Dolphin Smalltalk

FAQs - Commercial Smalltalk Environments

Dolphin Smalltalk is an object-oriented development environment for Microsoft Windows. As you might expect from any set of programming tools, you can quickly use it to build and test professional Windows executables (EXEs) and COM components (DLLs). But here the similarity ends. Under the covers you will find it quite different from other programming environments you may be used to. The reason for this difference is: Smalltalk.
Smalltalk is not just a programming language. It is a completely object oriented development system that just happens to have an object oriented programming language (Smalltalk, the language) at the front end. When you double-click on the Dolphin Smalltalk icon you are opening a set of windows onto a world of objects. Everything you deal with inside Dolphin is an object. Numbers are objects. Text strings are objects. Even the development tools are objects. All of these objects in this world are constantly interacting, sending messages to one another and their behavior is dictated by the Smalltalk code that lies behind them.

A World of Live Objects

All of the Smalltalk source code for the system is supplied to you but not as "dead" sample files that have to be compiled up to see how they work. The Smalltalk code that you see in the Dolphin browsers is the exact code that you see running before your eyes. If you make a change to an object then its behavior changes instantly with no need to re-link or restart the system. Imagine this, you can modify (or even create) your application objects while they are working, while they are interacting with one another. This is a truly dynamic, seamless approach to programming that makes it feel like your application objects are almost "alive".
Once you have experienced the Smalltalk way we doubt that you'll want to return to the static, file-based approach of other languages like Java and C#.

Products

Dolphin Community Edition

Dolphin Community Edition is our Smalltalk development environment that is totally free for personal/educational use. You'll find that it is a complete tool for either learning Smalltalk programming or for creating your own personal Windows-based applications. It has a great, slick, user interface that we've tried to make as easy to use as possible, thus complementing the dynamic nature you'd expect from Smalltalk.
This is the first-time since Dolphin 2.1 that we have had a completely free version in our product range. We originally withdrew the 2.1 edition because we felt its user interface had fallen behind that of our commercial versions and, overall, we felt that it was a poor advertisement for our products. Now, however, with Dolphin Community Edition X6, we have a completely up-to-date version of Dolphin that we are placing into the hands of the community to widen the acceptance of Smalltalk still further.
Help Out
If you don't think that you'll be upgrading to Dolphin Professional anytime soon then you might like to consider expressing your support for the free Community Edition by making a small donation. Any contributions will help us to carry on improving the Dolphin products into the future.

Dolphin Professional

Dolphin Professional is our top of the range commercial product. Naturally it contains all of the features present in the Community Edition but adds additional tools and facilities that the professional developer will require. For example, you get:

• The ability to deploy applications to EXEs and COM DLLs.
• The System Browser tool that provides a package based browsing environment. Once you've used this you'll find you rarely need to go back and use the old Class Hierarchy Browser.
• Full integration of the Refactoring Browser tools from Refactory Inc.
• The IdeaSpace; a "tabbed" container for managing all your Dolphin browsers and tools and associating them together with a particular idea or workflow. The idea is to save screen space and clutter and to help you focus on your train of thought.
• The Method Explorer, which provides a hierarchical trace of your explorations through the system.
• A new Executable Browser giving a window onto the contents of a deployed application.
• The Source Tracking System. We have licensed this full method level source code repository from ITC Gorisek for inclusion in all copies of Dolphin Professional. It is very similar to the ENVY source code manager that was available for some other commercial Smalltalk products but at a cost of thousands.

Announcement from the Provider

"For several years now, in a climate of free and open source development tools, it has been difficult for us to create and sell our products in a manner which is commercially viable. For this reason we have decided that it would be impractical for us to commit to major new developments of Dolphin Smalltalk into the future. What this means is that Dolphin will continue to support Win32 under both XP and Vista but we will not be porting the IDE to .NET or any other platform. We will still offer the Community Edition for free download and the Professional version can be purchased by those who have evaluated that the Win32 product meets their needs."

Andy Bower and Blair McGlashan