Cincom VisualWorks

FAQs - Commercial Smalltalk Environments

Cincom includes VisualWorks as part of the Cincom Smalltalk Suite. VisualWorks is an enterprise-class application development and delivery platform used by world-class companies in areas such as semiconductor manufacture, shipping, financial risk management, insurance, banking, government, education and health care. VisualWorks is instantly portable across a wide range of platforms: Windows (ME/2000/XP/200x/CE ARM & x86), Mac OS 9, Mac OS X PowerPC and Intel, Linux (x86/SPARC/PPC), HPUX, AIX, SGI Irix, Solaris (SPARC/x86), with full 64-bit support on Linux (x86-64) and Solaris (SPARC/x86-64). For Linux, we have have tested against RedHat Enterprise Linux specifically. VisualWorks includes components for any type of work your team might contemplate: Web Applications, WS* (Web Services), Internet Connectivity, and Database Connectivity - with a set of superior development tools. VisualWorks now includes best of breed tools such as the Refactoring Browser and the Professional Debugger Package, fully integrated with the product.
VW 7 represented a dramatic new direction for Smalltalk. VisualWorks is ready for integration with other leading applications and services, with support for Web Services, CORBA, COM, and common internet protocols.
VisualWorks now has support for all major internet protocols and other communication standards such as MQS, allowing Smalltalk applications to seamlessly plug into an enterprise infrastructure an important feature for IS shops that need to integrate multiple applications from multiple sources.
This generation of Smalltalk also stands as the best way to interoperate with the existing and competing standards of .NET and J2EE. With CORBA support for J2EE, Web Services support for .NET and COM support for legacy applications, VisualWorks is uniquely suited as an integration platform.

Web Services

Web Services offers a clean way to interoperate transparently with remote services, or to transparently make Smalltalk services available to others. This release has full support for UDDI, SOAP and WSDL. This allows for full interoperability with .NET-based services and J2EE web services. Wizards make it easy to either expose existing interfaces as a web service, or to create client Smalltalk interfaces to existing services. The Web Services implementation is supported by flexible XML-to-Object marshaling framework that can be easily reused for other purposes as well.

Seaside

Seaside is the best way to build "live web" applications that handle state in the same way that client applications do. It's a powerful, AJAX-enabled way to get going quickly - see this page for more details on our Seaside support.

Web Toolkit

The Web Toolkit takes advantage of and leverages the expertise of web developers and designers who do not know Smalltalk. Websites powered by the Web Toolkit can be built in the latest and greatest web development tools used by web developers today.
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 the 5i.4 release. With this release, we have enhanced the server management facilities and server-side performance. We support all the major web server interfaces including Apache and IIS.

Tool Enhancements

Refactoring Browser

The browser for VisualWorks is now the Refactoring Browser. This ensures VisualWorks' place as the premier eXtreme Programming toolset on the market.

Database

VisualWorks supports connectivity via ODBC, and via native connections to Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and DB/2. There are a number of contributed database connects to other RDBMS systems. Of course, VisualWorks connects closely to OODBMS systems like Gemstone and Objectivity, which allow for much more natural object peristence.

Professional Debug Package.

The debugger for VisualWorks is now the PDP from Crafted Smalltalk. This feature greatly improves the productivity of Smalltalk developers.

GUI Tools

The UI painting tools show continued improvement. Hotkey support has been added for all UI components, definable from the painting tools. The event system has been updated, and support for the wheel mouse has been added. There is now base-level support for XBM, JPG, PNG and GIF image formats, and new support for window opening and positioning. The user interface now operates with multiple processes instead of a single "distinguished" process. This enables more responsive applications. The Tree and dataset widgets have been enhanced as well, with additional keyboard navigation features.

Network Connectivity

VisualWorks now has an extensive library of internet connectivity tools. This support has been growing since VW 5i.3. We now support a variety of protocols including FTP, HTTP, SMTP, IMAP and POP3. Most of these protocols are supported by a robust MIME framework

Security - SSL

An extensive Security library includes implementation of a number of cryptographic algorithms (MD5, SHA, DES, AES, RSA, DSA, DH, etc) as well as higher level mechanism like password based cryptography (PKCS#5), standard secure private key storage (PKCS#8), or public key certificates (X.509). Many of these standards are supported by flexible ASN.1 marshaling framework. A complete implementation of SSL protocol is used to secure other protocols like HTTP (HTTPS) or various mail protocols.

Store

Store is the version control system of choice for VisualWorks. It has been improved in many ways since the 7.0 release including:

• Cleaner, clearer support for multiple repositories
• A tool interface for defining and changing package/bundle properties, including prerequisites
• Much improved database access speed
• Improved tool-level reporting to the developer of repository connections
• Enhanced usability when extending/overriding classes from other packages
• Ability to manipulate bundles within the repository without loading them
• Increased usability and robustness
• Ability to save ancillary files with a Smalltalk package in the repository
• Faster load times

CORBA

Distributed Smalltalk has been updated to allow for clean interoperation with the latest Iona and Visigenic Orb products.

Opentalk

Opentalk is the new network communication framework that generalizes common communication infrastructure. It is used to support specific protocol implementations like our transparent remote messaging between distributed Smalltalk systems (STST). It is also the basis of our Web Services and Web Toolkit implementations. Eventually it will be used to support our CORBA implementation and possibly other solutions as well.

Object Engine/Virtual Machine

The VisualWorks virtual machine technology provides the most sophisticated and highest-performance commercial Smalltalk execution technology with the broadest platform spread and with full 64-bit support on selected platforms. The virtual machine is based on just-in-time compilation that executes Smalltalk natively in machine code, yielding much higher performance than interpreted implementations.
The virtual machine provides cross-platform access to graphics and windowing facilities across Win32, MacOS 9, MacOS Aqua and X11 windowing systems. Smalltalk code lives in a virtual image, a file contaning a snapshot of an entire Smalltalk system, expressed in a machine-independent object representaton and instruction set. These two features providing instant binary portablity for applications across all supported platforms. 32-bit virtual images are rewritten to 64-bit virtual images via a simple one-click conversion program extending binary portability to 64-bits. Smalltalk's arbitrary-precision arithmetic support means that typical applications require no porting effort to run as full 64-bit applications.
The virtual machine provides a full C ABI interface which gives access to the underlying OS. Interfaces to COM and Objective-C are available on the relevant platforms. Call-outs and call-backs can be made on separate threads, allowing simple creation of non-blocking servers. The virtual machine provides cross-platform primitives for socket and file access which is used by the rest of the system to provide platform-independent network and file access.

Summary

Unparalleled productivity, the best tools for supporting emergent methodologies like XP, and worldwide support from Cincom

Roadmap 2008