Help

From Croquet Consortium

1 New to Croquet and Squeak?
2 Looking for downloads?
3 Have a question or problem?
4 Want to contribute?
5 Wiki help

New to Croquet and Squeak?

Although many programmers have heard of SmallTalk and perhaps even Squeak, most have little practical experience with these programming environments. Instead, C++ and Java are the object-oriented languages most in use today. Many people ask why Croquet was not written in Java or some other relatively well known language instead of in Squeak. The fact is that when we first set out to build Croquet, we intended to do it in Java. However, we had to abandon that approach because Java lacks needed meta facilities. Without them, the system would be far less powerful and capable than it is.

An essential part of our development process is Squeak's ability to keep the system running while testing, especially while making changes. Squeak allows even major changes to be performed incrementally, and they take no more than a fraction of a second to effect. Another key feature of Squeak is its generalized storage allocator and garbage collector that is not only efficient in real-time (so that animations and dynamic media of many kinds can be played while the garbage collector is collecting), but that allows reshaping of objects to be done safely.

Fear not, if you are familiar with object-oriented programming, then you will have little trouble picking up Squeak. After all, Squeak is a variant of SmallTalk-80, the original object-oriented language developed by Adele Goldberg, Alan Kay, and Others at Xerox PARC. It generally takes an experienced programmer only several weeks to pick up the language and gain a working familiarity with the Squeak environment and Croquet's classes.

There are a number of tutorials, books, and user groups to help in making the transition to this powerful environment. See http://squeak.org for more information and the book Squeak: Object-Oriented Design with Multimedia Applications by Mark Guzdial, Prentice-Hall, 2000. There are a number of useful resources available for learning OpenGL, including the OpenGL Programming Guide by Mason Woo, Jackie Neider, Tom Davis, and Dave Shreiner, Third Edition. Addison-Wesley. 1999 and OpenGL Game Programming by Kevin Hawkins and Dave Astle, Prima Publishing, 2001.

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Looking for downloads?

Go here.

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Have a question or problem?

First check the Croquet FAQs that are located on the left navigation bar. There you will find answers to many common, general Croquet questions. The Croquet Mailing Lists are a great way to connect to others in the community. Many of us are likely to have already encountered and solved your problem.

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Want to contribute?

In order to file a bug report, take a look at Bug Reporting.
In order to contribute a bug fix, go here
In order to contribute to the official Croquet documentation, write to docs at croquet dot org
In order to announce your application to the Croquet community, use croquet-announce at croquet dot org.
In order to propose changes to the Croquet, post your thoughts to croquet-dev at croquet dot org.
In order to make a monetary contribution, look at Donations to the Croquet Consortium.

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