Regarding hosting prices, there are really cheap VPS solutions available. I've been successfully deploying apps in a VPSLink Xen slice at a cost of around 80$ a year (one slice per app), which is not much more than what many web hosting companies will charge you. Something like that makes up for developing in a Smalltalk framework being expensive, and if the websites are simple enough, you can even run more than one in a single image. On the other hand, I still agree that a nice, free, end-user friendly CMS, as powerful and easy to use as Drupal would be great to have and would get lots of designers and web devs to use it over other more mainstream ones. Pier is very nice, but IMO no designer (or client) will like, for example, having to learn its markup language, they will ask you for an easy to use WYSIWYG editor, an easy to plug image gallery, forum, wiki, whatever. A designer can very easily learn how to install a Drupal/Joomla! extension, but we can't ask him to learn how to embed a Javascript rich-text editor into a Pier application... even most of us will run into several problems when trying to do that. I'm sure we mostly agree, but who does have the time to develop something as titanic as this? :( Bernat Romagosa.

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 6:02 AM, Geert Claes <geert.wl.claes@gmail.com> wrote:

laurent laffont wrote:

...

... The big problem with Pier is the terrible lack of documentation, recipes, how-to's...... no marketing, no communication with user. ...

When you say marketing what do you mean exactly because an application users want to use does its own marketing and than there is no need to do a hard sell :)

Marketing is NOT "hard sell". Marketing is figuring out what customers want and removing the things preventing them from getting it. it is finding the people who ought to use a product and letting them know about it. Marketing often means fixing the documentation, the license, or something else non-technical. No product can succeed without marketing. None ever has. Sometimes the marketing was not done by the inventor. Sometimes it is hard to tell who is doing the marketing and just what they did. But marketing is crucial. One of the problems with Smalltalk now is that the good marketeers have left it. When I heard that Dave Thomas was retiring I stood up on the bus, which was full of Smalltalkers, and said that this was the passing of an era, and that someone else needed to step up or Smalltalk would falter. More Smalltalkers need to read marketing books like "The Tipping Point" and "Crossing the Chasm". This is a very important thread. Please don't say that marketing is unimportant. Marketing is crucial, and a weakness in the Smalltalk community. -Ralph Johnson

Hi, I absolutely agree with Ralph, one of the main problems with Smalltalk over the last twenty years has been the lack of marketing of its strengths (the arrival of Java was another one!). Steve Edwards (Frustrated ex-Smalltalker, ex-The-Object-People, now doing Java and Ruby.) On 17 March 2011 11:16, Ralph Johnson <johnson@cs.uiuc.edu> wrote:

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 6:02 AM, Geert Claes <geert.wl.claes@gmail.com> wrote:

...

laurent laffont wrote:

...

... The big problem with Pier is the terrible lack of documentation,

recipes,

...

...

how-to's...... no marketing, no communication with user. ...

When you say marketing what do you mean exactly because an application users want to use does its own marketing and than there is no need to do a hard sell :)

Marketing is NOT "hard sell". Marketing is figuring out what customers want and removing the things preventing them from getting it. it is finding the people who ought to use a product and letting them know about it. Marketing often means fixing the documentation, the license, or something else non-technical.

No product can succeed without marketing. None ever has. Sometimes the marketing was not done by the inventor. Sometimes it is hard to tell who is doing the marketing and just what they did. But marketing is crucial.

One of the problems with Smalltalk now is that the good marketeers have left it. When I heard that Dave Thomas was retiring I stood up on the bus, which was full of Smalltalkers, and said that this was the passing of an era, and that someone else needed to step up or Smalltalk would falter. More Smalltalkers need to read marketing books like "The Tipping Point" and "Crossing the Chasm".

This is a very important thread. Please don't say that marketing is unimportant. Marketing is crucial, and a weakness in the Smalltalk community.

-Ralph Johnson

_______________________________________________ Esug-list mailing list Esug-list@lists.esug.org http://lists.esug.org/mailman/listinfo/esug-list_lists.esug.org

-- Steve Edwards Escala Ltd. steve@escala.co.uk

2) Yes. I have used and ported Pier, and presented it to non-Smalltalkers, and I have noticed that very small how-to or clarification things could delay me and would undoubtedly affect a non-Smalltalk user. (Some of it was just order of presentation - the how-to's that a non-Smalltalker wants first are not too hard to find - if you're a Smalltalker and so can guess where to look.) It would be good to watch people starting to use Smalltalk's 'best-practice' web suite and see what's slowing them.

There is no need of how-to's for Pier for basic usage (e.g., editing pages, adding menus, doing internal links, adding users). It is wrong to think this is necessary. I have never read the documentation of SimpleCMS, simply there isn't and there is no need to. Alexandre

...

Hi,

I absolutely agree with Ralph, one of the main problems with Smalltalk over the last twenty years has been the lack of marketing of its strengths (the arrival of Java was another one!).

Steve Edwards (Frustrated ex-Smalltalker, ex-The-Object-People, now doing Java and Ruby.)

On 17 March 2011 11:16, Ralph Johnson <johnson@cs.uiuc.edu <mailto:johnson@cs.uiuc.edu>> wrote:

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 6:02 AM, Geert Claes <geert.wl.claes@gmail.com <mailto:geert.wl.claes@gmail.com>> wrote:

...

laurent laffont wrote:

...

... The big problem with Pier is the terrible lack of

documentation, recipes,

...

...

how-to's...... no marketing, no communication with user. ...

When you say marketing what do you mean exactly because an application users want to use does its own marketing and than there is no need to do a hard sell :)

Marketing is NOT "hard sell". Marketing is figuring out what customers want and removing the things preventing them from getting it. it is finding the people who ought to use a product and letting them know about it. Marketing often means fixing the documentation, the license, or something else non-technical.

No product can succeed without marketing. None ever has. Sometimes the marketing was not done by the inventor. Sometimes it is hard to tell who is doing the marketing and just what they did. But marketing is crucial.

One of the problems with Smalltalk now is that the good marketeers have left it. When I heard that Dave Thomas was retiring I stood up on the bus, which was full of Smalltalkers, and said that this was the passing of an era, and that someone else needed to step up or Smalltalk would falter. More Smalltalkers need to read marketing books like "The Tipping Point" and "Crossing the Chasm".

This is a very important thread. Please don't say that marketing is unimportant. Marketing is crucial, and a weakness in the Smalltalk community.

-Ralph Johnson

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-- Steve Edwards Escala Ltd. steve@escala.co.uk <mailto:steve@escala.co.uk>

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-- _,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;: Alexandre Bergel http://www.bergel.eu ^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;.

There is no need of how-to's for Pier for basic usage (e.g., editing pages, adding menus, doing internal links, adding users).

I started to use Pier after watching Damien's screencast. I've tried before but could not understand how to do => no courage to go further. May be I'm stupid, but I need them.

I am not sure you need a better external documentation for Pier basic usage. But you surely need a better and more intuitive GUI. Just better marketing as Ralph would say. Alexandre

It is wrong to think this is necessary. I have never read the documentation of SimpleCMS, simply there isn't and there is no need to.

