Dear Thomas, I definitely do not see the maintenance of JNIPort as enhancing Cincom’s products. You wouldn’t consider writing an open source application running on MS Windows or an open source library for developers who are working on Windows being an „enhancement“ of Windows, thus benefiting MS, or would you? While Cincom was so kind to including it as a contribution in the VisualWorks distribution, it has also been available for Dolphin Smalltalk, Pharo, and VASt in a long time. JNIPort has always been developed completely independently from any of the companies offering Smalltalk IDEs. JNIPort works on VW 8.3, as far as I know, so there’s no work to be done at all for making it work for VWNC users. But even if VWNC is no longer actively supported by Cincom, there may still be Cincom customers who are interested in using JNIPort on one of the more recent VisualWorks versions, and who could have an interest in adapting it to that version. In such a case, a JNIPort user’s contribution in the form of an update would be uploaded directly to the Cincom public repository. I don’t see how this would mean „a lot of time and effort“ for a potential maintainer of JNIPort apart from updating some small parts of the JNIPort documentation. And then, there’s Pharo, which has an active community, and which I suspect to have more active users now than Cincom Smalltalk. Migrating JNIPort to Pharo 14 with some help from the Pharo community shouldn’t be a lot of work. I am simply looking for someone willing to keep the strings together and to prevent that JNIPort accidentally disappears, not someone who invests a lot of time and effort in active development. My ideas about the maintainer’s role: Someone wants to use it, work has to be done to make it work, so they do it themselves and tell the maintainer about it, who then updates the docs. Google switches off Google Sites - the maintainer moves the documentation to another place. And that’s more or less it, unless the maintainer wants to have some fun with enhancing JNIPort for some reason, just as I did when I ported it to VW and Pharo just because I thought that might be interesting and fun (and it was). Joachim

Am 24.09.2025 um 19:31 schrieb Thomas Sattler <tomsattler@gmail.com>:

Joachim,

Cincom has basically abandoned the VWNC distribution. The "latest" version one can obtain without paying for a license is VW 8.3, which was released in 2017.

it's hard to imagine people spending a lot of time and effort enhancing a system that old, when the vendor isn't committed to it. I'm sure Cincom is committed to the paying customers, but why should we help with that?

--Tom

On Wed, Sep 24, 2025 at 4:36 AM Joachim Geidel <joachim.geidel@posteo.de <mailto:joachim.geidel@posteo.de>> wrote:

...

Dear fellow Smalltalkers,

JNIPort is an interface from Smalltalk to the Java VM which was originally developed by Chris Uppal for Dolphin Smalltalk. It enables Smalltalk applications to use software written in Java seamlessly, locally and with low overhead, without resorting to network based interfaces like e.g. using microservices. Documentation is at https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://sites.google.com/site/jniport/__;!!DZ3fj... .

I have ported JNIPort to VisualWorks and Pharo, and Ben van Dijk, Adriaan van Os and Rolf van der Vleuten have ported it to VASt (https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://vastgoodies.com/projects/JNIPort__;!!DZ3... ).

The last time I really worked on JNIPort was in 2014, if I remember correctly. Now that I am retired and haven’t written a single line of Smalltalk code in five years, I am wondering if there is anybody willing to take over.

I haven’t had any enquiries about JNIPort since 2020, so the task would be easy: - Take over ownership of the documentation site. - Possibly move the source code for the Pharo version to Gitlab (it is still in the ancient SmalltalkHub repository). - Optionally integrate any changes from JNIPort users, e.g. when they adapt it to more recent versions of VisualWorks or Pharo. There hasn't been any community input since 2017 (or was it 2019?).

If nobody takes over, then JNIPort will be one of the many abandoned open source projects and disappear sooner or later when SmalltalkHub, the Cincom Public Repository and the documentation site are switched off.

On the other hand, I do not know if there is actually anybody using JNIPort. If it has no users, there is no harm in its disappearance, and maintaining it would be a waste of time.

Cheers Joachim Geidel