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 Posted: Thu Mar 12, 2009 10:37 pm |
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I am looking for some information about the tools/vendors for a VA
Smalltalk to .Net conversion. |
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| Frank Lesser [LSW]... |
| Posted: Fri Mar 13, 2009 4:02 am |
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Why you want to do that?
The probability that you succeed is the same as for seeking a tool to
convert a daimler car to a horse-drawn carriage.
If you need to interface .NET I would recommend to contact the
Instantiazions people for advice.
<nmotlag at (no spam) rediffmail.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:8d599b9a-e096-483b-8bff-516fcdae462b at (no spam) j38g2000yqa.googlegroups.com...
Quote: I am looking for some information about the tools/vendors for a VA
Smalltalk to .Net conversion. |
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| Louis LaBrunda... |
| Posted: Fri Mar 13, 2009 6:33 pm |
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Quote: I am looking for some information about the tools/vendors for a VA
Smalltalk to .Net conversion.
You would be better off upgrading the existing Smalltalk program to
Seaside. Which dialect of Smalltalk is the current system in? There are
ports of Seaside for Squeak, Cincom, Dolphin, GemStone and GNU Smalltalks.
And the port for VA Smalltalk is in Beta.
Do your customer a favor and investigate Seaside. The current trend is
from .net to Seaside not the other way around.
Lou
-----------------------------------------------------------
Louis LaBrunda
Keystone Software Corp.
SkypeMe callto://PhotonDemon
mailto:Lou at (no spam) Keystone-Software.com http://www.Keystone-Software.com |
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| MarkH... |
| Posted: Sun Mar 15, 2009 8:56 am |
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On Mar 13, 8:33 am, Louis LaBrunda <L... at (no spam) Keystone-Software.com> wrote:
Quote: I am looking for some information about the tools/vendors for a VA
Smalltalk to .Net conversion.
Do your customer a favor and investigate Seaside. The current trend is
from .net to Seaside not the other way around.
Lou
There was no mention of Seaside by the OP, and there is no current
trend from .net to Seaside. So no matter your affiliations, it's
better to stick with reality. |
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| Marten... |
| Posted: Sun Mar 15, 2009 8:14 pm |
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We have done this conversion in our project from VisualWorks to .NET
around 2002/2003 and perhaps I might say, that we have reached a state
around 2008, where we were able to get rid of this old system. Much
longer than we expected. I have to admit, that we have now a much
better system, much more power and much more speed than we had 2003.
Some of the winning was due to the fact, that we were able to use open
source third party libraries from all over the world. I think,that no
Smalltaker might have the productivity to catch this.
On the other hand - six years after the beginning of this conversion -
we are still not happy with VisualStudio. Of course we started with
VS2003 and this was a mess - VS2008 is much better.
But it's not always sunny on the .NET side. Errors within .NET
framework, no bug fixes - except the service packs.
VS2008 is a bright tool - but after working with VW/Envy and still
working with VA/Envy, the (line based) source code management in C# is
still a mess and it is far away from being good. We can live with this
situation, but it influences our daily life more than we expected. I
know, that millions of developers do not know anything about
respositories .... but I find ENVY amazing.
Another point was - for me - the typing of source code. I got the
feeling to type much more code to get the same stuff done under
Smalltalk. public, private, protected, virtual, override ....
Another point is speed. VS2008 is fast, C# compiler is very fast. But
projects grow and with a growing project the turn-around times are
increasing. Increasing in a way, that we are now in the old edit-
compile-run cycle. Boring, boring, boring and time consuming.
The debugger is good, but beware of the fact using LINQ or some other
modern stuff in C# 3.5 - very often you can change the code, but NOT
resume the program: edit, compile-run is here again - or write your
program in a specific way to make the C# compiler lucky again.
Compiling large projects with the VS2008 IDE may lead to errors. We
have - in addition to IDE 2008 - created a complete msbuild project to
get the job done.
One may write high sophisticated GUI programs - but not with the
widgets and tools you get from MS. Think about buying additional tools
to make your life much easier. Think about buying additional
Refactoring tools, think about buying additional profiler tools ! The
last area is more or less - in a suitable way - unavailable under
VS2008. Testing ? Is VS2008 good enough here ?
Another idea: which version do you buy ? The standard version or the
Team version ? Developing under MS can be pretty expensive.