Alexandre

...

...

Hi,

I absolutely agree with Ralph, one of the main problems with Smalltalk over the last twenty years has been the lack of marketing of its strengths (the arrival of Java was another one!).

Steve Edwards (Frustrated ex-Smalltalker, ex-The-Object-People, now doing Java and Ruby.)

On 17 March 2011 11:16, Ralph Johnson <johnson@cs.uiuc.edu <mailto:johnson@cs.uiuc.edu>> wrote:

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 6:02 AM, Geert Claes <geert.wl.claes@gmail.com <mailto:geert.wl.claes@gmail.com>> wrote:

...

laurent laffont wrote:

...

... The big problem with Pier is the terrible lack of

documentation, recipes,

...

...

how-to's...... no marketing, no communication with user. ...

When you say marketing what do you mean exactly because an application users want to use does its own marketing and than there is no need to do a hard sell :)

Marketing is NOT "hard sell". Marketing is figuring out what customers want and removing the things preventing them from getting it. it is finding the people who ought to use a product and letting them know about it. Marketing often means fixing the documentation, the license, or something else non-technical.

No product can succeed without marketing. None ever has. Sometimes the marketing was not done by the inventor. Sometimes it is hard to tell who is doing the marketing and just what they did. But marketing is crucial.

One of the problems with Smalltalk now is that the good marketeers have left it. When I heard that Dave Thomas was retiring I stood up on the bus, which was full of Smalltalkers, and said that this was the passing of an era, and that someone else needed to step up or Smalltalk would falter. More Smalltalkers need to read marketing books like "The Tipping Point" and "Crossing the Chasm".

This is a very important thread. Please don't say that marketing is unimportant. Marketing is crucial, and a weakness in the Smalltalk community.

-Ralph Johnson

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-- Steve Edwards Escala Ltd. steve@escala.co.uk <mailto:steve@escala.co.uk>

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-- _,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;: Alexandre Bergel http://www.bergel.eu ^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;.

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-- _,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;: Alexandre Bergel http://www.bergel.eu ^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;.

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 2:01 PM, Geert Claes <geert.wl.claes@gmail.com>wrote:

Alexandre Bergel-5 wrote:

...

...

I started to use Pier after watching Damien's screencast. I've tried before but could not understand how to do => no courage to go further. May be I'm stupid, but I need them.

I am not sure you need a better external documentation for Pier basic usage. But you surely need a better and more intuitive GUI. Just better marketing as Ralph would say.

Exactly, a UI that's intuitive needs no or minimal documentation

OK. Pier people, could you make an intuitive GUI please ? ;) Laurent.

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On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Alexandre Bergel <abergel@dcc.uchile.cl> wrote:

...

2) Yes.  I have used and ported Pier, and presented it to non-Smalltalkers, and I have noticed that very small how-to or clarification things could delay me and would undoubtedly affect a non-Smalltalk user.  (Some of it was just order of presentation - the how-to's that a non-Smalltalker wants first are not too hard to find - if you're a Smalltalker and so can guess where to look.)  It would be good to watch people starting to use Smalltalk's 'best-practice' web suite and see what's slowing them.

There is no need of how-to's for Pier for basic usage (e.g., editing pages, adding menus, doing internal links, adding users). It is wrong to think this is necessary. I have never read the documentation of SimpleCMS, simply there isn't and there is no need to.

You are apparently much smarter than I. I struggled mightly w/ getting going with Pier and finally gave up and moved on to other things. I doubt I'm an outlier on that. I'd love if there was much better documentation but, I'm definitely not the person to do it as I still don't really get how to work with Pier. It is very non-intuitive for me. Even if it is dirt simple to use, people are going to look at recipes, how-tos and general documentation when picking a CMS. Most people pick a CMS to make things easier not because they think 'o i really want to use X language'. -Sean-

I believe that Alex wanted to say that the basic functionalities should be so self evident that they should not need documentation. Regarding Pier, Lukas did an excellent job of building a content management system for programmers. You would not say about Seaside for example that it is bad because you cannot program it with drag and drop. It is the same for Pier. The main focus was to get it beautiful from a model point of view. To add a user-friendly interface on top of it would require an explicit and new project on top of Pier. The infrastructure is there and is powerful. Cheers, Doru On 19 Mar 2011, at 21:48, Sean Allen wrote:

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Alexandre Bergel <abergel@dcc.uchile.cl> wrote:

...

...

2) Yes. I have used and ported Pier, and presented it to non-Smalltalkers, and I have noticed that very small how-to or clarification things could delay me and would undoubtedly affect a non-Smalltalk user. (Some of it was just order of presentation - the how-to's that a non-Smalltalker wants first are not too hard to find - if you're a Smalltalker and so can guess where to look.) It would be good to watch people starting to use Smalltalk's 'best-practice' web suite and see what's slowing them.

There is no need of how-to's for Pier for basic usage (e.g., editing pages, adding menus, doing internal links, adding users). It is wrong to think this is necessary. I have never read the documentation of SimpleCMS, simply there isn't and there is no need to.

You are apparently much smarter than I. I struggled mightly w/ getting going with Pier and finally gave up and moved on to other things. I doubt I'm an outlier on that. I'd love if there was much better documentation but, I'm definitely not the person to do it as I still don't really get how to work with Pier. It is very non-intuitive for me.

Even if it is dirt simple to use, people are going to look at recipes, how-tos and general documentation when picking a CMS. Most people pick a CMS to make things easier not because they think 'o i really want to use X language'.

-Sean-

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Dear Joachim, and to continue/review at ESUG in workshop or similar, as I suggested in an earlier post? While no doubt some things may benefit from further coding or elaborate documentation, others may need no more than Pier experts helping Pier dummies get started, accompanied by someone noting what the FAQs are, debriefing, and tweaking the existing explanations.

maybe that's an idea for GSoC?

Am 20.03.11 09:35, schrieb Tudor Girba:

...

I believe that Alex wanted to say that the basic functionalities should be so self evident that they should not need documentation.

Regarding Pier, Lukas did an excellent job of building a content management system for programmers. You would not say about Seaside for example that it is bad because you cannot program it with drag and drop. It is the same for Pier. The main focus was to get it beautiful from a model point of view.

To add a user-friendly interface on top of it would require an explicit and new project on top of Pier. The infrastructure is there and is powerful.

Yours faithfully Niall Ross ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________

Am 20.03.2011 um 09:35 schrieb Tudor Girba:

I believe that Alex wanted to say that the basic functionalities should be so self evident that they should not need documentation.

Regarding Pier, Lukas did an excellent job of building a content management system for programmers. You would not say about Seaside for example that it is bad because you cannot program it with drag and drop. It is the same for Pier. The main focus was to get it beautiful from a model point of view.

To add a user-friendly interface on top of it would require an explicit and new project on top of Pier. The infrastructure is there and is powerful.

