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Original Post: Cincom Smalltalk Fall 2003 Announcement
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Announcing Cincom Smalltalk�� 2003, November Edition!
It is our pleasure to bring you Cincom Smalltalk 2003, November Edition - our highest-quality release ever.
Cincom Smalltalk 2003, November Edition is the latest update for our Cincom Smalltalk customers and includes updates to both ObjectStudio and VisualWorks. The updated products within Cincom Smalltalk are ObjectStudio Enterprise Edition v6.9 and VisualWorks Enterprise Edition v7.2.
What's New With ObjectStudio
The following enhancements and changes are included in the ObjectStudio v6.9 release:
Many bug fixes and enhancements to the OLE support. Using COM, either for client or server purposes, is much enhanced with this release
Addition of Opentalk for ObjectStudio. Opentalk is the communications package used in VisualWorks for the various distribution protocols (SOAP, etc). We have ported the base framework to ObjectStudio, which allows Smalltalk to Smalltalk communication between the two products. ObjectStudio users who want to add support for things like Web Services can now implement that functionality in VisualWorks, and access all of their ObjectStudio business objects
Database enhancements:
The Oracle OCI wrapper is now officially supported and present in the loadable application list. This wrapper works with Oracle 8.1.5 and later.
Sybase 12.5 support.
Generic SQL Server wrapper which works for all SQL Server versions.
Windows Authentication support to SQL Server wrapper. If you log on to a SQL Server database without providing a user name and a password, the SQL Server database wrapper automatically uses Windows Authentication.If you log on with a user name and a password, the SQL Server databasewrapper uses SQL Server authentication.
Numerous bugs were also addressed. Please see the release notes for details.
What's New With VisualWorks
Cincom has released VisualWorks 7.2 as part of the Cincom Smalltalk product suite. There are a number of new features in the release, as well as continued work on existing components (Web Toolkit, Net Clients, Opentalk). Cincom has worked with SilverMark and JOOPS to deliver evaluation versions of TestMentor and SmallCOM/X in this release. TestMentor is a full testing solution for VisualWorks. SmallCOM/X enables the embedding of ActiveX components into VisualWorks GUI Windows. The demonstration shipped shows how to embed the IE HTML control into a VW Window.
VisualWorks supports Windows (ME, NT4 (Server only), 2000, XP, Windows 2003), Macintosh (OS 9 and OS/X), Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, SGI IRIX, and Intel Linux. These are unsupported, but we are putting these out in order to examine interest. There are unsupported, experimental releases for Linux on SPARC and Linux on PPC. There are preview releases of Windows CE (4) on x86 and ARM. Cincom ended support for the Compaq Tru64 UNIX platform and the HPUX 10.2 platform with the release of VisualWorks 7.1.
For any questions about this or about Cincom Smalltalk, please contact James Robertson, jrobertson@cincom.com, the Product Manager. Of particular interest will be our support for Web Services and Web Development.
VW 7.2 is an incremental release from 7.1 " we are working on a large number of improvements (Pollock, native widgets) that will result in a major new release . That major release will come in 18-24 months. New in this release are a number of items in review (beta):
Support for Windows CE (4) on the x86 and StrongARM processors. There are VM's and loadable parcels in preview. We intend to support a wider array of CE devices as time goes by
Better Unicode display (and entry) support for Windows. After loading the Preview support, Windows users will see fewer font rendering issues. We are still working on this, including an investigation of cross platform support
.NET Connect " there is new support for linking to the .NET platform. This support involves working at a similar level to DLLCC at present; tools and documentation for this will improve
Implementation of loadable primitive modules into the VM. This allows for the breaking up of the VM into loadable components " which means that individual subsystems can be replaced dynamically. Again, this is early support " more details will be coming in the next release
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, Web Services support for .NET, and COM support for legacy applications, VisualWorks is uniquely suited as an integration platform.
The web toolkit takes advantage of and leverages the expertise of web developers and designers who do not know Smalltalk. The web pages that are powered by the web toolkit can be built by people who do not know Smalltalk, but do know and understand web technologies.
Web Services offers a clean way to interoperate transparently with remote services, or to transparently make Smalltalk services available to others.
Web Toolkit
The Web Toolkit takes advantage of and leverages the expertise of web developers and designers who do not know Smalltalk. The web pages that are powered by the Web Toolkit can be built by people who do not know Smalltalk, but do know and understand web technologies.
Smalltalk Server Page Support
Cincom added major functionality to VisualWave in order to support ASP and JSP-style Smalltalk Server pages, as well as Smalltalk Servlets and Custom Tags in 5i.4. With the 7.1 release, we have enhanced the server management facilities and server-side performance. We support all the major web server interfaces including Apache's FastCGI and IIS ISAPI, and are shipping a Perl-based CGI gateway as well.
Tool Enhancements
Better Searching - Searching for classes in the system or packages/bundles in Store are now front ended with a filtering (as you type) interface. This makes it dramatically easier to find things in the system
Professional Debug Package. The PDP is the leading debugging tool for VisualWorks, and has been fully integrated into VisualWorks with this release. The PDP supports breakpoints and watchpoints, and is now the basic debugger for VisualWorks.
.NET Connect - With this release, we are bundling a connection to the .NET (Microsoft) platform. This allows direct interaction between .NET applications and services and VisualWorks objects. This support will be in preview for this release, but will be fully supported in 7.3
Internet Connectivity Framework - VisualWorks now has an extensive library of internet connectivity tools. This support has been growing since VW 5i.3. We now support FTP, HTTP and HTTPS, SMTP, IMAP and POP3 (including MIME encoded attachments), and XML, XSL, Xschema, and Xpath. With this release, we support SOAP headers as well
Security - We now support ARC4, RSA, DES, and DSA. We have cleaned up a number of the Security API's, and moved the security related classes to their own namespace (Security). We now support SHA-256 " see the release notes for further details
StORE - StORE is the version control system of choice for VisualWorks. We have improved it in many ways since the 7.0 release.
Cleaner, clearer support for multiple repositories
Improved searching for packages/bundles
A tool interface for defining and changing package/bundle properties, including prerequisites
Much improved database access speed
Enhanced usability when extending/overriding classes from other packages
Ability to manipulate bundles within the repository without loading them
Increased usability and robustness
Distributed Smalltalk - Cincom has updated Distributed Smalltalk to allow for clean interoperation with the latest IONA and Visigenic Orb products.
Opentalk - Opentalk is the new distribution framework that allows rapid implementation of distributed protocols such as SOAP. Opentalk is the basis of UDDI and SOAP implementations. In this release, we have re-hosted the VisualWave and WebToolkit server frameworks on top of Opentalk. The previous server framework is still present in this release, but will be deprecated in the next one
Object Engine/Virtual Machine - Loadable primitives allow for creating more easily customizable Smalltalk systems, and for the easier interfacing of VisualWorks with external systems
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.
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