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

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Monday, September 24, 2007

Pier Port for Cincom Smalltalk

Via James Robertson, Pier has been ported to Cincom Smalltalk. What's that mean?

Pier may be the best open source application built on the open source Seaside framework. (The best commercial application being DabbleDB of course.)

Pier may be the best extension of Ward Cunningham's "wiki" concept. And it is built on Magritte, which may be the best self-describing meta application system on... well, on earth.

And Cincom Smalltalk may be the best OO dynamic language system, probably the best such commercial system, and has all the openness that Smalltalk systems have had going back to the early 1980s. In fact CST's lineage goes all the way back. (Why would you use Ruby when you could use Smalltalk???)

Cincom has or will soon have support for Seaside. Try out Pier. It's cool.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not seen Magritte before. Looks interesting. I was working on something along similar lines (http://www.thinkingcap-technology.com/documents/Thinkingcap_Platform_Overview.pdf)
a few years ago. Java is not as supportive as Smalltalk though.

Unknown said...

The image thing. Yeah, I know it's key to the meta stuff, but it seems to freak people out. Doesn't seem to fit with regular dev/scm practices (Note I said 'seem'). And the data isn't in an RDBMS. You get dinged for that.

I've said at least once that I didn't think dabbledb could be done (sanely) on an RDBMS (which means 'modern' LAMP based frameworks are out). Off the top of my head I think you could do it on Zope, or perhaps an imaginary RDF backed system, but not much else comes to mind. If there's an actual need for tools like dabbledb, I think inability for 99% of people to think outside orthodox ORM/RDBMS/LAMP setup is a natural barrier to entry.

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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.