Hi!

Just some quick personal answers.

"Joseph Frippiat" <joseph.frippiat at skynet.be> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I want to use Squeak to re-write an application for my work.

Good. :)

> It's a monitoring application:
>     - there are different equipments located in different countries;
>     - the PC has a modem.  When there is a problem on a equipment, it 
> automatically calls the monitoring PC to report it and to give informations 
> to help the diagnosis and the correction;
>     - after the monitoring PC received an incident notification, it calls 
> the maintenance guy with a pager or a GSM (sms)
>     - the incidents, the collected informations , the maintenance calls, ... 
> are stored in a database.
> I have written this application already twice: one in TurboC and Turbo 
> Prolog on DOS and the other in Visual Basic on Windows.
> 
> To communicate to the equipments, I am thinking about developing the 
> protocol on the base of the code found in SqBot.
> For the database, GOODS seems to be a good (sic) solution.

GOODS is a good choice, especially since quite a few Squeakers use it
today so there is "support".

> I don't ask for solution, only for guidelines and advices.  Do you think its 
> "playable" ? Is it recommended to use Squeak to develop an "industrial" 
> project ?

IMHO Definitely. Over the years I have found Squeak to be very robust
and the community very, very friendly and helpful.

> I have little experience in smalltalk.  I have played a little with Squeak 
> during the last years: it's a nice language and a nice environment but I am 
> afraid of the lack of stability. For example, I saved a little project 

Squeak is quite stable IMHO. But some mechanisms seldom used by people
can break from time to time. But if you use the released version and not
beta/alpha, you should be quite ok. The quality of 3.7 may be discussed
- the release was so recent that we don't have a good track record yet.

I have several apps running, well, the most obvious example is
SqueakMap. And it is quite solid, sure, has a few bugs - but those are
entirely *mine*. :) Note also that SqueakMap uses the same mechanism
that Projects use (ImageSegments) *extensively* and has worked without a
glitch. Well, ok, there *is* a VM-problem on some less used platforms,
but not many have been bitten and it will be fixed.

> (written to play with morphic) and now I am not able to load it anymore in a 
> fresh image.  The project is not important but in a case like this, is there 
> any way to explore a "lost" project when it is not possible to reload it and 
> the development image is lost ?

I think perhaps Ned or someone else with similar technical expertise
would be interested in looking at that Project file. But of course, I
can't make promises for anyone else.

> What is the safest way to make development 
> to avoid losing everything ?

Serious Squeakers today use Monticello for source code management. Or
they should. :) Images can break, even if it is quite rare.

> Thanks

regards, Göran