Cincom VisualWorks: The Corporate Face of Smalltalk

This is like Squeak's elder, much much more serious and responsible brother. Cincom VisualWorks is clearly aimed at a corporate development environment. It's very robust, with a large set of ready-to-go development tools and packages that will save you lots of effort. It's IDE seems to me to be solid and functional, if a tad uninspired.

They very generously offer a free download with a license for unlimited non-commercial use. No time-limits. Their site has lots of great informational links, not just for their product, but for Smalltalk in general, as well as other common Smalltalk environments.

You can get a 3rd party package called Jun that functions as a wrapper for Open-GL for VisualWorks. I have no idea how stable/well-documented/easy-to-use it is, but it is there, and it too is free. There's also been a fair amount of activity recently on its site, which is a good thing!

They also have 'ObjectWorks', which seems to be an associated product that is more closely tied to the Windows environment, and would be able to talk to DirectX libraries via it's COM/ActiveX capabilities.

VisualWorks is also notable for being one of the original efforts by Xerox ParcPlace at a commercial development environment for Smalltalk. (See this article for more info.)

However, for my purposes (see my earlier posts) VisualWorks didn't really seem appropriate. It's definitely aimed at the corporate user rather than the individual developer like myself. (When they don't even have the price on the web site, I know it's too much for me.) Plus, there are other distributions that look a little more in-line with what I'm looking to do....

[EDIT] In a (surprisingly prompt) comment, the product manager for Cincom Smalltalk clarified a couple things (it's 'ObjectStudio', not 'ObjectWorks' as I called it, and Cincom Smalltalk consists of VW and OS in conjunction, they're not separate products per se), and he also provided this helpful link with the details on their pricing policy.