Major Features in VisualWorks 2.5

• Internationalization
• Application Delivery
• Headless Operation
• New Menu Framework and Tool
• New Tools Interfaces
• Drag-and-Drop Framework
• Event-Oriented Windows
• Defect Removal
• New Database Connects
• New Platforms
• Platform Updates
• Other

Internationalization

Provides the infrastructure that allows our customers to develop localized applications. This will enable our customers to develop foreign language user interfaces and to support international standards and conventions. This is not only important to our international customers, however. Many of our large customers are multinational corporations that need to deploy in more than one country.

Components

• Unicode - makes this the base character encoding for VisualWorks
• Locales - Specifies how VisualWorks will handle dates, currency, numbers, and collation.
• Message catalogs - localized text resources

Locales

• Currency policy
• Font size and family
• Character set
• Number policy
• thousands separator
• - decimal point
• Timestamp (can be customized)
• shortPolicy - Date
• longPolicy - date
• shortWeekdays
• longWeekdays
• shortMonths
• longMonths
• shortAmPm
• longAmPm
• DefaultPaperSize
• Collation policy

Message Catalogs

• Interface Labels on canvases
• Menu text
• menu bars
• menu buttons
• pop-up menus
• Transcript messages
• Dialogs

Application Delivery

A New Delivery Paradigm for Smalltalk

The traditional method of delivering a Smalltalk application was to develop the application and create a runtime by stripping out the unneeded classes and methods. This meant that applications were delivered as monolithic images and incremental updating of the application code was difficult.

The goal of this effort is to:

• Provide tools to make application delivery easier
• Allow developers to build applications that can load/unload parts of applications and, thereby, allow them to:
• actively manage footprint by loading only needed portions of application
• unload and reuse same memory when the part of the application being used is changed
• distribute new version of apps without the whole image

Eventually, this means that applications and even VisualWorks development systems can be made out of independent components

At the heart of the point release, delivery capability is the ability to place classes and methods into a separate file called a parcel for runtime loading. Users will have the ability to specify parcels to load on the command line. On platforms such as Windows this will enable double-clicking the parcel file to make it load and run.

What is a Parcel?

A Parcel is typically classes and methods that are grouped together and loaded at the same time. They will typically represent a part of an application. Parcels have a name, a version string, a comment string, class definitions, and method definitions. They are saved in Parcel Files which contain only compiled code in a fast loading, binary format. They do not contain source code.

Important Point

Parcels are a deployment mechanism - they deal with how the finished application will be loaded and updated.

Three-Step Process For Application Delivery

1. Develop the application
2. Parcel the application and write appropriate code for loading
3. Create the deployment image using the Image Maker

What Parcels Allow You To Do

• Deliver a much smaller base image
• Incrementally update your deployed application

Application Delivery capabilities will include:

• Parcel definition tool - browser tool for parcels which allows inclusion or removal of classes or class extensions.
• New Image Maker - Greater ability to carve out chunks of the system
• Runtime parcel-loading and unloading available via two means
• a command line switch
• a simple API.

Headless Support

• Allows construction of server or batch VisualWorks applications in which the display system is deactivated.
• No direct user interaction
• May run on systems having no console or windowing system.

Implementation

• A new class acts as the focal point for headless operation.
• When the image starts, there is no hookup to the windowing system.
• If attempt is made to access a display, the error is trapped and logged.
• Startup file for initiating image activity.
• Transcript messages rerouted to disk files.

Communicating with a Headless Image

• Sockets
• TTY on Unix
• File I/O

New Menu Editor

• A new menu editor has been developed that provides greater support for the menu framework of VW2.0.
• Supports definition of
• Shortcut Keys
• Submenus
• Enable/Disable

Improved Development Tool Interfaces

• Development tools are VisualWorks applications.
• Provides
• Keyboard traversal of browser
• Enables drage & drop

Drag-and-Drop Framework

• Framework allow developers to build portable applications using drag and drop within and between VisualWorks windows.
• New API for building D&D applications
• Examples include base tools with some drag-and-drop awareness.

Examples

• drag selector from browser to Aspect field in a VW property sheet
• drag class or selector from browser to launcher browse button to create a new browser
• drag selector to protocol name to move method

Event-Oriented Windows

• Provide the capability to create windows that do not use polling.
• Controllers will report events
• New API
• Benefits

• Windows won't miss mouse clicks
• Smaller impact on performance

Defect Removal

• Combo boxes
• Dataset views
• Menus
• Input boxes

Additional Changes

• Sunset of Serial I/O
• Current implementation remains for this release.
• DLL/CC examples to illustrate replacement for serial.st.
• ODI VM changes.
• Mac Sockets certification
• Performance improvements

New Database Connects

• Sybase on PowerMac
• Sybase on Windows NT
• DB2 EXDI

New Platforms

• SGI IRIX 5.x
• MIPS ABI
• Digital Alpha Unix - (2.0 FCS in June)
• Digital Alpha NT

Platform Support Updates

• SGI IRIX 5.x
• MIPS ABI
• OS/2 Warp
• Mac 7.5.1
• SunOS 4.1.4
• Windows NT 3.5.1
• Solaris 2.4
• AIX 4.1.2