The Fnordistan Department of Software Engineering

Less than a year later, I finally got around to writing the second part of my VisualWorks application packaging tutorial.

This is my first attempt at a tutorial. The process of packaging a VisualWorks development image as a runtime image for deployment is covered in much more detail in Cincom’s Application Developer’s Guide. However, I thought it would be worthwhile to write a simple illustrated guide to cover the basics.

The tutorial is here.

I welcome comments, corrections, etc. I will finish the tutorial with a how-to on compressing the image and using ResourceHacker to make a Windows executable shortly.

I have been using Cincom’s VisualWorks for my Smalltalk programming. It’s a nice tool, but one thing I was really missing was syntax highlighting. Nowhere in VisualWorks’ Application Developer’s Guide is there any mention of syntax highlighting.

Finally, I stumbled across a reference implying that there was a way to do this in VisualWorks, and after a Google search, learned about RB Code Highlighter. This is a package in Cincom’s StORE open repository. StORE is accessible from within VisualWorks, but the documentation isn’t exactly clear. You have to poke around on the Cincom community blogs and Smalltalk wikis and newsgroups before you really start learning about these things.

IMO, Cincom has a great Smalltalk product but they don’t do a good job of marketing it or letting new users know about the tools available for it.