Monday, August 6, 2007

Which Smalltalk?

There are many Smalltalk implementations to choose from but because of an interest in both Croquet and Seaside, my primary choice would be Squeak. Squeak runs on many platforms (I'm on Mac OS X 10.4), is one of a few implementations of Smalltalk that runs Seaside and is the only one (that I know of) that runs Croquet.

Here is an abbreviated list of Smalltalk environments available:
  • Squeak - A free cross-platform Smalltalk environment. That I'll talk about more in a later post since I'm using it as my development enviornment.
  • VisualWorks (Cincom) - A cross platform Smalltalk environment with a free community and commercial editions. They support Seaside (in a big way), look better than Squeak (IMHO), provide great community support with tutorials documentation and screencasts, and have visual GUI editors. The only thing stopping me from using them is that Croquet runs on Squeak and I just want to learn one Smalltalk environment for now.
  • Dolphin Smalltalk (ObjectArts) - A Windows only Smalltalk environment. There is a free community edition and commercial editions. The product looks nice and has a native look and feel.
  • Vista/Silverlight Smalltalk - Smalltalk running in Microsoft's Silverlight. Pretty cool and cross-platform through Silverlight.
  • GNU Smalltalk - POSIX version of Smalltalk. Unlike the others in this list, GNU Smalltalk is less an all encompassing environment and working with it should be more familiar to most developers than the standard Smalltalk way of doing things.
  • Other versions - There are several other versions of Smalltalk available.

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