On the other hand: if you go the MS technology way, than perhaps
VS2008 is a must. We decided not to go the MS way everywhere (but we
use MS operating systems) and then the problems perhaps begin to
start. We went the OO way (and not the more table oriented .NET way),
we went with our own persistence way (not SQL server).
We also did - in the past - try to include support for external tools,
but then we were in the old product cycle problem. MS Office ? Which
version ?
In our project we still have some Smalltalk stuff: we have a C# source
code generator written in VA
to get large amounts of source code depending on a model (and I would
not start any other project without such a tool any more - also not in
Smalltalk). And a server component, which is written in VASmalltalk
7.x.
The development of the last part was very interesting for me: we
developed a TCP/IP server task in Smalltalk and the client in C# and
the most time consuming one was the C# client. It was less time
consuming to change or enhance the running Smalltalk server (within
the IDE) than the edit-compile-run client in C#.
After all: the conversion from Smalltalk to .NET in our project was a
"political" decision. If anyone would have calculated the actual costs
for this project, then perhaps nobody would have start this
conversion. But the costs were actually not that important at those
days. |
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| Joachim Tuchel... |
| Posted: Mon Mar 16, 2009 12:21 am |
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Dan,
sounds like flushing a lot of money. Was there any technical/business
reason for the road you're planning to take?
Joachim |
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| Joachim Tuchel... |
| Posted: Mon Mar 16, 2009 12:51 am |
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Joachim Tuchel schrieb:
you already posted about your motivation in an answer to James...
I still think you're about to spend a whole lot of money and are taking
a high risk. Not that I don't believe a system can't be redone in any
other technology...
Joachim |
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| Joachim Tuchel... |
| Posted: Mon Mar 16, 2009 12:54 am |
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Joachim Tuchel schrieb:
Quote: Joachim Tuchel schrieb:
Dan,
Not that I don't believe a system can't be redone in any
other technology...
My english still is terrible. There is one "n't' too much in this
sentence, I am sure you can reimplement your system in another language,
I see a big risk of investing a lot of money with questionable gains on
the other side...
Joachim |
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| Dan Antion... |
| Posted: Mon Mar 16, 2009 1:16 am |
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Joachim Tuchel wrote:
Quote: Joachim Tuchel schrieb:
Joachim Tuchel schrieb:
Dan,
Not that I don't believe a system can't be redone in any other
technology...
My english still is terrible. There is one "n't' too much in this
sentence, I am sure you can reimplement your system in another language,
I see a big risk of investing a lot of money with questionable gains on
the other side...
Joachim
Your English is far better than my German, despite many years of
attempting to learn it. I guess my main point is we are not rebuilding
the same systems. What we are planning to build is significantly
different from what we have today.
We were a much different company 20 years ago, when today's systems were
actually designed. 20 years ago, none of our employees traveled with a
laptop or owned a cell phone. Now, about 70% of our employees live off
of an Internet or cell connection. Our current systems are fat-client
desktop solutions designed for transaction processing. We're trying to
bring the value of those systems out to the whole company and that takes
a new approach.
A new approach doesn't demand a new language and it wasn't our first
choice and it wasn't an easy choice. We do believe it was the right choice. |
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| Friedrich... |
| Posted: Mon Mar 16, 2009 12:29 pm |
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I agree with your objections. However what migration path into the Web
world is there let's say e.g for access solutions?
Regards
Friedrich
--
Please remove just-for-news- to reply via e-mail. |
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| Reinout Heeck... |
| Posted: Mon Mar 16, 2009 2:16 pm |
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nmotlag at (no spam) rediffmail.com wrote:
Quote: I am looking for some information about the tools/vendors for a VA
Smalltalk to .Net conversion.
Check out Synchrony Systems, they specialize in harvesting and
mechanically transforming Smalltalk code.
http://www.sync-sys.com/
R
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| Bohdan... |
| Posted: Mon Mar 16, 2009 4:28 pm |
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On Mar 16, 10:33 am, jarober <jaro... at (no spam) gmail.com> wrote:
True. Cincom does a good job of offering integration tools, and I can
appreciate how challenging it would be to make them totally
'seamless'. But the original question was asked for VA and .NET, and
your comment was that migration would be a bad choice given the
overall costs.
