I came across this post from EZBoard's CEO this afternoon - Ezboard is currently built in Cincom Smalltalk, as you might be aware (there's a success story on our website). In the post, he talks about a new application architecture they are building, and in that discussion, he said the following:

ezboard was built on an older technology that has reached its end of life for web site development. It is time to replace ezboard's software platform so that we can bring you the new features you want while the improving security and stability of the service. It is not possible to attach new technology to ezboard's software in a reliable way. This is why we are building a completely new message board platform called Yuku.

Well, I need to address that statement, because it conveys a false impression about Cincom Smalltalk. Our current release of VisualWorks (the product they are using) is 7.4 - you can see the release page here. As you look through that, you'll see that we have a full platform suite supporting many things, including web development. Heck, the site you're reading this on uses Cincom Smalltalk as the engine, and I'll be giving an experience report on the technology at Smalltalk Solutions.

EZboard started using VisualWorks back in the 3.0 timeframe. Back then, the non-commercial product (which is what they started with) did not include the web server frameworks, which was, quite honestly, a mistake made by the previous owner of VisualWorks. The upshot is, they built their own HTTP application server framework, and their own object storage framework using serialized object files. I can well believe that it is difficult to move forward; this post I made yesterday has a lot to do with my own issues in carrying forward an application I wrote 3 years ago that uses serialized object files for storage. Today, I'm in the midst of an exciting data scrubbing mission based on that application's architecture.

Bottom line, there's nothing EOL about Cincom Smalltalk, or any application built with it.