At 09:00 29.06.00 +0200, Stephane Ducasse wrote:
>Hi Stefan
>
>thanks for all your work.

You're welcome.

>just a question:
>
>Are you selling application in Squeak?

Yes. Well, not me personally but the company I'm working for.

>can you say more?

It's a solution for a customer who wants to sell customized weather reports 
to ship captains.  We used Squeak to implement a server that automatically 
processes weather report requests and that creates the responses calculated 
from some 50 MB of weather data.

Smalltalk turned out to be really helpful as we're still tweaking and fine 
tuning the application while feeding it with test data with no compile time 
interruptions or other turn-around-time lost.

Squeak is a little bit slow but with a fast PC it's sufficient and still 
cheaper than a professional Smalltalk system.  So as I didn't want to use 
Java I convinced my boss to try out Squeak ;-)

The main obstacle was Squeaks poorly implemented file io.  They're very 
slow (but one can fortunately do this
   s := (FileStream fileNamed: 'foobar') contentsOfEntireFile readStream
work around) and we lost time because of that really stupid behavior of 
opening requestors if a file doesn't exist or whether it should be 
overwritten.  I cursed the author of that design multiple times.  IMHO, 
there should be two different level: core and UI.

We also tried to provide a small administration UI but failed because that 
would have taken too much time compared to a solution in Java or another 
language.  Interestingly, the customer wouldn't have cared about Squeak's 
look (MVC, with my newlook extensions)

bye
--
Stefan Matthias Aust  //  Bevor wir fallen, fallen wir lieber auf