This is what I would like in that Smalltalk:
- A file based environment since this is what people are used to.
- A transcript / console you can run interactively from the command line / shell (like Lisp, Ruby and Python etc).
- A Web Development framework based heavily on Rails, since this is a leading framework and one that a lot of people are interested in. Sorry Seaside as you are great but sadly not great enough.
- An ORM framework like ActiveRecord. (EDIT: Apparently this is already available.)
- IDE support for Eclipse, IntelliJ and TextMate.
GNU Smalltalk is file based (it has an image but that can be recreated from scratch if wanted) and it has Seaside. Seaside is great I think, because it constantly wins web programming shoot-outs (in terms of code size, readability and coding time). It doesn’t have a „click-and-deploy“ interface for web-apps, but I am confident that there will be one on day. GNU Smalltalk also has a decent command line interface (with readline support).
No Eclipse support for Smalltalk yet. But that’s funny, because IIRC: Eclipse is modelled after Visual Age for Java. Which is a Smalltalk program, adapted to Java, coming from… Visual Age for Smalltalk.
GNU Smalltalk is good and it’s GNU as well which I think makes it even better. However, it is lacking JVM support which sadly appears to be required to get into the places where I work.
I do think it is ironic that the Smalltalk original IDE is very good but IMHO people want a file based approach and a more traditional IDE like Eclipse/IntelliJ.
I think Ill look at GNU Smalltalk more now, but please support the Smalltalk/JVM as well, since this will benefit Smalltalk regardless of which flavor it is.
Yes, I agree that an Smalltalk/JVM implementation will have a huge impact on smalltalk at all. Still, I think that’ll only work if there are a few of smalltalk primitives supported and there is a decent closure support (Seaside).
I am not into closures – but a GNU/Smalltalk / JVM intetragion should be feasible. Or even squeak – has someone tried an SLANG/ JVM target yet?
I think smalltalk/JVM is getting some legs, follow smalltalkjvm on twitter for more info.