Dolphin 7 and Unicode

[Don]

I sell an application written in Dolphin Smalltalk, and the only
problem is that Dolphin 6 does not support Unicode strings, which is
restricting sales. I would be prepared to pledge money for development
of Dolphin 7 if it will fully support Unicode. Will Dolphin 7 fully
support Unicode strings?

I know Dolphin NG is fully Unicode "compliant", but I must say I find
it hard to have enough confidence in it to port my application to it.
Apparently, the beta version went on sale on 2nd January, but I
couldn't find information on the site on how much it cost or how to
buy it.

The only other option I can see, using Smalltalk, is to use Visual
Works Object Studio, but the amount of work needed for that,
especially rewriting GUIs could be prohibitive. On the other hand, it
might be a good option for future applications.

Any views on this?

Don

[Andy Bower]

Don,

> I sell an application written in Dolphin Smalltalk, and the only
> problem is that Dolphin 6 does not support Unicode strings, which is
> restricting sales. I would be prepared to pledge money for development
> of Dolphin 7 if it will fully support Unicode. Will Dolphin 7 fully
> support Unicode strings?

No, sorry, there won't be any change in this area for Dolphin 7. I
realize that this is a popular request but it's unrealistic at this
stage to make this change.

Best regards

Andy Bower

[Frank Lesser [LSW]]

Hi,
yes DNG has been delayed due to a lot of VM changes we did in the last year.

where we had to maintain several VMs last year - now we have only one VM
which can load the Smalltalk it is supposed to execute ( DNG, LSWVST or
VSE ) & recognize the
different systemSpaces.

DNG is full Unicode & is based on Dolphin 6.1
The DNG-Win32 VM is final - customers can start to port applications.
The DNG Smalltalk classes are still in beta.

Some features of the DNG VM are:

the JIT-engine generates fast X86 Win32 assembly code
the DNG VM is full Unicode.
fast generational non-moving Garbage-collector with dynamic memory-size
adaption
zero-cost true multithreading
& more ...

if you seriuously consider DNG then you should contact us.
with best regards, Frank Lesser

[Udo Schneider]

Don,

> I sell an application written in Dolphin Smalltalk, and the only
> problem is that Dolphin 6 does not support Unicode strings, which is
> restricting sales. I would be prepared to pledge money for development

Do you need "just" Unicode in the backend or do you need to display
Unicode Strings in the UI?

CU,

Udo

[Don]

Thanks Andy,

All the best to you too

Don

[Don]

Hi Frank,

I only need the 32 bit version at the moment. It does sound really
good. I suppose I was a bit put off by the lack of information. I'll
be in touch soon.

Regards,
Don

[Don]

> Do you need "just" Unicode in the backend or do you need to display
> Unicode Strings in the UI?
>

Hi Udo,

I need Unicode code strings for the backend and the UI. The user can
see the output from the program in the UI before outputting it to
various places. It also uses the type libraries for Excel and Word,
and some other ones I generated myself using the ActiveX Component
Wizard.

Regards,
Don

[Udo Schneider]

Hi Don,

> I need Unicode code strings for the backend and the UI. The user can
> see the output from the program in the UI before outputting it to
> various places. It also uses the type libraries for Excel and Word,
> and some other ones I generated myself using the ActiveX Component
> Wizard.

Too bad. I have some Unicode Extensions here which work quite good as
long as you do not need GUI Interaction.

Unfortunately Dolphin mostly uses the ANSI Variants ("A" Suffix) of the
Win32 Calls .... so once you pass such an Unicode string to the GUI or
if you read one from it you are back to ANSI Strings.

Making Dolphin "Unicode-compatible" also requires to update most of the
UI/Win32 Bindings which is IMHO not likely to happen with the current
Dolphin - this is however (as far as I understood) something which was
done for DNG.

CU,

Udo