This Pharo image seems really clean. And the tutorial is a very nice addition.
My only disappointment with Squeak is that all the multimedia related stuff was really outdated and the performance was poor.
I've been subscribed to the mailing list for a while and it seemed to me that very few people were concerned with this. All the development was focused on developer tools.
There was a guy (couldn't remember his name/website) who was working on really interesting graphical stuff. He was rewriting the Morphic gui from scratch. I hope his work will be eventually merged with Pharo. EDIT: found it: http://www.jvuletich.org/Morphic3/Index.html
With strong and updated multimedia capabilities this could become a modern HyperCard.
I now only use Smalltalk a few hours a month but I have switched over completely to using Pharo instead of Squeak or VW (non commercial version). Pharo really is cleanly laid out and nice to use if you are (like me) a very much part-time Smalltalker. The Pharo book is very good, BTW.
I built a seaside app on Squeak last year and ported it to Pharo in October. So far I've liked Seaside a lot better than Rails, and Pharo a lot better than Squeak. Pharo is a nice, clean smalltalk with a professional UI useful for the developer. We've even started selling the app. on a very small scale and have had great feedback on the flexibility we gained by using a Smalltalk, Seaside, and an object database
Would you mind sharing a link to the app? Many of us haven't had a chance to see many Seaside apps out in the wild. I think DabbleDB and Auctomatic are Seaside apps, but other than that I can't think of any.
I would like to, unfortunately it isn't a public application, and also contains medical information. Maybe one day I'll setup a demo account on a stand-alone server with fake data... but that is a really low priority (in fact, I just now came up with that, so its at the bottom of the list :)
Its called Magma. Its implemented in Squeak Smalltalk and runs fine on Pharo and is open source. So far I've enjoyed using it, but I haven't had to scale it yet. It does support replication with automatic fail-over though.
Edit: Some basic docs: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2665 The rest of the docs are just "read the code/comments" which actually works in Smalltalk. I've found "read the code" never works well in any other language due to poor code navigation in file-based PLs
Edit Edit: Sorry, didn't read your comment entirely. Its a pure OO database. These are pretty common in Smalltalk as it has good built-in serialization/marshaling routines, so most OO dbs are just a layer on top of the built-in stuff.
You can actually build fat-client apps with just Pharo too. The only downside is it doesn't support OS native widgets or windows (its all inside one window).
This Pharo image seems really clean. And the tutorial is a very nice addition.
My only disappointment with Squeak is that all the multimedia related stuff was really outdated and the performance was poor.
I've been subscribed to the mailing list for a while and it seemed to me that very few people were concerned with this. All the development was focused on developer tools.
There was a guy (couldn't remember his name/website) who was working on really interesting graphical stuff. He was rewriting the Morphic gui from scratch. I hope his work will be eventually merged with Pharo. EDIT: found it: http://www.jvuletich.org/Morphic3/Index.html
With strong and updated multimedia capabilities this could become a modern HyperCard.