Chapter 1: Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a brief overview of Smalltalk and VisualWorks and the relationship between them.

What is Smalltalk?

Smalltalk is an object-oriented programming language that was developed initially in the 1970s at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). ParcPlace Smalltalk is the latest version of Smalltalk from ParcPlace Systems, which was spun-off from Xerox PARC to support and market Smalltalk. General knowledge of Smalltalk is assumed in the tutorial, but some details of the Smalltalk language are reviewed in Chapter Three.

What is VisualWorks?

VisualWorks is a Smalltalk development environment. VisualWorks contains many useful tools for developing both Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and Smalltalk code, and then combining them to produce powerful applications. Chapter Two introduces the VisualWorks environment and its tools, and Chapters Four, Five, and Six provide illustrations of building a GUI and the underlying Smalltalk code for an application.