Yes, basically everything is there. I tried to push some of my friends to use it. Everyone said that it is not easy to use but they also said that wordpress is not easy to use. That does not seem to be the problem. After I explained it a bit most of them founnd it more clear and more easy than other CMSses. So I think we shouldn't be too hard to ourselves. For all of them the bunch of links at the bottom was too disturbing to work with. Well, I have troubles to find the right link because there are so much of them in one place. So reducing the links to the necessary ones (for a normal user) and re-design the functionality sections commands, view and sitemap will do it a big deal. And well, there was one single point everybody mentioned and that seemed to be to biggest problem for them. Everyone was asking if there are "themes" or "templates" you can chose from. Just to repeat it no one had real technical problems with the system but they expect they can chose a template (they are as good in design as they are good in programming) which looks good and start with a half pre filled page. That seems to be the success story for wordpress. And the default theme of pier is only appealing to purists. So to marketeer pier I would go the ui way. Add support for 960.cs css framework (pier uses blueprint but a lot of people are more fond of 960.cs like me :) ). Then the command links of pier need to be layouted with bigger coloured areas (that have round corners :) ). Care should be taken that the pier look does not interefere with a template css. The links shouldn't be at the bottom. A comfortable sitemap component will help also. In my opinion that is not too much work but one that helps a lot. I would expect with these changes the hosting question would be important to me because all of friends would want to have one :) my 2 cents, Norbert

On 19 Mar 2011, at 21:48, Sean Allen wrote:

...

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Alexandre Bergel <abergel@dcc.uchile.cl> wrote:

...

...

2) Yes. I have used and ported Pier, and presented it to non-Smalltalkers, and I have noticed that very small how-to or clarification things could delay me and would undoubtedly affect a non-Smalltalk user. (Some of it was just order of presentation - the how-to's that a non-Smalltalker wants first are not too hard to find - if you're a Smalltalker and so can guess where to look.) It would be good to watch people starting to use Smalltalk's 'best-practice' web suite and see what's slowing them.

There is no need of how-to's for Pier for basic usage (e.g., editing pages, adding menus, doing internal links, adding users). It is wrong to think this is necessary. I have never read the documentation of SimpleCMS, simply there isn't and there is no need to.

You are apparently much smarter than I. I struggled mightly w/ getting going with Pier and finally gave up and moved on to other things. I doubt I'm an outlier on that. I'd love if there was much better documentation but, I'm definitely not the person to do it as I still don't really get how to work with Pier. It is very non-intuitive for me.

Even if it is dirt simple to use, people are going to look at recipes, how-tos and general documentation when picking a CMS. Most people pick a CMS to make things easier not because they think 'o i really want to use X language'.

-Sean-

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At 09:35 20/03/2011, Tudor Girba wrote:

a content management system for programmers.

Exact. This is actually why I chose Pier for implementing my software platform for "online programmable CMS" [1]. During the past two years, I've been deeply extending Pier and never regretted my choice. As a matter of fact, Pier comes with a powerful CMS model.

To add a user-friendly interface on top of it would require an explicit and new project on top of Pier. The infrastructure is there and is powerful.

Exactly, and it's feasible since: (a) Pier offers appropriate abstractions for plugging rather easily application-specific interfaces. (b) Seaside offers powerful tools, e.g. JQuery, for implementing such interfaces. For example, I've rather easily implemented on this basis several sophisticated interfaces [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Actually, all of them reuse a "home-made" framework for interactive hierarchical interfaces that uses Seaside-JQuery. Cheers, Reza [1] <http://www.afacms.com/blog/pontoon-app>http://www.afacms.com/blog/pontoon-app [2] http://www.afacms.com/blog [3] http://www.afacms.com/cats/contracts/ [4] http://www.afacms.com/cats/concepts/ [5] http://www.afacms.com/cats/activities/ [6] <http://www.afacms.com/cats/activities/shopping/Seaside/>http://www.afacms.com/cats/activities/shopping/Seaside/

Hi guys Where were you? Where are your bogs, books, videos, and cool Smalltalk open source projects? I mean that this is easy to get frustrated but it is possible to do things: - I wrote Squeak by Example not for me but for newcomers - We are writing Pharo by example two for the same. - I wrote the Seaside book because it was important for other people (and because avi was not writing one) - we are pushing pharo because we want to create a good open-source smalltalk. I came to smalltalk in 1996 when everybody left and I decided to do something. Now this is not enough but I'm not frustrated and we are creating good energy. If people really want they can join and help or get frustrated. Stef

jarober-2 wrote:

Well :)

I've been promoting Smalltalk for years, and lately, I've been promoting all dialects using

-- my blog -- screencasts -- podcasts

I'd be happy to do more, but my personal budget doesn't allow for much more :)

Yep, excellent job James! :) -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Smalltalk-hosting-tp3384077p3384622.html Sent from the ESUG mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 3:11 PM, laurent laffont <laurent.laffont@gmail.com> wrote:

I like what you do James. We need more people do a fraction of what you do ! Laurent.

even aside of writing our own blog posts (which should do), just commenting on other peoples blogs, tweeting and buzzing about them can be of help. davorin rusevljan http://www.cloud208.com/

Hello, would it not a good idea, to buld a central register of productive Smalltalk applications, to show the world about. Because not only developers can win with Smalltalk... Josef Springer James Robertson wrote:

Well :)

I've been promoting Smalltalk for years, and lately, I've been promoting all dialects using

-- my blog -- screencasts -- podcasts

I'd be happy to do more, but my personal budget doesn't allow for much more :)

On Mar 17, 2011, at 8:18 AM, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:

...

Hi guys

Where were you? Where are your bogs, books, videos, and cool Smalltalk open source projects? I mean that this is easy to get frustrated but it is possible to do things: - I wrote Squeak by Example not for me but for newcomers - We are writing Pharo by example two for the same. - I wrote the Seaside book because it was important for other people (and because avi was not writing one) - we are pushing pharo because we want to create a good open-source smalltalk.

I came to smalltalk in 1996 when everybody left and I decided to do something. Now this is not enough but I'm not frustrated and we are creating good energy. If people really want they can join and help or get frustrated.

Stef _______________________________________________ Esug-list mailing list Esug-list@lists.esug.org http://lists.esug.org/mailman/listinfo/esug-list_lists.esug.org

James Robertson http://www.jarober.com jarober@gmail.com

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I myself have made an trial and error(ugly & beauty) screencast of using Pharo for Riak. ==> http://appdal.com/groups/36442/wiki/be0d1/Riak_Interface_for_Pharo_Smalltalk... 2011. 3. 17., 저녁 10:56, James Robertson 작성:

Well :)

I've been promoting Smalltalk for years, and lately, I've been promoting all dialects using

-- my blog -- screencasts -- podcasts

I'd be happy to do more, but my personal budget doesn't allow for much more :)

On Mar 17, 2011, at 8:18 AM, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:

...

Hi guys

Where were you? Where are your bogs, books, videos, and cool Smalltalk open source projects? I mean that this is easy to get frustrated but it is possible to do things: - I wrote Squeak by Example not for me but for newcomers - We are writing Pharo by example two for the same. - I wrote the Seaside book because it was important for other people (and because avi was not writing one) - we are pushing pharo because we want to create a good open-source smalltalk.

