Squeak

FAQs - Free Smalltalk Environments

Squeak is a modern, open source full-featured implementation of the powerful Smalltalk programming language and environment. Squeak is highly-portable - even its virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. Squeak is the vehicle for a wide range of projects from multimedia applications, educational platforms to commercial web application development.

Noteworthy uses of Squeak

• Children's Machine - The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative leverages Squeak to power the Etoys application shipped with every laptop around the world.
• Etoys is a powerful script-based environment to learn science and math by encouraging exploration and experimentation.
• Seaside is a framework for developing sophisticated dynamic web applications by using Continuations dramatically easing the complexity of web application development.
• Croquet is an open source software platform for creating deeply collaborative 3D multi-user online applications. It features a network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users.
• Sophie is a digital media assembly tool to combine images, text, video, and audio into a single multimedia document such as slideshows, presentations and annotated videos.
• Scratch is a new programmable toolkit that enables kids to create their own games, animated stories, and interactive art -- and share their creations with one another over the Net. Scratch builds on the tradition of Logo and LEGO/Logo, but takes advantage of new computational ideas to make it easier to get started with programming (lowering the floor) and extend the range of what kids can create and learn (raising the ceiling).

The list of features in Squeak is astonishing. What would, in other environments, be third party extensions downloadable elsewhere comes fully integrated in the standard Squeak release. Click on the links below to take a short tour of a small part of SqueakVille...

• Development
• Education
• Fun and Games
• Internet
• MultiMedia
• Research
• The Squeak VM

Smalltalk, the language, is:

• Dynamically Typed
• Strongly Typed
• Garbage Collected
• Interpreted
• Purely Object-Oriented
• Open Source
• Reflective
• Extensible
• Cross-platform
• Cross-OS
• Cross-hardware

Some features of Squeak

• Squeak's virtual machine is developed using Squeak itself. It is possible to execute and debug Squeak inside Squeak
• Squeak can be used for Web Application Development.
• See the Croquet project and Balloon for examples of Interactive 3D in Squeak!
• Squeak has superb multi-media potential!
• Squeak is internationalised! It supports Unicode and Localization for multi-lingual applications.
• Squeak is a persistent environment - when you save your image, every thing right down to the position of windows and text is saved.
• Squeak itself is an IDE. You can code, run and debug in the same environment.
• Squeak uses incremental compiling - once you've saved your code, it's ready to run!