On 06.01.2012 06:41, Gerry Weaver wrote:
Hello All,
Firstly, let me say that I am enjoying Pharo very much at this point. I
wish I would have found the time to look at this a long time ago.
I have a few misc. newbie questions.
1. VisualWorks - I am doing a lot of thinking about projects that I
could use Smalltalk on. I have a consulting project coming up that might
be a good candidate, but I'm sure I would be required to use a
commercial Smalltalk version for it. I guess it may be odd to ask about
VisualWorks on this list, but I'm not really looking for a comparison to
Pharo. What I'm interested in is your opinion of the product. I would
like to know if any of you would consider using it on a project. I would
appreciate anything y'all could share in the form of experiences good or
bad. I am trying to get my hands on it, but Cincom's mail server
(windoze) is having issues. I am also having some trouble getting
pricing out of them. Anyway, I would like to get your take on the Cincom
products.
2. There appear to be some tool choices in the Pharo image. I would like
to be able to create a class and it's methods in an editor in one go. I
like being able to see all of the class code at once. Is there a way to
do this? I just want to be able to type it all in and accept (evaluate?)
all at once.
3. I've seen some discussion about images and image sizes. What is the
current state of this. Is it possible to strip an image down to just the
required components for an application (ie; no world menu, etc.). I
would like to be able to run an image that would bring my gui
application up filling the image window such that it looks a close as
possible to a conventional gui application.
4. I have been reading about something called "Opentalk". It is a way
for images to be able to comminucate with each other over the network.
I've also seen something callesd "rST" that appears to do a similar
thing. In addition, I notice that someone has done some FFI bindings for
zeromq. What would y'all recommend as the best option to achieve
something like this in Pharo?
5. I'm trying to figure out exactly what the Pharo gui toolkit provides
in the way of widgets. Is there a widget gallery type thing somewhere
that shows all of them? I know I can play with them in the image, but it
would be nice to see a list of what is there with a brief description.
6. I know Pharo doesn't currently support OS threads in an image, but
I'm wondering about the FFI. Is it possible to call a foreign function
in a separate OS thread or asynchronously in Pharo?
My understanding is with the very latest mt Cog VMs that FFI call-outs
happen in a native OS thread. I'm not sure whether the required
infrastructure is already in Pharo.
Cheers
Philippe
