VisualAge Smalltalk

An industrial strength multi-platform Smalltalk development system originally developed by IBM in the early 90s, commonly known as VA Smalltalk in the OS/2 world, VAST in the Microsoft Windows and UNIX spheres and inside IBM often simply as "visualage".

History

The company had in the 80s realised the need for a rapid development system with a more modern and standardised language for application programming (as opposed to systems programming), that scaled across platforms and offered support for concepts like object-orientation and dynamic typing. After trialling Enfin Smalltalk internally for a few years the company settled on the language and started developing their own system that supported anything from PCs to mainframes from the same codebase, with the end result being VA Smalltalk.

Add-on systems

• Tenacity - Persistent Object Database - Freeware
• TORest - Regular Expressions Parser - Freeware
• TOScript - Smalltalk scripting interpreter - Freeware
• Totally Objects Readability - Source formatter - Freeware
• Totally Objects SocketSet - TCP/IP sockets library - Commercial
• Visibility Color - Enhancement for the report generator - Commercial
• VOSS - Database/transaction/object persistence system - Commercial/open source
• WindowBuilder Pro - Simplifies the creation of user interfaces.

Code snippets, archives and collections

By Matt Sims (Totally Objects):

• Application Prerequisites - Replaces the Prerequisites windows in VA Smalltalk
• Date and Time Editor - A small piece of VisualAge Smalltalk code that allows you to place date and time editors in a normal VA Smalltalk window.
• Text Widget Hyperlink - A small piece of code that shows how to use a Text Widget as a hyperlink.

By David Pennington (Totally Objects):

• JPEG Displayer - Demonstrates how to use JPEG images, requires VA Smalltalk 4 or up
• WebConnection File Attachment Adds file attachment capacity to the WebConnection part in VisualAge Smalltalk

By Adriaan van Os:

• Vastgoodies.com - A repository of VA Smalltalk functions, only a subset of these will work with the OS/2 version of VisualAge Smalltalk 6.x.

Version

Oct 1995:

• VisualAge for Smalltalk, Standard for OS/2, V3.0
• VisualAge for Smalltalk, Professional for OS/2, V3.0
• VisualAge for Smalltalk, Distributed for OS/2, AIX, Windows, V3.0
• VisualAge for Smalltalk, Reports for OS/2, Windows, V3.0
• VisualAge for Smalltalk, Database for ORACLE, for OS/2, AIX, Windows, V3.0
• VisualAge for Smalltalk, Communications/Transactions for OS/2, AIX, Windows, V3.0
• VisualAge for Smalltalk, IMS Connection for OS/2, for AIX, Windows, V3.0
• VisualAge for Smalltalk, AS/400 Connection, for OS/2, Windows, V3.0

1998:

• VisualAge Smalltalk Enterprise 4.5

1999:

• VisualAge Smalltalk Enterprise, Version 5.0

2000:

• VisualAge Smalltalk Enterprise, Version 5.0.1
• IBM VisualAge Smalltalk 5.52

Nov 2002:

• IBM VisualAge Smalltalk 6.01 (final OS/2 version)

Documentation

Version 3.0

• Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming with IBM Smalltalk, Version 3.0 (SC34-4491)
• IBM Smalltalk User's Guide, Version 3.0 (SC34-4536)
• IBM Smalltalk Programmer's Reference, Version 3.0 (SC34-4493)
• VisualAge for Smalltalk, Getting Started, Version 3.0 (SC34-4535)
• VisualAge for Smalltalk, User's Guide, Version 3.0 (SC34-4518)
• VisualAge for Smalltalk, User's Reference, Version 3.0 (SC34-4519)
• VisualAge for Smalltalk, Programmer's Guide to Building Parts for Fun and Profit, Version 3.0 (SC34-4496)

Version 5.5

• VisualAge for Smalltalk, User's Guide, Version 5.5

Publications

IBM Redbooks

• SG24-4828 - VisualAge for Smalltalk Handbook, Volume 1: Fundamentals
• SG24-2219 - VisualAge for Smalltalk Handbook, Volume 2: Features

Books

• Michel Brassard; William Nadal: VisualAge and Transaction Processing in a Client/Server Environment - Prentice Hall 1996, ISBN 0-13-460874-7
• Liwu Li: The VisualAge for Smalltalk Primer - Cambridge University Press 1998, ISBN 0-521-64669-3
• Skublics; Klimas: Smalltalk with Style - Prentice Hall 2002, ISBN 0-13-165549-3
• Dan Shafer, Scott Herndon: IBM Smalltalk Programming for Windows and OS/2 - Prima Publishing, ISBN 1-55958-749-0

Related articles

• ENVY - The 10 Minute Guide

Links

• IBM Newsgroup
• IBM: /ps/products/visualage/fixes/ Fixpaks