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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Smalltalk Mobilizes
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Georg talks about Smalltalk on mobile devices. October - Cincom's German sales guy asks about Smalltalk on the pocket PC. Within a few months he was demonstrating VW on Windows CE 4. Will be fully supported in the 7.2.1 release (later this spring). What do you need?
Win CE4.x (alias .NET)
Windows Mobile for Pocket PC 2003
Any variant of CE 4
Examples
Siemens Simpad PC, SkeyePad, Tatung Webpad, iPaq, bunch of others. Where did this idea come from? The DynaBook that Kay (et. al.) dreamed of at PARC "back in the day". Is this the Dynabook? Adele Goldberg Feb 2003: "This does indeed look like the original conception". There's more to the quote, whee she says that the challenge remains to make programming more like modeling, but it's too much for this non-touch typist to copy down...
What about the actual market? There was an interview with a Gartner analyst (Bill Clark):
Pace is critical- mean lifetime of a mobile device is 18 months!
ROI must be in 18 months
Portability is important
J2ME differs a lot from J2EE (as .NET compact differs from .NET)
Then there was Mark Driver, the Gartner analyst who stated that: "It does not matter what features Cincom Smalltalk has, Smalltalk market will not grow".
Tom Nies (Cincom CEO, 2003) - pointed out that there were proposals to close the US PTO in 1845, as "everything" had been invented
In Germany, mobile device manufacturers have become very interested in Cincom Smalltalk on mobile devices. Heeg produced a demo for this manufacturer (Hoeft and Wessel) in 25 hours for stock-taking, impressed them a lot. Asked for a demo and slide presentation immediately. He got a facility management application - and they released a press release to the mobile market talking about this. The upshot? Smalltalk is ideal here:
Pace - productivity
Portability - Windows/Linux/CE
Technology does not matter as the devices are outdated in 18 months
Target Market
Professional users of mobility
Professional mobile software producers
This space wants turnkey solutions, from solution providers
The competition?
J2ME/PJ - incompatible with J2EE
C/C - every device is different
.NET Compact
Considered immature
Windows CE only
Big Suites (IBM/Sybase/Oracle) of turnkey applications
What about Cincom Smalltalk Mobile?
You need VW 7.2 VM for Windows CE (XScale/x86/StrongARM)
Load CE parcel, deploy the application as appropriate - it should "just work"
Likely, you'll need to adapt the UI to work with a pen interface and the smaller screen turf. The bottom line though - develop on any supported VW platform, deploy to CE. No changes at the code level required....
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