How Do You Do Business Apps?

Andrew C. Greenberg werdna at gate.net
Fri Feb 25 11:48:19 UTC 2000


>For business applications, I'd recommend to stay with Dolphin ST.  Its
>application framework (called MVP - Model View Presenter) is IMHO one of
>the best things invented for Smalltalk.  Squeak has nothing comparable (yet).

This is certainly true.  OTOH, it will be just as difficult to evolve 
a Dolphin application to run on a Macintosh, Unix, or on any of the 
other myriad formats on which Squeak is supported.

What keeps drawing me to Squeak is that it delivers the promise of 
Java -- write once, run anywhere, without fibbing.  A Squeak 
application, whether developed in MVC or Morphic, runs pixel for 
pixel identically across formats.  Such ubiquity has great promise 
and utility offered by no other system -- including Java and Python, 
which while capable of running software on all those machines, 
doesn't run identically.

I developed my first Squeak app (a multimedia birthday present for my 
wife) on my office PC under Windows 95 just two months after 
beginning to learn Smalltalk.  The finished product ported to her 
MacOS via the expedient of an e-mail, ran first time, and was 
pixel-for-pixel identical to the original.

Dolphin can't do that, and without a fundamental rewrite of the 
entire system,can't be "evolved" to do that.





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