I came to smalltalk in 1996 when everybody left and I decided to do something. Now this is not enough but I'm not frustrated and we are creating good energy. If people really want they can join and help or get frustrated.

Stef _______________________________________________ Esug-list mailing list Esug-list@lists.esug.org http://lists.esug.org/mailman/listinfo/esug-list_lists.esug.org

James Robertson http://www.jarober.com jarober@gmail.com

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On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 12:47 PM, Geert Claes <geert.wl.claes@gmail.com>wrote:

Ralph Johnson wrote:

...

No product can succeed without marketing. None ever has. Sometimes the marketing was not done by the inventor. Sometimes it is hard to tell who is doing the marketing and just what they did. But marketing is crucial.

Don't get me wrong Ralph, that's exactly what I meant when I said when you have "an application users want to use" ... because this IS your market. If you miss this ball on this one you can have all the documentation, exposure, advertising and whatever in the world, it still wont make people want your application.

Not sure about this. Documentation, exposure and advertising attracts people. And among these people some will want to use what you have to offer. I've just played a little with PharoCasts: - Claire made a skin so the site looks better - I've started a campain with google adwords (google offered me 80€ to try) results: more visits, more Flattr and several mails from newcommers in my inbox. This is just a little experiment but it seems it works. Ralph Johnson wrote:

...

One of the problems with Smalltalk now is that the good marketeers have left it. When I heard that Dave Thomas was retiring I stood up on the bus, which was full of Smalltalkers, and said that this was the passing of an era, and that someone else needed to step up or Smalltalk would falter. More Smalltalkers need to read marketing books like "The Tipping Point" and "Crossing the Chasm".

This is a very important thread. Please don't say that marketing is unimportant. Marketing is crucial, and a weakness in the Smalltalk community.

I agree and this is where I am trying to help as well. It is extremely important but please beware that "marketing" is not something only "marketeers" do, everyone involved is participating in marketing, starting from application's requirements/features, look-and-feel, usability, quality, cost/license, documentation, support etc ... the whole shebang :)

I agree. world.st is nice. We need to have more people writing blogs, tweet, screencasts .... it's not hard, it's not a lot of time. If people want Smalltalk to succeed, do a small thing every day. IMHO everyone and everyday is actually more important than big project/application. Big project is the consequence. Laurent.

ps. I have actually read a couple of Malcolm's books ... Chris Anderson's Free is a good one too :)

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Having preconfigured amazon ec2 AMI with Pier correctly configured as a blog would not hurt. And by correctly I mean really ready to go with persistence, backups, google analyitics. And few bullet proof tutorials how to adjust look and feel, i.e. where to poke what, and that it works even if one does not understand what he is doing much less can read Smalltalk code. Of course it would be also great to have clear documentation, which goes beyond to say that everything is a structure. But I am afraid it is really a lot of work. Davorin Rusevljan http://www.cloud208.com/

Well said, thanks! I also beleive that a right way to the average "CMS user" friendly CMS is to hide Smalltalk as long as possible, until user is encouraged enough to customize his website in depth. And in this customization is where we actually have an advantage over others. But, we need to build that non-Smalltalk front part first. There is no way to skip that part. Best regards Janko On 20. 03. 2011 23:49, ariliquin wrote:

I am a smalltalk newbie and interested in Smalltalk CMS. In answer to your question, from my point of view, I would like to say:

1. The ability to achieve something functional, say a my own custom main page, quickly and easily, is very encouraging (I haven't even begun to be able to do this in Pier etc, I am still wading through the concepts that are being presented, as opposed to the functionality that is made easily accessible).

2. The CMS is built on top of the Smalltalk platform, both an advantage for obvious reasons, yet a big disadvantage for this reason, from my point of view: I have to be familiar with Smalltalk BEFORE I can even approach the CMS. I don't mean familiar with the finer details and vast libraries, I mean familiar with the main screen and how to simple navigate, what the concepts are, the terminologies etc etc etc etc. NO other CMS requires this as obviously as Pier. The Smalltalk interface is NOT intuitive. I am not spoon feed everything. I have to research and digest and understand and grow to be able to do anything here. Yes, there are many simple concepts, however my experience was, upon seeing the Smalltalk environment in its totality, was to be completely lost.

3. Every other CMS like Wordpress, Concrete 5, Joomla are designed to present a user interface, not a programmer interface. Hence they are attractive to users immediately, in general. Yes a programmer can delve in and do things, but a user can get things they want done, point and click. (Although some of the interfaces can be overwhelming with navigations etc, also).

If you want a SmallTalk CMS that is Amazingly Attractive to End users and Programmers, this would be a good start for me:

Provide a USER interface that can be used to quickly produce publishable content (a lot of work, as many have pointed out, yet achieved by many other CMS projects)

Provide an underlying Programmer interface that gives simple and powerful access to the framework to allow extension and manipulation of the system (already there)

Identify the STRENGTHS of smalltalk, LEVERAGE these and present these, in a simple and meaningful way, to End USERS and programmers, to create a CMS with capabilities that others cannot match easily and that is Attractive because of its inherent nature and abilities.

Provide Tutorials, Video How-To's and Documentation from Within the CMS. This is were I am wondering how to do things, this should be were I find the answers also.

-- Janko Mivšek Aida/Web Smalltalk Web Application Server http://www.aidaweb.si

Completely agreed, Helge. I also have to wonder if the Smalltalk community would really benefit as much as everyone seems to think from having a "successful CMS written in Smalltalk". Does anyone who uses Wordpress care much what language it is written in? I guess there could be some vague peripheral benefit in terms of the appearance of acceptability, but really the only way to have a successful CMS is to write a good CMS, and at that point people are judging the product, not the language it was written in. So, sure, someone could go create a great, free CMS with Smalltalk. But why do we as a community feel a need to champion the idea? Is it just that we want to be able to use our favourite language to write CMS plugins? Julian On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 8:36 AM, Helge Nowak <hknowak@yahoo.de> wrote:

Janko and ariliquin: very well said!

The original poster's intention was to create a Smalltalk based CMS as successful as the leading open source ones. This can only be reached by making the system easily accessible to end users, not developers. Developers are a minority. They don't decide on what will be used as an end user tool in companies, organizations and communities.

If we think Pier and Scribo shall be end user tools they need end user UIs. If we don't think so we have to accept the fact that their target audience is the Smalltalk fraction of the developer community. As Ralph said: marketing is thinking about your market first and then build, advertize and distribute your offfering to your target segment's needs and expectations. And don't forget your return on investment! Without ROI people will soon leave because no-one can afford to just spend.

My 2 € Cents Helge ________________________________ Von: Janko Mivšek <janko.mivsek@eranova.si> An: ESUG Mailing list <esug-list@lists.esug.org> Gesendet: Montag, den 21. März 2011, 0:02:48 Uhr Betreff: Re: [Esug-list] Smalltalk hosting ...

