Promoting Squeak/Smalltalk

Diego Fernández diegof79 at gmail.com
Thu Jan 31 16:12:32 UTC 2008


To me one of the issues that we have to attack to make Smalltalk more  
popular in the business arena is: isolation.

I mean, currently Smalltalk developments are "isolated" in two ways:

- If you choose an Smalltalk, you can't migrate easily to another one.

The "core" framework is more or less the same for all Smalltalks  
(collections, streams, exceptions, SUnit).
But when you start using another things like networking, databases,  
UI... porting from one Smalltalk to another still requires a lot of  
work.

Another issue on porting are tools for  "source code packages". For  
example the code of Aconcagua (the unit framework created at Mercap),  
is very portable: it was created on VisualAge, and them ported to work  
on GemStone, Squeak and VisualWorks.
Camp Smalltalk Rosseta was used to port the initial version from VAST  
to Squeak and VW, but the required work was not trivial, and maintaing  
"source code packages" for each Smalltalk flavor is really tedious.

I know that there is a Monticello package loader con VW Public Store,  
but having an open source package format with multiple smalltalks in  
mind would be nice. (Even more nice would be having an open source  
multi smalltalk versioning system... imagine how nice would be if  
SqueakSource packages, and VW Public Store packages are accessible  
from the same public repository and versioning system).

- The integration with other tools could be really difficult

In VisualWorks you have  tools to integrate an smalltalk application  
with the rest of the enterprise: webservices, ActiveX, JNIport.
But in Squeak, no :(
The webservices package seems to be unmaintained, and you have a great  
FFI support, but compared to Ruby or Python, the communication with  
systems in Java or C# requires a lot of work.
For example, a lot of enterprises  (Banks, travel agencies, etc) uses  
JavaEE for the middle tier. But there this is a potential market for  
Seaside in the web tier: the framework is superior and more flexible  
than JSP, Ruby On Rails or PHP.  But is not easy to communicate your  
Seaside front end to the Java/C# backend. You can use and ad-hoc HTTP  
or plain socket messages, or buy a license of VW and use WebServices  
or RMI. But the immediate cost of this compared to just develop the  
web application in Java or JRuby, is difficult to justify.

Also integration from other applications to Smalltalk is difficult (a  
nice thing of GNU Smalltalk is that you could use the VM as a library  
in C -the people in VW is working in something similar, and I think  
that St/X also have something like this).
Thanks to this Python became more popular: Python is used as scripting  
language in a lot of games because is really easy to integrate from  C/ 
C++. (for example in Linux you could make an filesystem driver using  
Python and FUSE!)


Well that are to me aspects that we as developers can resolve, and can  
have impact on the whole community: with better integration with other  
systems, an small consultant could sell a Seaside based solution more  
easily. With tools to work on multiple smalltalks I think it would be  
less duplicated work, and more shared packages between smalltalk  
implementations.



On Jan 30, 2008, at 4:16 AM, Damien Cassou wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Jan 29, 2008 11:45 PM, David Zmick <dz0004455 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have been wondering how to make smalltalk a more "popular"  
>> language,
>
> I can find different options:
>
> - distribute flyers (http://damien.cassou.free.fr/)
> - present Smalltalk/Squeak/Seaside
> (https://svn.squeak.org/Advertisement/presentations/squeak_jm2l_en/)
> - help people working on the Smalltalk entry point (the dev-images,
> the documentation...)
> - live on #squeak irc and answer questions
> - develop programs with Smalltalk/Seaside and advertise
>
> -- 
> Damien Cassou
>




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