small talk programming tutorial3

4.1 Going on

I have given to you only a small taste of Smalltalk. The true power of this language is under this surface, under the deep water of Object Oriented Programming.

Design Patterns and Smalltalk

About Design Patterns, a good text can be [AlpBroWoo98] Here you get a comparison of Design Patterns of the [GoF95] With this two books you can compare C++ and Smalltalk, looking how the two languages implements the same patterns.

Future of Squeak

Looking at Squeak 3.0 we see a powerful ide, for experimenting, developing and not only... it is a very fun environment! The Jitter Engine will give to Squeak a powerful VM, faster and free.

4.2 Commercial and free products list

The complete list is not-so-short.
I can give you a rouge idea:

Visual Works 5i, before was of the ObjectShare http://www.objectshare.com now is sell by Cincom http://www.cincom.com It is a big Smalltalk with a large library and a lot of library code. Best, it executes code with a powerful JIT (Just In Time Compiler). It is probably the fastest Smalltalk on the market, in my own opinion.
Squeak http://www.squeak.org/. Created by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, John Maloney and many others authors of first Smalltalk80. Squeak has multimedia support, a fantastic community, and a large base of software. See [IngKaeMal]
Smalltalk MT
Smalltalk/X is very powerful, and it is a viable solution for developing under X11. The last license seems free also for commercial usage. Take a look to it.
Dolphin Smalltalk http://www.objects-arts.com/ is a very simple Smalltalk for MS-Windows, but it has good tutorials.
Smalltalk Agents http://www.qks.com/
Visual Age for Smalltalk http://www.ibm.com It is a professional products, very easy to use thank to the Visual Age Ide. Last but not least, the Visual Age for Java's IDE is written in Smalltalk too!

Some of this products (as VisualWorks and Visual Age) are very big and multi platform, other are very very small and cheap (like Dolphin) so you can choose your preferred commercial product without worrying about it. If you like, try them in this order: Squeak, VisualWorks, SmalltalkX and VisualAge. You can get trial version of the latest 3 products (I have my preferred environments, but I will not say them here...email me :-)

4.3 References

[Grogono87] Peter Grogono, Programming in Pascal, Addison-Wesley,1987
[Squeak] Squeak Home Page: http://www.squeak.org
[IDETutorial] http://kaka.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~wolfgang/cosc205/smalltalk1.html
[GoF95] Gamma, Helm, Jhonson, Vlissides, Design Patters: Elements of Reusable Object Oriented Software, Addison-Wesley, 1995
[AlpBroWoo98] Alpert, Brown, Woolf, The Design Pattern Smalltalk Companion, Addison-Wesley,1998
[IngKaeMal] Ingalls, Kaehler, Maloney, Wallace, Kay, Back to the Future: The Story of Squeak, A Practical Smalltalk Written in Itself, 199?