Well said, thanks! I also beleive that a right way to the average "CMS user" friendly CMS is to hide Smalltalk as long as possible, until user is encouraged enough to customize his website in depth.

And in this customization is where we actually have an advantage over others. But, we need to build that non-Smalltalk front part first. There is no way to skip that part.

Best regards Janko

On 20. 03. 2011 23:49, ariliquin wrote:

...

I am a smalltalk newbie and interested in Smalltalk CMS. In answer to your question, from my point of view, I would like to say:

1. The ability to achieve something functional, say a my own custom main page, quickly and easily, is very encouraging (I haven't even begun to be able to do this in Pier etc, I am still wading through the concepts that are being presented, as opposed to the functionality that is made easily accessible).

2. The CMS is built on top of the Smalltalk platform, both an advantage for obvious reasons, yet a big disadvantage for this reason, from my point of view: I have to be familiar with Smalltalk BEFORE I can even approach the CMS. I don't mean familiar with the finer details and vast libraries, I mean familiar with the main screen and how to simple navigate, what the concepts are, the terminologies etc etc etc etc. NO other CMS requires this as obviously as Pier. The Smalltalk interface is NOT intuitive. I am not spoon feed everything. I have to research and digest and understand and grow to be able to do anything here. Yes, there are many simple concepts, however my experience was, upon seeing the Smalltalk environment in its totality, was to be completely lost.

3. Every other CMS like Wordpress, Concrete 5, Joomla are designed to present a user interface, not a programmer interface. Hence they are attractive to users immediately, in general. Yes a programmer can delve in and do things, but a user can get things they want done, point and click. (Although some of the interfaces can be overwhelming with navigations etc, also).

If you want a SmallTalk CMS that is Amazingly Attractive to End users and Programmers, this would be a good start for me:

Provide a USER interface that can be used to quickly produce publishable content (a lot of work, as many have pointed out, yet achieved by many other CMS projects)

Provide an underlying Programmer interface that gives simple and powerful access to the framework to allow extension and manipulation of the system (already there)

Identify the STRENGTHS of smalltalk, LEVERAGE these and present these, in a simple and meaningful way, to End USERS and programmers, to create a CMS with capabilities that others cannot match easily and that is Attractive because of its inherent nature and abilities.

Provide Tutorials, Video How-To's and Documentation from Within the CMS. This is were I am wondering how to do things, this should be were I find the answers also.

-- Janko Mivšek Aida/Web Smalltalk Web Application Server http://www.aidaweb.si

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On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 4:59 AM, Julian Fitzell <jfitzell@gmail.com> wrote:

Completely agreed, Helge.

I also have to wonder if the Smalltalk community would really benefit as much as everyone seems to think from having a "successful CMS written in Smalltalk". Does anyone who uses Wordpress care much what language it is written in? I guess there could be some vague peripheral benefit in terms of the appearance of acceptability, but really the only way to have a successful CMS is to write a good CMS, and at that point people are judging the product, not the language it was written in.

So, sure, someone could go create a great, free CMS with Smalltalk. But why do we as a community feel a need to champion the idea? Is it just that we want to be able to use our favourite language to write CMS plugins?

How much more effective to enable one to write plugins in Smalltalk and then plug them into existing CMS systems. Insularity and lack of interoperability can hobble Smalltalk. Emphasis on interoperability in general and the FFI in particular. These are the multipliers that will cause greater adoption and penetration. Reimplementing an insular and there-by inferior version of something already in existence is pointless. Providing a platform that allows us to join in with the world is essential. best, Eliot

Julian

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 8:36 AM, Helge Nowak <hknowak@yahoo.de> wrote:

...

Janko and ariliquin: very well said!

The original poster's intention was to create a Smalltalk based CMS as successful as the leading open source ones. This can only be reached by making the system easily accessible to end users, not developers. Developers are a minority. They don't decide on what will be used as an end user tool in companies, organizations and communities.

If we think Pier and Scribo shall be end user tools they need end user UIs. If we don't think so we have to accept the fact that their target audience is the Smalltalk fraction of the developer community. As Ralph said: marketing is thinking about your market first and then build, advertize and distribute your offfering to your target segment's needs and expectations. And don't forget your return on investment! Without ROI people will soon leave because no-one can afford to just spend.

My 2 € Cents Helge ________________________________ Von: Janko Mivšek <janko.mivsek@eranova.si> An: ESUG Mailing list <esug-list@lists.esug.org> Gesendet: Montag, den 21. März 2011, 0:02:48 Uhr Betreff: Re: [Esug-list] Smalltalk hosting ...

Well said, thanks! I also beleive that a right way to the average "CMS user" friendly CMS is to hide Smalltalk as long as possible, until user is encouraged enough to customize his website in depth.

And in this customization is where we actually have an advantage over others. But, we need to build that non-Smalltalk front part first. There is no way to skip that part.

Best regards Janko

On 20. 03. 2011 23:49, ariliquin wrote:

...

I am a smalltalk newbie and interested in Smalltalk CMS. In answer to your question, from my point of view, I would like to say:

1. The ability to achieve something functional, say a my own custom main page, quickly and easily, is very encouraging (I haven't even begun to be able to do this in Pier etc, I am still wading through the concepts that are being presented, as opposed to the functionality that is made easily accessible).

2. The CMS is built on top of the Smalltalk platform, both an advantage for obvious reasons, yet a big disadvantage for this reason, from my point of view: I have to be familiar with Smalltalk BEFORE I can even approach the CMS. I don't mean familiar with the finer details and vast libraries, I mean familiar with the main screen and how to simple navigate, what the concepts are, the terminologies etc etc etc etc. NO other CMS requires this as obviously as Pier. The Smalltalk interface is NOT intuitive. I am not spoon feed everything. I have to research and digest and understand and grow to be able to do anything here. Yes, there are many simple concepts, however my experience was, upon seeing the Smalltalk environment in its totality, was to be completely lost.

3. Every other CMS like Wordpress, Concrete 5, Joomla are designed to present a user interface, not a programmer interface. Hence they are attractive to users immediately, in general. Yes a programmer can delve in and do things, but a user can get things they want done, point and click. (Although some of the interfaces can be overwhelming with navigations etc, also).

If you want a SmallTalk CMS that is Amazingly Attractive to End users and Programmers, this would be a good start for me:

Provide a USER interface that can be used to quickly produce publishable content (a lot of work, as many have pointed out, yet achieved by many other CMS projects)

Provide an underlying Programmer interface that gives simple and powerful access to the framework to allow extension and manipulation of the system (already there)

Identify the STRENGTHS of smalltalk, LEVERAGE these and present these, in a simple and meaningful way, to End USERS and programmers, to create a CMS with capabilities that others cannot match easily and that is Attractive because of its inherent nature and abilities.

Provide Tutorials, Video How-To's and Documentation from Within the CMS. This is were I am wondering how to do things, this should be were I find the answers also.

