The GNU SmallEiffel compiler has been ported to the Intent/AmigaDE operating environment. Also worth checking out is this transcript of Bill McEwen’s AmigaDE demonstration for TechTV. You will get a good idea of what this technology is capable of, regardless of it being only a tip of the iceberg of what the AmigaDE developer community is working on.
Hey does the Amiga SDK support Ada95 ?
Will it ever support Ada95?
If I could write in Ada95 then you would have a sale. This is the most amazing thing I have ever seen. Forget .Net crap, Amiga DE/Anywhere blows Java and .Nyet right out of the water. 16 k the Amiga DE layer is only 16k!!!!!!!!!!
SmallEiffel has been available for a while. Amiga.org just posted it as a news item. Hhmmm at least it is the first time it’s mentioned on OSNews.
Anyway more people should check it out, including me. 🙂
Forgive my ignorance, but what is this Eiffel language? Is it comparable to C, C++ or Java?
Eiffel is an object-oriented language like C++ or Java.
http://www.eiffel.com/eiffel/nutshell.html“>Eiffel
Amiga Anywhere will be the thing that not only saves Amiga Inc, but saves the Amiga Platform. As more people buy this for their PDA’s/STB’s what evers… More developers will be needed and im guessing that AmigaOS will be come the official development platform of choice for AmigaDE apps.
Simply because the DE is going to be a lot faster on AmigaOS because of its seemless integration and transparency. Sure you could buy the SDK, but AmigaOS will offer so much more, like a consistant feel and development enviornment
That how it should be done, and my guess is thats how it will be done.
I think your post is maybe more wishful thinking than cold analysis. First, there’s no indication that developing on AmigaOS will be “a lot faster” than on other platforms. (This assumes an early integration of AmigaDE/SDK and AmigaOS, to begin with.) Since the hardware available for AmigaOS will run, initially at least, on relatively slow PPC G3s, whatever “sluggishness” caused by overhead on other systems could easily be compensated for by their much faster processors. Of course it remains to be seen how this all plays out.
Second, how soon will people be able to develop for AmigaDE/Amiga Anywhere natively on AmigaOS? That’s supposed to be possible with AmigaOS 5, right? And who knows when that’ll be released. Seems to me Amiga is going to have to make a lot of headway with Amiga Anywhere sooner than OS 5 will be available. Anyway, Amiga, Inc., when considering development platforms, seems to be very pragmatic, putting their resources where they’ll do the most good (thus the early Windows version, repellant as it might have been for more emotional reasons). Unless AmigaOS 5 numbers ramp up fast, Amiga may not choose it as a dev platform over something like MacOS X, if the potential is greater there, for example.
Third, doesn’t it seem that the “Amiga platform” will have to be more than just a development platform for Amiga Anywhere in order to be viable? Relatively few customers out there are developers. AmigaOS can’t survive on sales to developers alone; it needs ordinary (insofar as Amiga users are ‘ordinary’
end users for its development to be cost effective. So I think there’s a ‘poetic justice’ in AmigaDE/Amiga Anywhere developers using AmigaOS for their work, I don’t think those people are particularly a factor in the AmigaOS bottom line.
You’re right that it’s how it should be done (assuming coders with a feel for the Amiga platform might be most in tune with producing small executeables of the sort Amiga, Inc. seems to want for Amiga Anywhere), but I rather doubt that’s how it will be done, at least not any time soon.
> This assumes an early integration of AmigaDE/SDK and
> AmigaOS, to begin with.
AmigaOS4 is being developed with seamless AmigaDE integration in mind for later versions.
> Second, how soon will people be able to develop for
> AmigaDE/Amiga Anywhere natively on AmigaOS? That’s
> supposed to be possible with AmigaOS 5, right?
The cool thing about the AmigaDE platform is that, when you have it running on a platform, everything written for it will become available including development tools. So we can see development tools from AmigaOS4.2 on.
Of course most people probably don`t want these tools available on a PDA, but when the AmigaDE is available for QNX Neutrino, having a QNX RtP AmigaDE SDK isn`t a big task. An actual release of an QNX RtP AmigaDE SDK is dependent on how many developers would like to use QNX RtP as an AmigaDE development platform. I believe Windows and AmigaOS will be the most important AmigaDE development platforms in the near future.
> Third, doesn’t it seem that the “Amiga platform” will
> have to be more than just a development platform for
> Amiga Anywhere in order to be viable?
No, but having the AmigaDE integrated will help, as for example one of the fastest/smallest JVMs will become available and also CodeWarrior development tools, Renderware and a whole lot of other stuff currently unavailable to AmigaOS.
It’s a pity that no one made such a fuss when I ported Smalltalk to the Amiga (called AmigaTalk). If Amiga Inc. would contact me, I might be persuaded to let them have a copy of
the source code (for Amiga OS4 or 5 or whatever).
Jim Steichen, author of AmigaTalk, which can be found on aminet (be sure to download
AmigaTalkUpd.lha as well)
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana!
Is your Amiga port of Smalltalk suitable as a general-purpose language
?
Could one write a paint and animation program that works correctly
with graphics cards, for instance ? Or is it limited to Shell programs
?
> It’s a pity that no one made such a fuss when I ported
> Smalltalk to the Amiga (called AmigaTalk).
