| Edit | Rename | Changes | History | Upload | Download | Back to Top |
Cincom Smalltalk User Conference 2004 December 7-9, 2004 Frankfurt/Germany
Key
Q - Question
A - Answer
C - Comment
D - Discussion
Customer Advisory Board - General Topics
Q (Herr Dr. Boergi, Frey Computersysteme): What is the status of the project of an unified code of VW & OS? We need a faster speed of development for this project.
A (James Robertson): We are looking at ObjectStudio VM future directions now. We intend to get more feedback from customers, and then set direction at our next planning meeting (in January)
Q (Niall Ross): What is the proportion and the visibility of the Smalltalk part within Cincom-s success?
A: CST is the second largest engineering group within Cincom; has the second largest sales team within Cincom. Slightly less than 10 % of revenues at Cincom come from CST.
Q (Reginald Krock): What is the percentage of the CST workforce within Cincom?
A: about 20 % of engineering resources are CST; about 15% of Cincom-s overall development staff. This shows the overall investment into SW development Cincom is doing.
Q: How many VW core developers does Cincom employ?
A: About 30 - 40 people work in support & engineering. 65% in engineering; 35% in support. Within support 80% usage-based questions and 20% product-based cases.
Q (Niall Ross): How getting the message out?
A: Smalltalk is 'bleeding edge web development' (Jim R.) with Seaside & WebTalk / SoftwareWithStyle. Cincom would like to partner with SoftwareWithStyle and collaborate more closely.
Q (Roel Wuyts): What about the integration of VW and OS and other Smalltalk dialects like Squeak?
A: formal and informal connection; Alan Knight has started to work on this (Squeak --> VW); also contact with Avi (Seaside).
Q (Andreas T-nne): What are the plans and visions for CST in five years? What will CST do next?
A (Jim R.): only looks for the next 18 months or at maximum 2, 2 - years. The future of software development will be in end-user specified applications. Within the next 2 years or so, Pollock, Glorp, cross-platform and cross-dialect SW development will be the focus. We will look for customer verticals to help our VARs or our customers grow. The objective is to make Smalltalk more profitable.
C (Reginald Krock): For the VARs Pollock is interesting and Seaside will be important. Also improved database integration (Gemstone) which makes the applications easier to deal with.
C: port to VW / Seaside; Metacase, SoftwareWithStyle, XML-editing tool
Q: marketing budget? Not many people know about the recent developments, many still believe Smalltalk is dead.
D: user stories; use the computer press, publish (more) articles by Alan and Eliot; BottomFeeder, conferences, events
Q (from Georg Heeg to Walt Beisheim, Objectivity, former VP at ParcPlace): How does he see the current status of Smalltalk (history) and compared to the late eighties/beginning of the nineties?
A (Walt Beisheim): Smalltalk technology was way ahead of its time then, it is even still now. Applications have requirements that were never met by the developers (data perspective). People -dummy down- applications as they don-t want to write hard stuff / hard code. The environments were stuck. This is now the time of investments into real OO applications. The driving factors are still complexity and volume of the data on the back-end. Now money can be made out of the investments made 12 years ago. Capabilities are there. Vendors/analysts should write the studies but you need to buy their studies first. To raise the flag to write new successful applications.
D (Andreas T-nne): He wants to share the experiences from the shows Georg Heeg and Cincom are doing: Smalltalk is seen as a new product by the students and young people. They ask for the Eclipse plugin for VW. There is now the need to educate the young people, write articles, get the product to universities. The 'old' programmers are lost.
D (Jim R.): dynamic languages like Python and Ruby are now more interesting to young/new people. Other choices for dynamic languages like Smalltalk aren-t so widely considered; it is the -cool factor-. The local user groups (Smalltalk and Python/Ruby) should work together and we need to help them.
D (Sudhakar): Linux is on the upswing which we should promote more. BottomFeeder. Books on Smalltalk. Current VW applications.
D (Jim R.): We are working with partners to look into migration from VAST to CST instead of VAST to Java. OpenSource applications - the ST community is required more; Jim can-t do it all alone.
D (Sudhakar): Licensing issues? Non-commercial license?
D (Niall Ross): BottomFeeder is good publicity. Need for many changing requirements, fluctuating standards.
D (Roel Wuyts): He sees a big gap between the CSTUC attendants and the usual attendants of the ESUG conferences. This is interesting. At ESUG there are a lot of academia/university attendants. He publishes scientific publications on Smalltalk. He plans to publish articles/papers on Smalltalk and is ready to help others as well. Mentions Ralph Johnson.