-- Janko Mivšek Aida/Web Smalltalk Web Application Server http://www.aidaweb.si

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Agreed. Smalltalk is not helped by trying to show everyone how much better we can redo what they've already done. We need to borrow what we can, integrate where we're able, compromise when necessary, and remain stubbornly unique only where our core values are at stake. That still leaves us plenty of room to shine and makes it more likely the other kids will let us play in their sandboxes too. Julian On 3/21/11, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 4:59 AM, Julian Fitzell <jfitzell@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Completely agreed, Helge.

I also have to wonder if the Smalltalk community would really benefit as much as everyone seems to think from having a "successful CMS written in Smalltalk". Does anyone who uses Wordpress care much what language it is written in? I guess there could be some vague peripheral benefit in terms of the appearance of acceptability, but really the only way to have a successful CMS is to write a good CMS, and at that point people are judging the product, not the language it was written in.

So, sure, someone could go create a great, free CMS with Smalltalk. But why do we as a community feel a need to champion the idea? Is it just that we want to be able to use our favourite language to write CMS plugins?

How much more effective to enable one to write plugins in Smalltalk and then plug them into existing CMS systems. Insularity and lack of interoperability can hobble Smalltalk. Emphasis on interoperability in general and the FFI in particular. These are the multipliers that will cause greater adoption and penetration. Reimplementing an insular and there-by inferior version of something already in existence is pointless. Providing a platform that allows us to join in with the world is essential.

best, Eliot

...

Julian

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 8:36 AM, Helge Nowak <hknowak@yahoo.de> wrote:

...

Janko and ariliquin: very well said!

The original poster's intention was to create a Smalltalk based CMS as successful as the leading open source ones. This can only be reached by making the system easily accessible to end users, not developers. Developers are a minority. They don't decide on what will be used as an end user tool in companies, organizations and communities.

If we think Pier and Scribo shall be end user tools they need end user UIs. If we don't think so we have to accept the fact that their target audience is the Smalltalk fraction of the developer community. As Ralph said: marketing is thinking about your market first and then build, advertize and distribute your offfering to your target segment's needs and expectations. And don't forget your return on investment! Without ROI people will soon leave because no-one can afford to just spend.

My 2 € Cents Helge ________________________________ Von: Janko Mivšek <janko.mivsek@eranova.si> An: ESUG Mailing list <esug-list@lists.esug.org> Gesendet: Montag, den 21. März 2011, 0:02:48 Uhr Betreff: Re: [Esug-list] Smalltalk hosting ...

Well said, thanks! I also beleive that a right way to the average "CMS user" friendly CMS is to hide Smalltalk as long as possible, until user is encouraged enough to customize his website in depth.

And in this customization is where we actually have an advantage over others. But, we need to build that non-Smalltalk front part first. There is no way to skip that part.

Best regards Janko

On 20. 03. 2011 23:49, ariliquin wrote:

...

I am a smalltalk newbie and interested in Smalltalk CMS. In answer to your question, from my point of view, I would like to say:

1. The ability to achieve something functional, say a my own custom main page, quickly and easily, is very encouraging (I haven't even begun to be able to do this in Pier etc, I am still wading through the concepts that are being presented, as opposed to the functionality that is made easily accessible).

2. The CMS is built on top of the Smalltalk platform, both an advantage for obvious reasons, yet a big disadvantage for this reason, from my point of view: I have to be familiar with Smalltalk BEFORE I can even approach the CMS. I don't mean familiar with the finer details and vast libraries, I mean familiar with the main screen and how to simple navigate, what the concepts are, the terminologies etc etc etc etc. NO other CMS requires this as obviously as Pier. The Smalltalk interface is NOT intuitive. I am not spoon feed everything. I have to research and digest and understand and grow to be able to do anything here. Yes, there are many simple concepts, however my experience was, upon seeing the Smalltalk environment in its totality, was to be completely lost.

3. Every other CMS like Wordpress, Concrete 5, Joomla are designed to present a user interface, not a programmer interface. Hence they are attractive to users immediately, in general. Yes a programmer can delve in and do things, but a user can get things they want done, point and click. (Although some of the interfaces can be overwhelming with navigations etc, also).

If you want a SmallTalk CMS that is Amazingly Attractive to End users and Programmers, this would be a good start for me:

Provide a USER interface that can be used to quickly produce publishable content (a lot of work, as many have pointed out, yet achieved by many other CMS projects)

Provide an underlying Programmer interface that gives simple and powerful access to the framework to allow extension and manipulation of the system (already there)

Identify the STRENGTHS of smalltalk, LEVERAGE these and present these, in a simple and meaningful way, to End USERS and programmers, to create a CMS with capabilities that others cannot match easily and that is Attractive because of its inherent nature and abilities.

Provide Tutorials, Video How-To's and Documentation from Within the CMS. This is were I am wondering how to do things, this should be were I find the answers also.

-- Janko Mivšek Aida/Web Smalltalk Web Application Server http://www.aidaweb.si

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On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 12:48 AM, Norbert Hartl <norbert@hartl.name> wrote:

This is a very sad thread. It started with a nice idea to talk about and it became more ridiculous with every single reply. I don't understand why everybody is so 110% confident what is the right thing to do if it turns out that we are all completely clueless? How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas? We don't have tons of ideas and need to select. And we don't need _one_ idea!

Writing a user friendly CMS is not _the_ idea but it is an idea. It doesn't help to shift perspective either to the low level side, the business side or the end user side. It is an idea and it is good. Looking at the current smalltalk development than I can just state that it flurishes at least in the open source corner. From an end user perspective neither pharo, seaside, pier or FFI has a value in itself. But all of these are a good foundation to enable people with ideas to produce wonderful products. I think to do marketing you need something to show. And if we are not the ones with the market breaking ideas than we should focus building the good tools and attract developers. Good applications will follow.

Mostly agree. But good tools is not enough to attract developers. We have to show how good they are - that means more blogs, tweet, screencasts, documentation .... so newbies can learn how to use them. For example I know that in Pharo there are powerful tools - I don't know how to use them, there's almost no comment, documentation, .... Metacello has done it right. Help, recipes, tutorials are here - I can learn advanced stuff in a couple of hours. A community is like a kitchen garden. You have to do a little everyday to make it grow. Yes, marketing is good. Talking about how marketing should be done is not.

Analyzing markets, building a product for it and advertize might work but it is a corporate view. Open source devlopment works the opposite way most of the time. So what is better? Isn't that dependent on the fact if you are inside or outside corporate wise. Reading 'the tipping point' is sure a good idea but I observed it made a lot of people think they know "how success works" and they just need to find any idea/product that is willing to fit in. But you can't copy success stories easily.

Open source doesn't mean no marketing - indeed to me it seems successful open source project has really good marketing from their user / developer base: people using it and write about it to say it's great and how to use it, make it easy to setup. LAMP stack is a good example I think: they were not blasting technologies, but were easy to setup, lot of tutorials, easy to get in. So we all should focus more on what we can _do_ instead of distracting the

motivaton of those that are willing to do something. I'm not a professional smalltalker but I spend a vast amount of my (spare) time in a lot of things smalltalk and try to build my small business. Without having faith, love and passion I could do J2EE instead.

