I talk about Smalltalk here, but I haven't really explained what's in Cincom Smalltalk - which might be useful for readers who don't already know. First off, Cincom Smalltalk consists of two Smalltalk environments - VisualWorks and ObjectStudio.

ObjectStudio is a descendant of the Enfin product, originally from Easel, a company which is now defunct. ObjectStudio is Windows specific, and targeted at building client applications - particularly database front ends. It sports a nice array of database connectors and tools.

VisualWorks is a descendant - as is Squeak - of the original Smalltalk-80 that came out of Xerox PARC many years ago. Squeak derives from the Apple copy of that original, reinvigorated after years of nothing. VisualWorks, on the other hand, has seen continuous development since ParcPlace (long since defunct) spun out of PARC.

ObjectStudio is in the midst of being rehosted on top of the VisualWorks VM - this will bring two things to ObjectStudio developers:

• Dramatically faster performance
• Access to all the functions and features of VisualWorks

In that update, none of the major features of ObjectStudio (such as the native Windows UI) will be lost - and in fact, they will also be available to VisualWorks developers. This ObjectStudio update will actually be highly beneficial to both customer bases.

What about VisualWorks? It's received a lot of updates since the 1999 acquisition by Cincom. During presentations, I like to pop up the following two images (click on each to enlarge) - first, VisualWorks before Cincom:

And here's VW After Cincom got it - this is a screen shot of VW 7.3, which is actually one rev back (we are on 7.3.1 now):

Those shots are something I tend to show early in a presentation, in order to point out just how much has changed. Sometimes, I'll pull up VW 2.5 (yes, I still have it installed :) ) to show just how far things have come. Many people don't realize just how much has been done. All the "normal" stuff is in VW, and has been for quite a while:

• Network client libraries (HTTP, FTP, etc)
• Mail client libraries
• Encryption/Decryption libraries
• CORBA, COM, and .NET interfaces
• Smalltalk Server Pages and Servlets
• WS* implementation

There's a lot more too, but those tend to come up - a surprising number of people still look at Smalltalk as if it's 1994 or so. A lot has changed since then. Heck - don't take my word for it. Go visit our download site, and have a look for yourself.