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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Smalltalk in teaching
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.
Carsten Harle is talking to us about Smalltalk in teacher support. Schools may have hundreds of PCs and thousands of users, with many applications to install and manage - typically without a dedicated system administrator. This leaves the task to teachers, who are also trying to teach the students. Another problem is making PC's tamper proof - including the ability to roll back to a known state after each class. There's also the need to do internet filtering, and make sure that the same content is displayed/transmitted to each PC.
They wrote an application - DX-Union - that handles deployment issues - management of what should be where, etc. Another application - Dr. Kaiser - makes PCs tamper proof. NetO handles screen transmission, and Cobion/Time does internet filtering. Finally, they created beno, an integration platform for all of these applications. This created a single point of interaction for all of the supported functions. So, now comes a demo - something that doesn't come across well in a blog :) What he's showing us is how you can use Beno to push an installation (In this case, the Google Toolbar) out to a set of managed PCs.
It's a cool and useful suite of applications - written in Dolphin Smalltalk. They are the biggest distributor of this kind of software in Germany. Why Smalltalk?
Cost savings in Smalltalk
Faster Development
Better Diagnostic capabilities
Able to do this with a 6-7 person team - could not have done that with VB or C++ or Delphi
Unlike a lot of Smalltalk applications, this is a shrinkwrap application, and they are likely going to get MS logo certification. Which Smalltalk? Dolphin, which they consider to be the replacement for Digitalk Smalltalk.
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