But, if you have an integration need, and the cost of doing the
integration is high, it may make sense to do the migration to another
tool. If you have a Windows centric office and a long term strategy
to use Sharepoint, how high is your cost going to be to keep your
Smalltalk app integrated? Ideally, you would keeping using Smalltalk
and have it play nice with the rest of your world, but that is not
always an option without vendor support.
I'm using Seaside and web services as my tool of choice for Smalltalk
integration, but there is still a lot of work to do. And I'd rather
see suggestions to how these tools could be used, rather than focusing
on the cost of migration.
And thanks for the Smalltalk daily content. I wish all the vendors
would do something similar.
Bob Nemec |
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| Louis LaBrunda... |
| Posted: Mon Mar 16, 2009 6:39 pm |
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Quote: On Mar 13, 8:33 am, Louis LaBrunda <L... at (no spam) Keystone-Software.com> wrote:
I am looking for some information about the tools/vendors for a VA
Smalltalk to .Net conversion.
Do your customer a favor and investigate Seaside. The current trend is
from .net to Seaside not the other way around.
Lou
There was no mention of Seaside by the OP, and there is no current
trend from .net to Seaside. So no matter your affiliations, it's
better to stick with reality.
Perhaps calling it a trend was too strong and I didn't mean anyone was
converting from .net to Seaside. But I see posts all the time by
developers who no-longer use .net and now use Seaside I don't see any the
other way around.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Louis LaBrunda
Keystone Software Corp.
SkypeMe callto://PhotonDemon
mailto:Lou at (no spam) Keystone-Software.com http://www.Keystone-Software.com |
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| Joachim Tuchel... |
| Posted: Tue Mar 17, 2009 6:17 am |
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Dan Antion schrieb:
Quote: They taught him Java and told him there was no career in
Smalltalk.
That's one of the sad things today: kids are taught they need to use
Java or .net, because they won't make a living otherwise. Here in
Germany, Universities refuse to even offer courses in COBOL because it's
legacy. That's plain stupid. No matter which technology, it's quite
unlikely it'll be there for a whole career of, say, 35 years from now.
They should rather decide whether Java is good for teaching certain
concepts.
Quote: Finding VS programmers is easy, training them is easy and I can find 10
places in the local Hartford area where they can get general and
specific training. So, training in other languages isn't as hard as
Smalltalk - sorry, that's the reality of the situation.
Agreed. What about the quality of the training? I cannot judge the
trainings, but taking another area which is often cited to show how easy
it is to educate yourself in (enter whatever mainstream technology
here): Books.
How many really good books for VisualStudio are you aware of. How many
really good introductory books for Java do you know? I can think of two
good Java Books. Put that in relation to the shere amount of books which
simply copy the java specs...
Training in Smalltalk also isn't hard. Most Smalltalk Trainers do travel
a lot.
They're probably a bit more expensive than a typical Java trainer, but
chances are good the Smalltalk Trainer you hire is an experienced
Smalltalk programmer and will be able to teach not only Smalltalk
syntax, but also oo thinking and usage of the Smalltalk tools. I do
train new Smalltalkers and most people I know who use Smalltalk are very
experienced Smalltalk programmers. You get a lot for your money.
Of course I cannot really judge your findings about your project. If you
are going to use SharePoint, going with MS tools is surely the easiest
path. There's not much I can argue here, unfortunately.
I just wanted to say that your arguments are not correct as a general
statement.
Joachim |
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| Markus Fritsche... |
| Posted: Tue Mar 17, 2009 10:35 am |
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Joachim Tuchel <jtuchel at (no spam) objektfabrik.de> wrote:
Quote: They taught him Java and told him there was no career in
Smalltalk.
That's one of the sad things today: kids are taught they need to use
Java or .net, because they won't make a living otherwise. Here in
Germany, Universities refuse to even offer courses in COBOL because it's
legacy. That's plain stupid.
That's more than plain stupid. Being able to program Smalltalk (or even
better, COBOL) is a much better oppurtunity than being the 100.000.000 java
programmer competing with east indian graduates on the local market...
Quote: No matter which technology, it's quite unlikely it'll be there for a whole
career of, say, 35 years from now. They should rather decide whether Java
is good for teaching certain concepts.
My university chose Smalltalk saying: "If you want to teach OOP, use
Smalltalk. Everything else (Java, C++, C#) ruins your understanding of OOP
before you even had it."
^ STOP RUN. |
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