The specialty of having different programming languages available for the AmigaDE, is that programs written with any such language, can be run on any AmigaDE enabled device. This means you can easily write software i.e. for use with mobile phones, PDAs and STBs. Different languages have different advantages, a developer who owns Tao’s Intent ADK or full Tao/Amiga SDK for example, could write a simple database while using the <a href=”http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=169“>SHEEP programming language, for example for use on mobile phones! (Would be a great tutorial/type over stuff for computer magazines IMO, just like the way it was popular to do on the c64 over a decade ago.)
The AmigaDE developer community hopes to attract many more bedroom developers. The potential is enormous for them. Maybe you still remember the game “Worms”, a game by a classic Amiga bedroom game developer using BlitzBasic, which became a huge worldwide multiplatform hit title.
The game was a mixture between the original multiplayer Amiga “Lemmings” (Fabulous game, much better than the incredible inferior single player only PC port) and an original Amiga Freeware game called “Tank” (Many Shareware/Freeware clones followed like “Scorched Tanks”, “Artillery”, “Battle Dual” or “Tanx”.) It would be great if we could revive a similar developer community with the ability to reach a much wider audiance, for bedroom programmers.
Also online multiplaying has huge potential on PDA/Cellphone hybrids. I would love to see good multiplayer “Dynablaster” clones (An original 1991 Amiga game, later ported to other platforms and maybe better known as “Bomberman”), for example “<a href=”http://amisource.de/dynamite/“>Dynamyte” would in my opinion be an amazing multiplayer game for PDAs and other handhelds (either linked or played online.)
There are thousands of developers already seeing this potential, I hope many more developers will follow soon. 🙂
“The specialty of having different programming languages available for the AmigaDE, is that programs written with any such
language, can be run on any AmigaDE enabled device. ”
Which unfortunately doesn’t include Amigas, and I am doubtful that it
ever will.
> Which unfortunately doesn’t include Amigas, and I am
> doubtful that it ever will.
AmigaDE should become available for AmigaOS4.2 and newer. (Note AmigaOS4.x even runs on old 68k/PPC hybrids) New PPC Amigas and supported clones however will make nicer solutions for running 68k software through emulation, new PPC native titles as well as AmigaDE software. If you need AGA compatibility I recommend Eyetech/Escena’s AmigaOne solution.
If you mean that 68k AmigaOS won`t be supported by AmigaDE then you are probably right, we are beyond the year 2000 afterall, it just wouldn`t make much sense anymore, it is time for people to upgrade their 1985-1992 Amigas to more modern specifications. Maybe if http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=604“>AmigaOS starts selling in the millions you may see it though. 😉
“AmigaDE should become available for AmigaOS4.2 and newer. ”
Oh, I know it _should_, that’s what it says on the web site, bit will
it actually happen, since Amiga Inc are not directly involved in OS 4
?
If they look at the market, the priority on the desktop would be Mac
OS X, which probably has a thousand times as many users as AmigaOS 4.
As for running on Amithlon etc, that doesn’t need a 68k PII, as the
x86 PII can be used.
It would certainly be useful to have the DE running on Amigas, but I
can’t see it as commercially viable. It would have made more sense two
years ago.
The nice part is that AmigaOS does not need to be commercially viable right at the start. It is an investment for moving towards the future. AmigaOS is part of Amiga’s long term strategy of developing a home server platform.
If everything goes according to plan you will see the AmigaDE fully integrated in future AmigaOS releases. MacOS X is a great step forward for Apple but it is very bloated and inefficient IMO, not something Amigans (like the ones working for Amiga Inc) could feel proud of. We should take note of its visual quality though (cool integrated animations for example). But in my opinion from a technical point of view alot can be improved regarding MacOS X, the eyecandy is pretty good, but in general IMO it is just that, eyecandy.
Its being implimented in 4!!
Dont you read the developer status reports?
A Hardware Abstraction latyer is already being worked on. Parts of it will be avaliable in version 4 of AmigaOS!!!
Rodney, the abstraction layer is for/of OS4. Nothing AmigaDE/AmigaAnywhere related.
Mike, I bet you got pretty good contacts at AI. Keep them informed that we (the Classic Amiga community) need DE/AA and SDK on our Amigas ASAP! Preferably THIS year!
And I mean DE/AA & SDK for OS4.x is sufficient.
(not for those 68k systems)
Smalltalk (& Amigatalk) are general purpose languages, but I can only add support for Graphics
that I have documentation for. I wish someone would supply me some source code on how cybergraphics.library BitMaps could be converted to regular Amiga-type BitMaps so I could finish the Image Class in AmigaTalk.
AmigaTalk opens a GUI on my CyberVision 64D with no problems. There is a mostly complete interface to the Intuition, DataTypes, & Graphics libraries, so I believe that a Paint program, for example, could be written. However, you should be aware that AmigaTalk now uses up to 30MB of memory.
There are some examples of creating gadgets, menus & so forth in AmigaTalk:TestFiles/ directory.
I Just finished uploading V2.0 of AmigaTalk to aminet (it is also available from my website at: http://home.rconnect.com/~jimbot/amigatalk.htm). 17-Mar-2002
Jim Steichen
No matter where you go, there you are!