See the NEWS page for other recent Cincom Smalltalk News.
There isn't a lot of "new" stuff in this release. It's a maintenance release over the last one. There were a lot of changes in 7.2 and 6.9, and a number of those things have been enhanced in this release. Here's a short list:
VW
- Web Services
- Tools for generating Smalltalk classes from WSDL and for generating WSDL from Smalltalk classes. These tools are "command line" (i.e., Workspace) driven in this release, but will have Wizard style interfaces in the next release.
- Web Toolkit/Wave Server
- The server has been updated to use the Opentalk framework, making it more stable and more scalable. We have added an Opentalk based Load Balancer framework, which replaces the CORBA based one from earlier releases. This framework will be generalized over the next few releases
- GUI
- Many bug fixes to the event handling and painting of widgets, especially the TreeView and DataSet (grid) widgets. Most work is focusing on Pollock at this point; the existing UI will not be updated (other than critical bugs) until Pollock replaces it.
- Internationalization
- All English language strings in the product have been replaced by UserMessages - which means that developers can more easily internationalize their applications. Reuse of existing Dialogs (for example) no longer requires code changes - instead, simply create a parallel catalog
- Unicode support
- On Windows, we now have a fully Unicode aware Image and VM. This means that VisualWorks will display the correct font - assuming that said font is installed on the machine in question (without regard to the current Locale). This support will be extended to the Macintosh platform in the fall, and beyond that to Linux/Unix over the next few releases
- Platforms
- Windows CE support remains in preview (beta) for this release. We intend to move this to a fully supported state for the fall release. Developers can target Win CE 4.x devices that use either the x86 or StrongARM architecture.
ObjectStudio
- XML
- We have included a port of Opentalk (the Smalltalk to Smalltalk protocol) in ObjectStudio. This is in preview (beta) until the fall release. What this allows is full messaging interoperation between VisualWorks and ObjectStudio - developers with ObjectStudio applications that need access to services supported only in VisualWorks (Web Services, etc) may now do so much more easily
That's the summary. For VW bug fix details (with case numbers included) go here. For the same information on ObjectStudio, go here