Killer Application (was: Squeak Foundation)

Todd Kueny todd at think121.com
Sun Jun 9 13:39:46 UTC 2002


We are working on a commercial, wide-deployment, multi-purpose,
multi-platform app with Squeak.  In our particular case, we have chosen a
browser as the UI.  That being said, there is still a *lot* of work to do to
just organize Squeak and the components we use (Seaside, Comanche + some
others) into a reliable configuration - one that we can reliably rebuild,
deploy, support, etc.  (Since I wear the pager, this is really important to
me.)

Our goal is to run the same user app on Mac OS/9, OS/X, HP-UX, Linux,
Solaris, and NT.  Our software is already this portable, but its a
command-line UI app.  This UI shell will be a free app (the customer will
only pay for our software which will be called from inside the server).

We sell printing software and services relating to web-based and digital
printing (www.think121.com).  Our goal is to build a browser-UI control app
that will run on all these platforms.  The user experience will be the
uniform due to the browser.  From the development side, we want the code
across all the platforms as similar as possible (as close to one code base
as possible).  Squeak is the only app that does the job (Apache does not run
on OS/9 which is a major graphic arts/printing platform).

The main problem we have encountered with Squeak is the dispersion of
knowledge and change files needed to get anything to work.  From a
commercial perspective, we need to reliably be able to 1) build the VM for
each platform from C to maintain control and reliability, and 2) have a well
defined change set load that works on each VM.  That said, we are getting
close on #2 and haven't started #1. It seems like the knowledge base is
fragile, not the main code base.

My goal is to have a distribution site for our flavor of Squeak with these
components and to rev it periodicaly.  I think that this is the real area
where Squeak needs help.  The code itself, once you get it working, seems to
be quite good.

Todd
todd at www.think121.com





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