C (Monika Laurent): Cincom supports and sponsors ESUG and local SUGs. Different activities in various countries in Europe.
D (Eduard Maydanik): suggests to promote that games are built in Smalltalk. This will incite young people to Smalltalk. Are their templates for games?
D (Alan Knight): mentions the local Smalltalk user groups (he hosts the Ottawa group) and promotes the idea of organizing more of these.
Q: Complaints that half of the parcels, goodies and toys don-t work, especially not with VW 7.3 (Fall 2004 edition).
A: It looks like the authors have lost their interest; the goodies are not supported by Cincom. Suggestion to put the plug-ins which do exist on a FTP server to make them available.
D: Are the goodies still used? Can Cincom list information how many times a goody has been downloaded?
Q (Joachim Tuchel): He published quite a few articles on Smalltalk and got positive feedback. Positive feedback on the tools and environment. New people started to play with Smalltalk. But there are some hurdles that frustrate them:
D (Jim R.): we need definitely more content; mentions his online publications.
D: free Smalltalk books Stephane Ducasse listed and published on the web.
Q (Jim): Do you need other things than Pollock or faster? Jim lists the following items on the white board and asks for feedback:
A: Obviously, they don-t see the savings in development costs. It doesn-t make sense to rewrite applications. If Cincom changed the pricing model then the product would be at risk.
B. Customer Advisory Board - ObjectStudio
Jim asks about the general direction the OS development should undertake in the near future:
C (Jim R.): Speed in development time:
C: Important to their management is: when? How long? Costs of both directions?
A: No more costs, just another upgrade for the customers.
Q: full WindowsXP look&feel compliance is needed (e. g. XP buttons change color by mouse over); that is the main complaint they hear from their customers. Also support for more colors (transparency).
Q (Hans-Dieter Brenner, Novatec): He presents the following list of what they would need for OS for their customers:
Q (Paul Wallimann, Informing): Their list what they would need:
Q (Less Informatik): Their list
Q (Helge Nowak): which version control systems are being used A: PVCS, CVS, Visual Source Safe, Star Team
Q (Eduard Maydanik): who would need support for generating PDF, especially because it allows creating graphical images with meta information
A PDF generation is generally interesting but none of the people were expressing a pressing need for the meta data images idea
D: Discussion about future of OS: "Georg-s architecture" of embedding OS into VW vs. old HPS2OS idea (VisualWorks vm as replacement of ObjectStudio vm only). Embedding would allow to use part of the VisualWorks development tools (Browser, Debugger, Inspector) and all of the VisualWorks frameworks right from the start. HPS2OS would keep the environments much more apart and would deliver "only" faster execution. Embedding seems to be the most interesting choice for the audience.
C (Informing): VW development tools are fine with them as long as the end-user view will remain the same. For their applications the Windows native look is very important.
C. Customer Advisory Board - VisualWorks
Q: GUI development - Windows-native widgets?
A: see roadmap on the wiki.
Q: Multithreaded vm?
A: scalability and stability issues, conflict with multi-platform functionality, scalability on multiprocessor machines better addressed by multiple images applications using Opentalk
Q: XML sub-system?
A: XSchema support - planned for VW 7.3.1
D: Scalable vector graphics, e. g. for ellipses?
Q: Graphics framework (GF/ST vs. HotDraw) - GF/ST a great framework, but documentation ? Should be brought into the product
A: see the newsgroup on vwdev; it is an ex-commercial product.
D: Mac support?
Q (Roel Wuyts): configuration, packages, bundles - in the base of VW 7.3? confusing
A: the parcels will disappear except as a file format in VW 7.4; it will become "sort of agile".
Q: Conditional dependencies ?
A: slow progress; cleaning the development process as a project for the next 1 or 2 releases (a vision for VW 7.4).
D: Runtime Packager should be packages based and improved in usability
Q: Store as a deployment environment?
Q: (from several) is there a decent cross platform report writer?
A: (Jim Robertson) use the JOOPS- SmallCom/X extension to embed Crystal Reports, but this not cross-platform but windows only
A: (Helge Nowak) ask CS Component Studio whether they-ll sell their Report Writer written entirely in Smalltalk
Q: UI Generation from domain models and database schema, does Glorp support this
A: (Alan Knight) not yet, Glorp does not have the same type of strict roadmap like Pollock, requests and contributions welcome
Q Q (Jim R.): How many of you use the following tools?
| Edit | Rename | Changes | History | Upload | Download | Back to Top |