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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Smalltalk and Continuous Integratin
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.
Mark talks about some of the difficulties in getting into VisualWorks:
Having hung out with a bunch of Smalltalker's on #smalltalk for some time now I'm getting used to them always talking about their increased productivity, but having read several comments in James Robertson's blog I hit one snag, whilst Smalltalk gives you a really nice productive environment, it would seem the packaging/deployment stage may be where they get hurt. I must say however that James's has shown great agility with my regular incessant BottomFeeder requests, suggestions, and bug reports - often having a new fix ready for the automatic updater within minutes of a problem being reported. I guess it all comes down to setups, and familiarity
Yes, familiarity has a lot to do with it. As Travis pointed out the other day (scroll through the comments) - packaging a VW application for deployment can be daunting. The Runtime Packager is powerful, but can also be hard to use - and error prone for the first time user. I've now got a stable, reproducible build/update process for BottomFeeder, but I had to build it myself. That's not something customers should have to do, IMHO.
So what to do? Well, engineering is working on a standard runtime deployment system for VW, one that will support network based updates out of the box. We are soon going to rolling out a network based installer for the NC product - which will be our first internal cut on that vision. You should start to see a deliverable take on this vision starting with VW 7.3 - we are aware of the issue, and working to remedy it.
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