[Seaside] Should I become a Seasider?

[Johan Brichau]

On 08 Apr 2011, at 23:53, Ralph Boland wrote:
> Starting a business is generally a tough deal so please don't butter me up
> with glowing reviews of Seaside.

Well, to make a long story short, we did exactly that 2 years ago: www.inceptive.be
Our two core projects are built using Seaside. One of them is already public: www.yesplan.be. The second one is going public by summer.

In one project, we got started explicitly because we were offering a Seaside-based solution. The customer had very bad experiences with traditional software development houses and was explicitly looking for an agile team using a dynamic language to do the job. So, it's fair to say that this was a unique opportunity. However, Seaside and Smalltalk did deliver! In only a single man-year of working hours (not counting the designer), we had produced a working application that other "established" development houses had failed to deliver. Whenever we show the functionality of the application to partnering software producers, they are amazed by the productivity we had gotten. Ah... and it should mention that one person in our team of three had never done any Seaside....

But, in our second Seaside project, the customers don't care at all what technology is used. They want a good product! And, in my opinion, that is true for many other potential projects we have down the pipeline. For us, Seaside and Smalltalk are powerful tools we can use to leverage a better price and better product in comparison to competitors. In the end, that is what customers want.

In other projects, we are exposed to .net, ios, objective-c, etc... and I generally miss a lot of the power and simplicity of Smalltalk. There is a lot of power in Smalltalk and the Smalltalk community when you look at Gemstone, Seaside, Pharo, Squeak, Visualworks, Cog, etc... ! 

There are (of course) occasions when I curse on Smalltalk in general: the lack of (or difficult) interoperability with non-Smalltalk based libraries and the relative small size of Smalltalk libraries is often the biggest hurdle. For every project we intend to do in Smalltalk, we have to carefully analyze the requirements and see if we can meet all of them in the Smalltalk environment. MS-Office interoperability, for example, is a nightmare.

Bottomline: Seaside and Smalltalk are currently our core technologies but not our *only* technologies. You cannot start a business on a single technology and doing business is more than technology.... there are many factors playing a role.

Cheers
Johan