"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

Search This Blog

Sunday, November 14, 2004

Lisp, Smalltalk, and

Alex Peake writes in a comment...

I would love to use Franz Allegro or Cincom Smalltalk in all their maturity. On the other hand, if I have to write my own infrastructure and GUI components, I will never finish the "real" project.

What do you do in Franz and Cincom for the Infragistics GUI components, ActiveData reporting, GoDiagram...? What do you do for .NET Remoting, Declarative Transactions, MessageQueue, Declarative Code Access and User Security (based on Windows Login)...?

So I'll open this up for others to respond. Generally, these vendors (e.g. Franz and Cincom) have to provide connections to Java and dotnet at least as easily as they did for C. Given these systems are run-time typed, reflective, and garbage collected, the implementations should be easier.

Franz has a set of tools for Java, and so I would expect something similar for dotnet. Cincom has an preliminary interface for dotnet, with a more complete (events, etc.) interface in a few weeks. I guess for Java, Cincom Smalltalk would use the JNI.

Specific capabilities are probably hit-or-miss. Cincom supports an MQ-Series interface apparently. I guess the question for someone in a situation like this would be does the use of some specific product outweigh the benefit of building the majority of a product in a more productive environment? And what the cost is for creating a specific interface to that product from the ground up.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bill Clemenston has had a bunch of stuff on mixing CL and Java a bit ago: part 4 discusses jfli, which currently runs on LispWorks (and could potentially be ported to other CLs). This bit contains links to all four parts.

Anonymous said...

RDNZL is an interface from Common Lisp to .NET. It is an open source project but it has been supported by Franz Inc. and works with their Lisp implementation.

URL: http://weitz.de/rdnzl/

Blog Archive

About Me

Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.