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Cincom Smalltalk Roadmap

June 12, 2013 13:38:05.991

Gemtalk and Instantiations already did theirs; today it's Cincom's turn, and Arden Thomas is up there giving us the roadmap. Things that are happening that impact both VW and OS:

  • 64 bit VMs revamped
  • Windows 64 bit
  • GC improvements
  • Atomic Loading
  • Delay alternatives
  • Store revamped - now uses Glorp under the covers - improved store "GC"
  • New merge engine, new comparsion tool
  • Latest Seaside integrated
  • Now supports external encryption (lots of interesting issues with the US government on that)
  • Xtreams is moving forward, improvements to Timestamp
  • New webserver (SiouX) in VisualWorks, using xtreams. Should be faster and simpler than old Opentalk based server. Rehosted Seaside and WS* to use this
  • New web app framework, AppeX
    • Modern web framework
    • HTML5, JS, Ajax, JSON, XHR
    • Auto session management
    • Lightweight, flexible
  • Polycephaly has been renamed to MatriX (again, using xtreams)

Future Store improvements

  • Less memory usage
  • Better method source handling
  • Better external file handling
  • Make it faster

Some stuff he won't tell us yet.

Now, ObjectStudio

Improvements to modeling and mapping tool coming. Windows 8 certification coming. Improving fonts, trying to get rid of a lot of the old "done in C" things from ObjectStudio, move them to the image. Unicode support for DB2. Updated and improved ODBC support. There is an ongoing project to improve the widget set in ObjectStudio. Upcoming release will have new GUI work into preview, and will use the VW COM code, which has seen more work recently.

Now the VW specific stuff. Improvements to the Project Launcher. COM updates, including COM 64 bit. Better ActiveX integration. Some JIT improvements on the Unix and Windows platforms, ability to have the MS specific DLLs statically linked to the VM. Skins (native looking widgets, using the images for the platforms for the widgets) is going into preview, updated keyboard handling is coming. Totally revamped command system for that. Much better integration with Macs due to that work. Improved text editor (check out our podcast with Michael Lucas-Smith - part 1 and part 2 on that).

Finally, some demos of the skins work, the editor work, and the AppeX work

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posted by James Robertson

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