Advantages of moving to VW 7.x

The 7.x releases of VisualWorks represent a vastly improved Smalltalk. In the past, Smalltalk was seen as a monolithic, hard to integrate toolset - productive in and of itself, but often difficult to bring into existing projects.

This release changes all of that. VisualWorks now has support for all major internet protocols - including email and ftp. Additionally, VisualWorks now supports interoperability standards such as WS*, SNMP and ASN1, allowing Smalltalk applications to seamlessly plug into an enterprise infrastructure - an important feature for IS shops that need to integrate multiple applications from multiple sources.

This generation of Smalltalk also stands as the best way to interoperate with the existing and competing standards of .NET and J2EE. These competing systems are not easy to integrate; the competing vendors would rather fight. VisualWorks stands as a bridge between them - with CORBA support for J2EE, the dotNET Connect and Web Services support for .NET, and COM support for legacy applications, VisualWorks is uniquely suited as an integration platform. Unparalleled productivity, the best tools for supporting emergent methodologies like XP, and worldwide support from Cincom - you simply can't go wrong by choosing Cincom Smalltalk. Still not sure? Visit our download site and see for yourself!

New Features in 7.x

Dramatic Performance Improvements

Better VM level performance, image level optimizations

Better Tool Support

Improved ToolTip help
Improved Toolbar support
Updated Workspaces that allow for local variables and namespace importation
Trippy, the new inspector

Better File Dialogs

Native dialogs under Windows

Faster Virtual Machine

Polymorphic Inline Cache -> 2x on Richards w.r.t. 3.x
New Block Implementation -> 2x on blocks, exceptions, etc w.r.t. 3.x
Improved GC -> 2x on Boehm GC benchmark w.r.t. 3.x, much improved scalability
Single Executable Support under Windows, Mac

NameSpace Support

Ability to partition code across development teams without risking naming collisions

GUI Improvements
Additional widgetry

Allows developers to build more responsive GUIs
Improved Painter Tools
Pollock in preview

Interface rationalization with VisualWave

Allows developers to use VisualWave as an add-on instead of as a separate environment

ANSI standardization

Allows developers to ensure that they have portable code implemented

dotNET Connect

Allows developers to interoperate directly with dotNET assemblies

XML support

Allows developers to take advantage of the rising use of this standard
Web Services Support

SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, XML-To-Object, Wizards

Opentalk

Allows developers to use Smalltalk-Smalltalk messaging without having to to use CORBA style bindings. Opentalk has been designed to be a fully extensible framework upon which to hang additional protocol support

Internet Connectivity Frameworks

Cincom has added support for most of the common internet protocols in use, including:

SNMP
ASN1

Allows developers to control SNMP capable systems from Smalltalk. We will be releasing support for controlling VisualWorks shortly.

FTP
IMAP
POP
SMTP
MIME parsing and handling
URI parsing and handling

Support for these standard internet protocols allows Smalltalk developers to seamlessly plug Smalltalk applications into their application space.

Smalltalk plug-in

Allows developers to develop fully interactive web based applications that

Leverage all existing code, including custom widgets
Does not require a distributed processing model
Works with IE

Web Toolkit

Smalltalk Server Page Support
Smalltalk Servlets
Custom Tag Support
Web based management consoles

All allowing developers to build web applications using best of breed web front end tools with a highly scalable Smalltalk Server

VisualWave Server

Load Balancing - Scale VisualWave servers with virtually no limits
ISAPI Support
Perl CGI Gateway support

Linux

Using commodity hardware, build stable, scaleable application servers
Support for x86, PPC, and SPARC

Store

Out of the box version control for new customers
Pluggable to a number of standard, scalable relational back ends
Seamless fit with VisualWorks component architecture
Store supports

Oracle
MS SQL Server 7.x
SUPRA SQL
PostgreSQL 7.x and later (Community provided)
Sybase (Community provided)
Firebird (Community provided)
Access (Community provided)
(community provided) DB/2
(community provided) Interbase

ODBC database support

Allows developers to access commodity SQL data sources

In general, VW 7.x is a feature rich development environment that represents a new generation of Smalltalk. At the same time, migration to VW 7.x will not be burdesome. As outlined above (and detailed below), the changes have been made in ways that minimize the impact on developers.

Follow this link for specific class/method differences Back to What Changed from VW 2.5.x to VW5i

Why Upgrade VisualWorks

Advantages of moving to VW 7.x

The 7.x releases of VisualWorks represent a vastly improved Smalltalk. In the past, Smalltalk was seen as a monolithic, hard to integrate toolset - productive in and of itself, but often difficult to bring into existing projects.

New Features in 7.x