This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Cool Customer
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.
I met with a very interesting customer today - Satellite Forces, Inc. They are based in Ottawa, Canada - the meeting was in Cincom's Montreal office. They drove over from Ottawa, I came up from Maryland yesterday. I met with David Long, who's the visionary (and a co-owner there) and John Couch, one of their customer support and all around networking guys.
These guys have a very interesting system they call Atlantis. It's built in VisualWorks, and exists roughly in the domain specific modeling area. Here's what they do - they capture the business process requirements for an application area. Their tools allow you to model it graphically, showing as much or as little detail as you want. The underpinnings of this system is a Finite State Machine - which means that the applications generated by Atlantis are always in a known state. If your requirements are wrong that might be the wrong state, but it's definitely known.
What they've done is work with a few people in business areas they are targeting - I won't go into too many details there, since we are under NDA. Suffice to say, they capture the full business process for a given problem, and they can push a full application out the back end. They believe in their own sales pitch - their internal systems (accounting, sales management, and software lifecycle) have all been built with this tool.
Before I saw what they do, I really would not have believed it was possible - given a set of business processes, they can capture them and generate a working application. In the markets they are going after, they can deliver a working product in a week - which is pretty darn impressive. I won't say that this is a silver bullet for all business areas; it's not. However, for the targets they are going after (and a few others they plan to go after) - Atlantis is simply untouchable.
I mentioned that I didn't think that a tool like Atlantis could be built in the faddish languages - like C# or Java, for instance. In a theoretical sense, that's not correct. In a practical sense, it is - while you could build this in one of those systems, it would require a larger team and a much larger up front investment in time. They make use of the dynamism of Smalltalk - and of the meta model behind Smaltalk - in ways that would be hard to deal with elsewhere.
This is an outfit that you're certain to hear more about as time goes by. John and his team have done a very, very impressive job.
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