On Tue, 05 Jul 2005 03:06:55 -0700, German Arduino gsa@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.