Code Requests

• I want to be able to do secure transactions using pws.
  

• calender system, for keeping up with dates
  
• Rolodex system, for contact management. (Hint: Use the example in http://www.charm.net/~arning/BobsUI.13Jun624pm.cs.txt
  
  Interesting--a possible start. It could use documentation, and ideally it should be divided from the UI so that you can plug it into other applications. -Lex Spoon)
  This could be integrated into mail readers!
  
• cron-like system that does things periodically
  
• dates and times with timezone handling
  
• enriched text handling and generating
  

• Quicken for squeak
  
• faster text formatting & displaying
  
• integrated web-browser & file list
  
• menus that can have items added without over-writing previous entries
  
• whorled peas
  

• A Swiki that allows you to upload source files to it, so that he doesn't have to submit something to the UIUC and then put a link to it here. :)
  
  (Travis, please see the page on Upload Swikis -- Mark Guzdial)
  

• Linda
  
• Physical Worlds: 3D Worlds (Alice?) with realistic physics (gravity, elastic materials, collision detection, etc)
  
• Some simple natural language generation and understanding.
  
• Speech recognition
  
• 3D Sound
  

• MorphicWrappers.
  
• ClassWrappers.
  
• BitMappedWrappers.

Peter Smet mailto:peter_smet@hotmail.com wants

a public domain smalltalk ORB (CORBA 2.0) would be excellent. I noticed in the mailing list that Alan Kay is not keen on CORBA, but it seems to be like a 'universal glue' for objects and non-objects alike. It would also mean Smalltalk could be seamlessly integrated with other languages, giving project managers the option of doing different parts of projects in different languages (allowing Smalltalk to 'get its foot in the door' more often, perhaps)....?

• an IDL compiler (to squeak, of course) and an ORB
  
  but it seems like Peter has taken the lead on developing one; way to go Peter.
  

• Running Squeak headless
  
• Talking with other apps in other languages, e.g.:
  
  • C++ vis a vis Squeak through function calls
    
  • or remotely (CORBA, please or /shudder/ sockets).
    
  
  

• Native Interface Framework (for leveraging platform specifics)
  
• A Win32 API wrapper library (for doing stuff on Windoze and other platforms that have Win32 support)
  
• Object Persistence (or a disk based image with virtual memory for handling objects)
  
• An Object Transaction Service
  
• Support for multiple VMs to share an object space
  
• Support for multiple name spaces
  
• A generic mechanism for moving objects into and out of an image
  
• A mechanism for packaging objects to be loaded and unloaded
  
• Object, package and name space versioning support
  
• An object constraint mechanism (to correctly do what Java interfaces and staticly typed languages do badly)
  
• With all of this, Squeak should become an environment where many people can do work in the same image, spanning many machines, and doing dynamic load balancing (a much better solution than CORBA or COM)
  

• I've written page up and page down support for
  both MVC and Morphic. It's been tested on V2.5 and V2.6a.
  The code can be found at http://w3.one.net/~swessels/squeak/mine/pg-up-dwn.14Oct507pm.cs
  The code was included in the 2.6 official release. I just (4-dec-99) fixed the URL to point to the right place. Sorry.
  - Steve Wessels
  

• Finalization (difficult without an object table)
  
• Weak References (and staged references)
  

• SqueakOS :o) . This must surely be possible now using
  the OSKit http://www.cs.utah.edu/projects/flux/oskit/, (which
  has already formed a basic OS for 3 other languages, including
  Java) and Squeakette. Like I say, this is just a fun challenge,
  but it would be nice to be able to boot up into Squeak...
  
  
  Take a look at SqueakNOS. We first thought of naming it SqueakOS, but then we realized it's Squeak No Operating System (-:
  
  It's currently booting and starting the VM! 27-04-2000
  

• Remember Outliners? How about an outliner which saves text in HTML format?
  
• Let's go one further. How about a minimal wordprocessor which natively saves documents in HTML and GIF (for embedded pictures).
  
• foo on HTML. Use XML. Who's up for writing a parser? (Rick Innis, mailto:rdi@interlog.com)
  Thanks.
  

• ANSI Smalltalk draft compatible language extensions (ie. temp vars in blocks - NB this would mean fixing the block arguments problem as well, ie. both Squeak VM, compiler and block support code would have to be changed)
  
• ANSI messages for basic classes where missing
  
• for any volunteers, the ANSI draft is available at http://www.software.ibm.com/ad/smalltalk/downloads/ansistan.doc
  

[Richard A. Harmon (mailto:harmonra@webname.com):

I've implemented all the ANSI Standard messages in Smalltalk Express
and ported the Fundamental through part of the Collection protocols plus
the ScaledDecimal and DateAndTime protocols to Squeak. I never got my implementation
of the Exception protocol working, but other folks have done it for Squeak.



I've finished an implementation of a facility to read and write files
in ANSI Smalltalk Interchange Format (SIF) for Squeak and Dolphin. I'm
currently packaging them up for an alpha release (real soon now--I've been
saying this for months).



I have snippets of code to test for ANSI compliance for the Fundamental
through Collection protocols plus the ScaledDecimal protocol in Squeak.



I would like someone to volunteer to head up an ANSI compliant Squeak
and work with Squeak Central on this project. I'd love to, but am not suited
to the task.

• A VM, which does all user interaction through the VNC protocol. This would enable fast ports to platforms where the VNC viewer is already available (some PDA etc), or to run Squeak remotely where there is no support for this, with multiple concurrent sessions (such as Windows).
  
• for any volunteers, the description of the VNC protocol, including all the sources and binaries of various implementations are at http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/
  

• UNICODE support and support for the various codepages, such as ISO-8859-, Windows 12xx and possibly systems like Japanese, Korean and other specific codings.
  
• something has been done for the Japanese language already (see the pages of the author of the Sharp Zaurus port of Squeak), although that uses some Japanese-only coding of the 16bit characters, but may be a good starting point. [hh] See Multilingual Support - First Version. It is probably a good starting point.
  

Allan Baruz (mailto:baruz@erols.com) would like to see:

• Ted Nelson's Udanax (the open sources for the Xanadu Project) brought to Squeak. Looking at the ParcPlace fileouts, it seems that this would first require the temporary variables in code blocks fix that was mentioned earlier.
  

Jared (mailto:slake@punkass.com) would like to see:

• OpenGL Extension, I'm a very big fan of OpenGL for it's platform independence with 2d and 3d graphics. I think it's the perfect 2d/3d graphics system for squeak.
  

Thomas Mahler would like to see:

• Support for native Windows widgets.
  Like the support for QT and GTK in QT Squeak (http://www.informatik.fernuni-hagen.de/import/pi3/joerg/squeak/talktalk.html)
  
  Most people I showed Squeak told me "this is very nice but it LOOKS so strange". I think supporting one's most familiar look and feel (Like in Java Swing) would really support squeaks acceptance.