Hey Maarten,
On 22 May 2016, at 18:08, maarten.mostert@stakepoint.com wrote:
Hi Antony,
Most recently I have been contracted to look at porting VisualWorks to iOS and Android/Blackberry (in short - it's entirely doable).
Now that we have native OSX and Windows Skins and a Web framework (AppeX) that runs circles around Seaside in terms of simplicity, Native IOS and Android Apps is the last major missing brick.
For how much does it sell ?
It doesn't. They decided to go a different route for the same business outcome (which I am helping them with). I have blind-cc'd them BTW - they might give me permission to discuss the alternative, which is generally applicable, although not for your app (without very significant effort). The POC for VW on Android/Blackberry and iOS was interesting. I did enough to know exactly how to do it. As a side effect, you would get mobile AND desktop unified GPU-accellerated drawing, gesture support, async multi-threaded IO (ala NodeJS), and solve the threading/modal issues. The trade-off is that this delivers for iOS/macOS/Windows/Android/Blackberry/Linux x86_64/ARM only, and is explicitly not concerned with compatibility with *very* legacy code (all which is what holds VisualWorks back, as I wrote in 2007 BTW - that is not an ex-employee trade-secret detail). The focus of this project would on apps like yours i.e. modern, desktop/mobile, native-integrated consumer apps. Approx AUD$100,000 + "Cincom Fee" to get there in 6-9 months, without docs. So if anyone is interested? As a consortium, of any size? Result would be delivered as ST and VM diffs to an agreed Cincom release. The consortium would own the IP. Additional users would pay a license, ongoing proceeds from which would be returned to the consortium members (not to me - I would have been payed to do it). If you are interested, you might like to investigate/promote such a consortium. I'm not putting effort into promoting this idea, and no longer have access to vw-dev for example. This consortium idea could extend to other features BTW, especially for those who don't have 20-year-old apps running on Solaris/AIX etc. You should contact me privately for further information. I'm not in a position to fund it, and in any case my experience is that doing commercial work in Smalltalk where the target is other developers, is not feasible, for reasons I described in detail back in 2007. This problem is not exclusive to Smalltalk/VisualWorks, although for VW it is particularly impossible. Cheers, Antony Blakey -------------------------- Ph: +61 438 840 787 Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. -- Douglas Adams