Oh I'm doing mostly PHP for one year ;) But the more I learn about Pharo the more it get into my workflow. It seems to me it's easier to get into Smalltalk now than it was two years ago when I discovered it. Cheers, Laurent ranting end.

Norbert

Am 21.03.2011 um 22:09 schrieb Julian Fitzell:

...

Agreed. Smalltalk is not helped by trying to show everyone how much better we can redo what they've already done. We need to borrow what we can, integrate where we're able, compromise when necessary, and remain stubbornly unique only where our core values are at stake. That still leaves us plenty of room to shine and makes it more likely the other kids will let us play in their sandboxes too.

Julian

On 3/21/11, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda@gmail.com> wrote:

...

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 4:59 AM, Julian Fitzell <jfitzell@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Completely agreed, Helge.

I also have to wonder if the Smalltalk community would really benefit as much as everyone seems to think from having a "successful CMS written in Smalltalk". Does anyone who uses Wordpress care much what language it is written in? I guess there could be some vague peripheral benefit in terms of the appearance of acceptability, but really the only way to have a successful CMS is to write a good CMS, and at that point people are judging the product, not the language it was written in.

So, sure, someone could go create a great, free CMS with Smalltalk. But why do we as a community feel a need to champion the idea? Is it just that we want to be able to use our favourite language to write CMS plugins?

How much more effective to enable one to write plugins in Smalltalk and then plug them into existing CMS systems. Insularity and lack of interoperability can hobble Smalltalk. Emphasis on interoperability in general and the FFI in particular. These are the multipliers that will cause greater adoption and penetration. Reimplementing an insular and there-by inferior version of something already in existence is pointless. Providing a platform that allows us to join in with the world is essential.

best, Eliot

...

Julian

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 8:36 AM, Helge Nowak <hknowak@yahoo.de> wrote:

...

Janko and ariliquin: very well said!

The original poster's intention was to create a Smalltalk based CMS as successful as the leading open source ones. This can only be reached by making the system easily accessible to end users, not developers. Developers are a minority. They don't decide on what will be used as an end user tool in companies, organizations and communities.

If we think Pier and Scribo shall be end user tools they need end user UIs. If we don't think so we have to accept the fact that their target audience is the Smalltalk fraction of the developer community. As Ralph said: marketing is thinking about your market first and then build, advertize and distribute your offfering to your target segment's needs and expectations. And don't forget your return on investment! Without ROI people will soon leave because no-one can afford to just spend.

My 2 € Cents Helge ________________________________ Von: Janko Mivšek <janko.mivsek@eranova.si> An: ESUG Mailing list <esug-list@lists.esug.org> Gesendet: Montag, den 21. März 2011, 0:02:48 Uhr Betreff: Re: [Esug-list] Smalltalk hosting ...

Well said, thanks! I also beleive that a right way to the average "CMS user" friendly CMS is to hide Smalltalk as long as possible, until user is encouraged enough to customize his website in depth.

And in this customization is where we actually have an advantage over others. But, we need to build that non-Smalltalk front part first. There is no way to skip that part.

Best regards Janko

On 20. 03. 2011 23:49, ariliquin wrote:

...

I am a smalltalk newbie and interested in Smalltalk CMS. In answer to your question, from my point of view, I would like to say:

1. The ability to achieve something functional, say a my own custom main page, quickly and easily, is very encouraging (I haven't even begun to be able to do this in Pier etc, I am still wading through the concepts that are being presented, as opposed to the functionality that is made easily accessible).

2. The CMS is built on top of the Smalltalk platform, both an advantage for obvious reasons, yet a big disadvantage for this reason, from my point of view: I have to be familiar with Smalltalk BEFORE I can even approach the CMS. I don't mean familiar with the finer details and vast libraries, I mean familiar with the main screen and how to simple navigate, what the concepts are, the terminologies etc etc etc etc. NO other CMS requires this as obviously as Pier. The Smalltalk interface is NOT intuitive. I am not spoon feed everything. I have to research and digest and understand and grow to be able to do anything here. Yes, there are many simple concepts, however my experience was, upon seeing the Smalltalk environment in its totality, was to be completely lost.

3. Every other CMS like Wordpress, Concrete 5, Joomla are designed to present a user interface, not a programmer interface. Hence they are attractive to users immediately, in general. Yes a programmer can delve in and do things, but a user can get things they want done, point and click. (Although some of the interfaces can be overwhelming with navigations etc, also).

If you want a SmallTalk CMS that is Amazingly Attractive to End users and Programmers, this would be a good start for me:

Provide a USER interface that can be used to quickly produce publishable content (a lot of work, as many have pointed out, yet achieved by many other CMS projects)

Provide an underlying Programmer interface that gives simple and powerful access to the framework to allow extension and manipulation of the system (already there)

Identify the STRENGTHS of smalltalk, LEVERAGE these and present these, in a simple and meaningful way, to End USERS and programmers, to create a CMS with capabilities that others cannot match easily and that is Attractive because of its inherent nature and abilities.

Provide Tutorials, Video How-To's and Documentation from Within the CMS. This is were I am wondering how to do things, this should be were I find the answers also.

-- Janko Mivšek Aida/Web Smalltalk Web Application Server http://www.aidaweb.si

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Hi guys, My opinion is, that we are good in CMS *as a framework*, but I doubt we will ever be in CMS for end users. CMS as a framework means, that you are building your customized solutions on top of it, and that CMS functionality is usually only a tiny part of a whole solution. And we are good in complex things, so having a Smalltalk CMS in this case is a good thing. That's at least how Scribo CMS is used and how it was actually born. Scribo is namely an open sourced part of bigger commercial offering. I prepared some classical public sites with Scribo as well and for me as Smalltalker it was easy. But immediately when I started to explain Scribo to others , I came to conclusion, that a lot more needs to be done for Scribo to become a more end-user friendly. To invest a time and resources in that, is it worth? That's my question too. But so far I'm happy to use Scribo as a framework. Janko On 22. 03. 2011 11:27, Geert Claes wrote:

Joachim Tuchel wrote:

...

... I'm afraid the idea of having to provide a killer app that will show the world how cool Smalltalk is will not work. If the app is great, nobody will ask: What's it made with? My blog is hosted on Wordpress.com, and I must admit I neither have an idea nor care what language it's written in. My time is too limited to care.

I disagree on this one. There are a lot of similarities between Smallthought Systems/DabbleDB/Seaside/Squeak and 37Signals/Rails/Ruby where both have somehow kick-started a wider community who did care.

Joachim Tuchel wrote:

...

But if we manage to make our Smalltalk environments a nice place to stay at for programmers, we can probably attract more Smalltalkers.

Agree

... -- Janko Mivšek Aida/Web Smalltalk Web Application Server http://www.aidaweb.si

Hi all! I agree with Julian in all his points (thus no quoting!) but just wanted to say one more thing in this thread: Although it is fun and engaging to talk about "we should do X", and I really don't want to suppress that, it almost never ends up being the driving force for someone to actually do X. IMHO a more exciting discussion can start if someone says "I want to do X" and then see what people think of it and if they want to join in and so on. Just my 2 öre. regards, Göran

Niall Ross-2 wrote:

1) GSoC Smalltalk project in the area of CMS: needs Pier-capable mentor(s).

