It's after lunch, and Mark Johnson is up to talk about VA Smalltalk. I blogged both talks on this at StS. The difference here is that Mark is a marketing guy, not a technical guy - so the tone of this talk should be somewhat different than at StS. On to his agenda:
- Who Instantiations is
- Relationship with IBM
- Roadmap information
Mark has been at Instantiations since 1999, in Marketing and Business Development roles. His charter at Instantiations is to promote Instantiations tools - Smalltalk and otherwise. For those who don't know, Instantiations is a small (25 staff) company in Oregon. They were re-founded in 1997, they mostly partner with IBM, working with Rational, Eclipse, WebSphere.
They've been selling a bunch of VA add-ons for ever since Instantiations was re-founded out of the wreckage of ObjectShare. Late last year, Instantiations started working with IBM at the Raleigh lab to provide 2nd and 3rd level support for IBM. More recently, Instantiations was able to announce and offer VA Smalltalk. They are an Advanced IBM Business Partner. They have been a VisualAge Smalltalk Solution Team Member, member of STIC, and also associated with similar programs for Rational tools, WebSphere, etc.
Now we see the slide that IBM showed at StS - the "either run or walk to Java" slide. Even the maintain Smalltalk slide calls that a "Staged Transformation". Mark is pointing out that Instantiations is taking over marketing and support, so that there's no need to migrate - the choices IBM are laying out are to migrate now, or go to Instantiations.
VA Smalltalk 7 (Instantiations Product):
- Lengthens viable life of VAST applications
- 100% compatible with VA
- Includes VA Assist, WidgetKit/Controls, GF/ST
- Modernized product
- Fully Supported (by Instantiations)
- Roadmap for the future (out 2 years)
- Instantiations is 100% committed to product development
The roadmap:
- VA 7: Summer delivery (late August, early September) - VA 6.0.3 with the additional components listed above
- VA 7.5 (Next year)
- ANSI support
- More modernization
- Integrate RB
- Newer Windows Widgets
- More WS* stuff
- All additional migration stuff
They plan to evolve their own pre-existing tools as well, and integrate them more fully into VAST. Small note - GF/ST will remain a "goodie" (i.e., unsupported). By contract with IBM, they have to include the migration assistance tools from Synchrony Systems. The release was delayed somewhat by the slowness of the 6.0.3 release from IBM. Still on track for Windows GA version shortly (within a week), with Linux, AIX, and Solaris by end of August. Looks like you can contact Mark for a copy of the slides.
Mainframe stuff is still at IBM - Academic licenses are not free. hmmm.
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