See the 7.1 Info Page
See the Features Summary Letter
Released, November 2003
Cincom Smalltalk Fall 2003 delivers a number of improvements to both VisualWorks and ObjectStudio.
ObjectStudio
The 6.9 release of ObjectStudio includes interoperability work enabling communication with VisualWorks based services. What this opens up is the ability to deploy Web Services based, CORBA based (etc) applications - with ObjectStudio delegating the services communications to VisualWorks
- Opentalk ST to ST has been ported to ObjectStudio. This enables clean interoperability between VisualWorks and ObjectStudio. Cincom Smalltalk developers can now leverage the native Windows strengths of ObjectStudio and the cross platform server capabilities of VisualWorks - together
- We are offering preview level support for Windows Server 2003 (release by MS in May, 2003). It will be fully supported with the next release
VisualWorks
The 7.2 Release includes a number of incremental improvements over VW 7.1. The next major release is likely a year or so a away, and will feature the new GUI framework (code-named Pollock). In the meantime, there will be a lot of work done throughout the various product sub-systems, delivered on our current release schedule.
- Object Engine - The VisualWorks Virtual Machine
- New platform support
- We are offering preview level support for Windows Server 2003 (release by MS in May, 2003). It will be fully supported with the next release
- We are shipping preview (beta) support for Win CE (XSCale, StrongARM, x86 Based).
- Native zlib de/compression library plus support for compressed images on all platforms
- Squeak plugin framework including WarpBlt. See this Wiki page for details
- Base System - the core of the VisualWorks Smalltalk system
- More base development tools - a dialog to define a class, offering to immediately generate accessors/mutators/initialize
- Preview level support for better character encoding/font mapping support under Windows. This is in the form of a lodable parcel - look for the Unicode directory under Preview
- Protocol System - Encompassing Opentalk, Web Services, CORBA, etc.
- Continuation of WebServices work
- SOAP Headers
- Better WSDL tools
- Integration of the Core Wave libraries into the Opentalk framework
- Secure (SSL) Opentalk messaging
- Documentation on much of the security and Distribution work that has taken place over the last few releases
- A general load balancer for VisualWorks servers, built in Opentalk
- GUI System
- The current GUI framework has received minor improvements, as the team focuses on Pollock work
- Tools - The developer interface(s) into VisualWorks
- A Uniform code access framework will be started. At present, there are three distinct frameworks for accessing code in VisualWorks - The old browsers (Store), the new browser (RB), and the debugger (PDP). These frameworks will be unified over the next two releases, which will allow improvements in
- Common keyboard shortcuts across all coding tools (browsers, debuggers, inspectors, etc)
- An API for developers wishing to extend the tools
- I18n - Internationalization
- Ensure that UserMessages are used wherever strings are currently used in the system. This is a large job, and some parts may not be complete within this cycle.
- Add additional locales
- Database - the EXDI and O/R mapping framework
- In the 7.2 release, GLORP has become an active engineering project, with the goal of creating an updated O/R mapping layer. The current layer (ObjectLens) is mostly focused on client/server implementations, and is not entirely suitable for server-side work. GLORP has been delivered in Preview mode
- Store - The VisualWorks Source Code Management system
- Searching for published items by string matching