On Tue, 05 Jul 2005 03:06:55 -0700, German Arduino <gsa at softhome.net>  
wrote:

> nik boretos <nicolasb <at> maich.gr> writes:
>
>>
>> Blake wrote:
>>
>> > Just an opinion. I keep looking for places to use Squeak in a
>> > business  context. Database connectivity and display is key.
>> >
>> I'll strongly second that...
>>
>> nikos
>>
>>
>
> About databases, this may be true because relational databases are a  
> "de-facto" standard and a programmer dealing with legacy systems must  
> talk with DB stuff. But in Squeak is available ODBC and ODBCEnh to help  
> with this.

In just about any professional desktop development tool today, the process  
of displaying DB data in form or grid format is nigh automatic.  I can do  
it without a line of code, and I can do it even if I've never seen the  
tool in my life.

You say ODBC and ODBCEnh "help with this", so I try to install ODBC and  
get the expected "no published package" followed by the not surprising:  
"Error occured during install: Not a GZipped stream". And yet, even if I  
could get it to install, I'm positive that generating a simple data entry  
form or grid would not be trivial and would most certainly require coding.  
Most likely it's not something I could manage in the first week of using  
Squeak, much less the first hour.

> But the key, IMHO, is that relational databases smell bad. Isn't natural
> develop a Smalltalk system + relational DB. Is a way to freeze and tie  
> our model and withdraw flexibility to our system.

I disagree. OO programming is perfectly capable of modeling an RDBMS. (I  
may be hallucinating but I thought I read an essay by Alan Kay embracing  
both RDBMS and ODBMS. If so, I hallucinated a really sensible thing.<s>)

The relational model certainly has its limits, but it also has its uses.  
And it's not to Squeak's credit that it makes a chore out of reaching out  
to other tools.