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stic12

VA Smalltalk Update

March 20, 2012 16:13:18.520

After a bit of a fight between John O'Keefe's laptop and the projector, we're on to a VA Smalltalk update. Lots of news on the website - new forum, and a videos/podcasts page.

Version 8.5.1 just came out this month - and based on Seth's earlier talk, there's some really cool stuff in it. The highlights of the new stuff:

  • Code Completion
  • SUnit update - support for "expected failures"
  • Log4s (Logging Framework based on Log4j) (updated with asymch support)
  • Updated to a new preference setting framework. They plan to move most or all things to that over time - uses a standard .ini file format (key/value pairs)
  • Marking code as deprecated via a new exception - you get the error, but you can handle it
  • Support for mapping logical names of external libraries to real names via an external ini file - allows non-Smalltalk changes in platform to be migrated to easily
  • Updated VA to support the latest Windows updates to the progress bar control
  • Added support for date/time controls
  • Support for HTTP chunked transfer encoding
  • Improvements in support for SST, GLORP, and validate on Fedora Core, OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu 11
  • Lots of bug fixes

Still doing two releases a year - next one planned for 3rd quarter 2012

Possible futures - full unicode, Seaside 3.x, continuations, multipart form support, WS* updates, validating XML parsing, GTK+ 2.x on Linux, more Windows controls, better icon support, more dev tool work. They have a Monticello importer done.

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posted by James Robertson

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