Visual Age BOF, Ginny Ghezzo, John O'Keefe, IBM
(I only caught the part of this that occurred after the remote development panel.) WebSphere is important to IBM and you can develop in VAST and integrate into WebSphere. WSAD is an IBM-strategic development environment (Eclipse plus some things) and they are building Smalltalk in WSAD so that it will appear in the list of WSAD languages. (Some people memorise the acronym via mnemonic, 'We Sad' as in either 'we sad people to use a less productive language than Smalltalk' or 'we sad people to use Smalltalk in Eclipse instead of in the far technically superior VAST' :-))
IBM is still marketing VAST. By contrast, VAJava has been withdrawn from marketing. At a certain date, VAJ will no longer be sold. This indicates the different approach; VAST is alive. WSAD does not have an officially-announced longer support date than the same Dec 2005 that has been announced for everything else, including VAST. Obviously, WSAD is strategic whereas VAST is not but VAST has its revenue stream. If you are confident about Smalltalk's productivity (as we all are) then you should not fear that lack of extra dollars pumped in from IBM's strategic funds will prevent VAST from progressing to new releases with fresh features.
If any IBM sales people don't know about VAST, tell them to contact Ginny Ghezzo. Also if you think WSAD is missing things, tell IBM. Likewise tell IBM about any problems you see in J2EE and Java. Always be specific about what is missing, etc., and your business problem that it impacts. General emails moaning about Java and J2EE are of no relevance.
IBM want to use Eclipse to deliver a single industry standard tool for building new tools. They open-sourced it to show it was not a locked-in solution and because they hope it will move into markets that are too small for them to be interested in but in aggregate will give value and coverage. Making Smalltalk work in it gets Smalltalk visibility in language lists that IBM will be publicising and might also occasionally let non-Smalltalk customers accept Smalltalk utilities for specific functions. Meanwhile the group clearly felt that anyone who had ever encountered VAST would continue using it and WebSphere, not move to WSAD and WebSphere, a view that I felt Ginny and John were not disputing though it was doubtless proper of IBMers to leave its more emphatic expression to others.
Rumours that SUN may not survive the next two years abound; I heard them before I came to this conference and they were circulating there too. I had some quiet discussion about whether demise of SUN, and possible consequent change in public perception of Java and J2EE as SUN creations, might change the emphases of IBM's approach, with possible benefit to Smalltalk. Watch this space.
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