Here's a question that cropped up on the ESUG mailing list about application distribution:

As a non professional writing for fun the [deleted: ed], there is a very practical feature I badly need. I would like to be able to distribute my application without the need to distribute over 20Mb of image, change, VM. Doing so for one application is ok, but for 10 applications it is unacceptable (it does not scale well the on the target resource host).

This has always been an interesting problem with Smalltalk, but it's something you can deal with in VisualWorks and ObjectStudio:

• Create your base deployment image
• Ship the base deployment image and VM into a "well known" application directory
• At startup, your application knows where the base VM and image are, and has a directory of application components (parcels) to load, along with a manifest specifying what to load first - this can be accomplished with ini files and a startup class which fits into the Smalltalk startup machinery .

I suppose I coud do a screencast on it :) All of the pieces are there, they really just need to be put together more properly.

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