Tablets, the Cloud, and Smalltalk
Runar Jordahl links to a post about Tablets and the Cloud, and passes on his own thoughts:
Skrishnamachari says that better interfacing with Java is vital to grow Smalltalk’s use in cloud computing. That might be true, but interfacing to NoSQL databases (Cassandra, Riak, Hbase) and services (like AWS) running in the cloud, is just as important. Cloudfork is one such interface, the Riak interface another. I think we should be able to write great cloud applications from scratch using Smalltalk, and increasingly these tools are becoming more important.
One thing that you'll notice right off is the complete dearth of commercial Smalltalk support for tablet devices. All of the action is in Pharo and Squeak, where there's been a fair bit of work done to support IOS, and a start at Android support. Cloud/web interfacing looks more possible for the commercial systems, but again - most of the action is coming from community people (Cloudfork, anyone?).
I understand the need to support the existing customer base, and the whole "where's the revenue?" problem - but at the same time, these are areas that really can't be ignored.
Technorati Tags: cloud computing, IOS, android
Comments
Re: Tablets, the Cloud, and Smalltalk
[Davorin Rusevljan] June 7, 2011 2:32:56.433
As far as I know Gemstone might be working on Smalltalk support for Cloudfork. (which makes sense since both are under the VMWare hat). It would be great if that goes well.
Tablets and mobile are going to be harder part I guess. Both platforms (ios and android) do not lend themselves easily to Smalltalk. For now it seems you can make it run on platform, but in an alien-ugly way. Maybe it would be possible to go html5 way with something like phonekit + seaside on the server for Mobile platofrms.
Re: Tablets, the Cloud, and Smalltalk
[Davorin Rusevljan] June 7, 2011 2:42:37.033
Ups, Gemstone reference was to CloudFoundry, I guess too much cloud* buzzwords in my head :)