X11 support, and basically nothing for anything Apple.

> And if Delphi doesn't do these things best what language does?

IMO, language is not the issue. The issue is good cross platform support. For
GUI, there have been many attempts: Tk, SWT, VisualWorks's GUI, VisualAge's GUI,
CommonView, WxWindows, GTK, QT, etc.

The problem is that each and all fail in one way or another: They are either
proprietary, tied to a specific language, or just don't do a good job.

Even Pollock won't solve the global problem, although it could solve it for the
Smalltalk community if they want.

As for Databases, well, let's look at the original Cross Platform Database
access library: ODBC...

'nuf said.

                                And So It Goes
                                     Sames
______________________________________________________________________

Samuel S. Shuster [|]
VisualWorks Engineering, GUI Project
Go Smalltalk!