This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Is Smalltalk a real option?
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
ISerializable asks some questions about Smalltalk. I was going to leave a long comment, but decided to post my response here, and point to it from there:
Well, the server I'm posting too is an example Cincom Smalltalk application, as is BottomFeeder
To get to your specific questions:
Enterprise space - we have a number of customers using the product in that capacity - from Penn State with their online student information system, to JP Morgan for derivatives tracking, to AMD for managing wafer fabs
Web services - supported for a number of versions now. There's a loadable component that supports SOAP, UDDI, WSDL (etc)
Talking to other applications - Mostly the same as Java here - we have C level interfacing, things like web services or CORBA
How widespread is it? TO be fair, not nearly so much as Java or .NET. There's Smalltalk work around (I get calls on a regular basis), and learning Smalltalk will, IMHO, make you a better OO developer regardless
There are two Smalltalk implementations for .NET - #Smalltalk and S#
There's also a very nice set of online tutorials for learning Smalltalk on our website - I'd suggest having a look there. Another good tip is to check out comp.lang.smalltalk, or join the Smalltalk IRC channel - with questions. It's a friendly community, very open to questions
My advice to people trying to learn Smalltalk is pretty much the same advice I'd give for learning any new language - try something out. My own "aha" moment came a decade ago, when I redid my standard "learning app" in Smalltalk. I wrote this same application in Basic, Pascal, Imp (don't ask :) ), and Smalltalk. The application was a simple aid to solving simple cryptograms (like the puzzles they post in some newspapars on the comics page). I was astonished at how fast I got that done in Smalltalk, before I really even knew Smalltalk! The point is, trying to solve a simple programming problem I already understood was valuable - it taught me how Smalltalk worked.
Previous Topic
