CincomSmalltalkWiki: VisualWorks 7.1 Information

VisualWorks 7.1 shipped on April 7, 2003. Download the Non-Commercial version now!. VisualWorks 7.2 information maybe found here

VisualWorks 7 shipped on July 15th, 2002.

Product Overviews

Summary
Here's a brief overview of the changes in this release:

Multi-Process UI. ForkedUI is dead, and so is the distinguished User Interface process. Each Window can now have its own Smalltalk level process, making the entire system more responsive. This has some implications for assumptions about event handling, which Cincom will be documenting. One major thing though - Cincom is very pleased to thank Terry Raymond, author of the PDP (Professional Debug Package). Not only is Terry the provider of the PDP, but he is also the originator of most of the multi-process UI code.
PDP (Professional Debug Package) Integration. Terry Raymond's package will be fully integrated in this release.
Win XP look
MacOSX Aqua look
Improvements to the TreeView -- better handling all around, including improvements to double click behavior, and a general upgrade to the TreeModel.
Pollock will be in preview for the 7.1 release, but expect enough to play with and see the future.
Many minor tool improvements -- status bars with Store Connectivity information, an optimized file browser, etc.

VW has always required the presence of GUI libraries (for instance, XLib in Unix) to run. With the 7.1 release, headless applications may be deployed without that restriction. The Unix platforms supporting this in 7.1 are:

Sometimes you need to be able to save a headless image headful (i.e., with a GUI) in order to see what is happening. This release of VW will enable this as an option without having to save the image headful and restart.
Mac OS X is now fully supported

We have added two new platforms - Linux on Sparc, and Linux on PPC. These are unsupported at this point, but we are very interested in feedback on their use. Please let me know if you would like to see these as supported platforms!

The user interfaces for Store and the change tools will be getting a facelift, improving their general usability

Opentalk has matured as a communications framework - for instance, supporting our Web Services infrastructure. During that time, tools for managing and configuring Opentalk services have lagged. Over the next few months we will start addressing this issue.

Improved API for VW Security. We have greatly improved the security implementation. See the release notes for details.

Clarified and simplified exception handling. The EXDI now uses the ANSI standard, class based exception scheme instead of the older Signal based scheme
Added CLOB and BLOB support to the Oracle EXDI

The framework has been more cleanly partitioned between developer and deployment. This should make it easier for developers to deploy systems with cleaner dependency chains. See the Release Notes for details.
The VisualWave application server has been made much more robust. Previous releases did not necessarily hold up under stress; this releases does.

One of the frustrating aspects of creating WSDL and IDL from Smalltalk is the lack of manifest type information, making it more difficult to create tools that generate these things. Over the next few months, we will start addressing this issue. The 7.1 release will have the first deliverable cut on this - but it is not the final word here!

The tools in VisualWorks (RB, PDP, File Browser, Parcel Manager) have improved greatly over the last few release cycles. We aren't finished! We will be addressing the change tools and Store interface tools during the next few months.
The Settings tools are being replaced. The existing settings framework will work in this release, but will be obsoleted in 7.2