Ezboard has been having fairly epic problems with their server software, most of which is written in Cincom Smalltalk. Rather than actually explain the problems they have had, they just want to point the finger at us:

The current ezboard program is written in Smalltalk, a programming language that is becoming obsolete. The current program has many bugs that can't be fixed because each time the developers try to fix them, it causes something else to break. That seems to be the nature of Smalltalk. In the beginning, the program was simple, but as more and more features were demanded and added, it became more complicated -- and more buggy. It is also becoming difficult for ezboard to find skilled Smalltalk programmers. As a result, ezboard has had to choose to stay as it is, adding no new features and fixing no bugs, or move to a new architecture that will make it simpler and quicker to make changes, add new features, etc., and that will still be easy for board owners to customize. That is the purpose of the move.

Hmm. They wrote the original application in VWNC 3.0, and didn't use VisualWave (the then current HTML technology add on for VW). Instead, they wrote their own server from scratch. They didn't use a database on the back end, instead serializing objects to disk. Those two early decisions came back to haunt them in a big way - we actually spoke to them about dealing with them inside Smalltalk, by:

• Updating to the Web Toolkit, which works in conjunction with your stock web server
• Upgrading from serialized objects to a database back end

Instead, they decided to go with a full rewrite in something else, and a general blasting of our product as a way of making excuses. There's no reason for them to do that. Just look at what they say instead: fixing bugs creates other ones. That has nothing to do with Smalltalk (or any other language, for that matter) - it has to do with whatever process they use to develop code. If that's happening to them now, I guarantee that it will happen to them in the future, without regard to what development/deployment platform they end up using.

Update: Looks like they pulled that post down.

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