On driving and monitoring Smalltalk-80 applications using Unix spreadsheets

Our goal is to overview the Application Programming Interface (API) we have developed to allow for the integration of Smalltalk-80 applications with Unix spreadsheets. We first present two motivating examples and summarize the relevance of spreadsheets for Smalltalk applications. Our contention is that two omnipresent but cumbersome tasks of Smalltalk applications can be efficiently handled by a spreadsheet, namely the driving and the monitoring of an application. We overview the implementation of our API in order to demonstrate that the Smalltalk-80 programming environment is easily integratable with other Unix applications, and to emphasize the benefits of such a potential for integration