Michael Chean wrote:

> Do the member of this list see Squeak as a business language?  Perhaps for
> deploying apps accross the Internet/Intranet?  The language looks like fun,
> and the Smalltalk community discussion and wiki pages have excited me about
> programming again, but I'm wondering if I'm headed in the wrong direction.

This is exactly what I am doing: having fun using Squeak as a business language, developing a business objects framework (still a work in progress), and serving up web pages using the PluggableWebServer (PWS - the engine behind the first version of Swiki). 

I'm making good progress, refactoring my web page classes as time goes on, building up my business objects, and working on object persistence. One approach to persistence that I've been playing with maps objects to a relational database using Joe Yoder & associates framework described at http://www.joeyoder.com/Research/objectmappings/. I have ported the framework to Squeak for use with a port of MySQL database driver (http://www.mysql.com/Contrib/JdmMysqlDriver-0.1.0.tar.gz and http://fce.cc.gatech.edu/~bolot/squeak/opp/mysql-driver.st). Joe will soon be releasing an update of his framework that uses metadata to help with the mappings. I hope to publish my port of this stuff after I port his newest work.

I'm also investigating more direct object persistence.

All this stuff isn't all ready to ship out today, but I see it as a good long term strategy that is producing some usable stuff in the short term.

-Mark Schwenk
 WellThot Inc.