As far as I understand it we were not accepted for the GSoC this year -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Smalltalk-hosting-tp3384077p3395992.html Sent from the ESUG mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Hi Göran, all, At 12:04 22/03/2011, Göran Krampe wrote:

something *I* want to do (and has already started doing)

Building on the Smalltalk Community achievements since several decades, and my own Smalltalk-related work since 1992: 1) I've conducted in 2008 and 2009 a quite extensive study of the elderly requirements like preventing and managing impairments, improving quality of life, mobility, nutrition, medication, organization, communication, etc. These are socially, economically and technically challenging enough to motivate calling in Smalltalk technologies. Specifically, the elderly requirements are characterized by quality attributes like runtime adaptation to changing needs and conditions, affordability, and privacy. 2) I've elaborated and funded a project for developing novel Smalltalk-based solutions that address those requirements. 3) As part of that project, I've already implemented an extension to Pier and Seaside for developing Online Programmable CMSs (OP-CMS) [1]. To the best of my knowledge, no other CMS solution comes currently with end-user programmability. Although, when addressing the elderly requirements, CMS is necessary to dynamically adapt the content of the web server, and end-user programmability to adapt its functionality. So, it appears to me that We, as a Community, have there a significant competitive advantage, which is currently largely underexploited. 4) Now, I'm in the process of adding social networking facilities (as social networking is known as a core component of elderly-related solutions). 5) As a next step, I want to create a network of professional Seaside/Smalltalk "web service" providers. In effect, runtime adaptation of the server functionality in OP-CMSs is based on online service composition. A "service" may be any piece of code accessible for invocation from a Seaside server, including Seaside components themselves and standard Web-Services from Amazon, etc. "My" software platform provides online service composition and interpretation facilities (together with content management and social networking). Elderly people need individualized solutions. Additionally, their needs change alongside the ageing process. So, to address worldwide the elderly changing needs, hundred of thousands of individualized services will be needed. This appears to me a concrete and substantial market for Smalltalk solutions. The end-user-friendliness issue of Pier interfaces will be addressed as a byproduct of that effort. What do you think about this product-oriented and Smalltalk-based research, development, and innovation project? Would anybody be interested in joining efforts to create and sustain a network of professional Seaside/Smalltalk "web service" providers, and eventually technology developers for Smalltalk-based elderly solutions (in line with what was OLPC for kids)? Regards, Reza Razavi [1] <http://www.afacms.com/blog/pontoon-app>http://www.afacms.com/blog/pontoon-app [2] http://www.rezarazavi.com/about/cv/publications/iwst-2010 [3] <http://www.rezarazavi.com/about/cv/publications/pppo-2011>http://www.rezarazavi.com/about/cv/publications/pppo-2011

Hi Julian, I agree wi most of your points, but would like to add one reason I see to add a usability layer on top of Pier: Most larger shops have separated content and application departments. Smalltalk indeed excells as an environment for developing complex business applications and, thanks to Seaside, delivering those complex applications to the web. However, mpst of the times those complex components need to be embedded in some kind of semi-static content which is maintained by the marketing department. At the moment, there is no decent way to provide that end user department with a reasonable alternative on a smalltalk-basis. Thus, the only feasible solution for embedding a seaside component in a set of webpages is the dreaded iframe. If we had a decent (not perfect, but decent) end-user cms on top of seaside, we could fix that. And not using iframes would make a lot of things (seo, component sizing etc) a whole lot simpler. Keep in mind, I'm not talking about a top of the bill technology demonstration, but merely of a usable cms from an end user perspective. I for one would like to spend some time at esug looking into that. Not being a developer makes me an excellent customer, I guess :) Kind regards, Louis Op 22 mrt. 2011 om 10:23 heeft Julian Fitzell <jfitzell@gmail.com> het volgende geschreven:

Hi Norbert,

I disagree entirely. This thread isn't sad at all; it shows how passionate this community is about Smalltalk and that people want to talk about how to share this passion with as many others as possible.

Suggesting that one can do marketing without talking about marketing is, in my view, nonsensical. People are naturally free to do whatever they like, but the fact that they are having this discussion suggests to me that they are not quite sure what to do and would like to discuss ideas with others. They would like to focus their passion on ideas they believe will be successful, rather than doing whatever first comes to their minds. Presumably this discussions will involve some disagreement rather than a big love fest of mutual affirmation. "How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas?"? I find that a very very strange sentiment...

Since most of use here are developers, I think we are not used to thinking about the issues of markets and messages and can therefore benefit from all the groupthink we can get. Obviously writing a CMS is *an* idea - that's by definition; but this particular idea was being discussed in the very specific context of making Smalltalk wildly popular. Do you think it will?

I'm not 110% certain of anything but looking at the idea of a CMS: * there are many established players already in the market, with mindshare and a big headstart * there are probably thousands of plugins already written for the existing platforms * we are less likely to be successful precisely *because* we would be using an uncommon language * our deployment story is still poor * users of a CMS are generally not going to be users of its underlying programming language * Smalltalk is really good at modelling complex domains and CMSes (at least the popular ones) are really quite simple - this isn't an area where Smalltalk is going to give a huge advantage over competing languages

The award-winning Cmsbox is evidence that you can create a great CMS in Smalltalk. But that's not the point. You don't need to read The Tipping Point to see that we would be entering a saturated market with little competitive advantage; even if we were successful, we'd have been largely targeting the wrong people.

(By the way, your suggestion of attracting developers with good tools sounds like one reasonable focus. From what I've seen, good developer tools are in fact still "market breaking" - this used to be one of Smalltalk's strengths and is a perfect opportunity to borrow, integrate, and innovate...)

Julian

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 11:48 PM, Norbert Hartl <norbert@hartl.name> wrote:

...

This is a very sad thread. It started with a nice idea to talk about and it became more ridiculous with every single reply. I don't understand why everybody is so 110% confident what is the right thing to do if it turns out that we are all completely clueless? How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas? We don't have tons of ideas and need to select. And we don't need _one_ idea!

Writing a user friendly CMS is not _the_ idea but it is an idea. It doesn't help to shift perspective either to the low level side, the business side or the end user side. It is an idea and it is good. Looking at the current smalltalk development than I can just state that it flurishes at least in the open source corner. From an end user perspective neither pharo, seaside, pier or FFI has a value in itself. But all of these are a good foundation to enable people with ideas to produce wonderful products. I think to do marketing you need something to show. And if we are not the ones with the market breaking ideas than we should focus building the good tools and attract developers. Good applications will follow.

Yes, marketing is good. Talking about how marketing should be done is not. Analyzing markets, building a product for it and advertize might work but it is a corporate view. Open source devlopment works the opposite way most of the time. So what is better? Isn't that dependent on the fact if you are inside or outside corporate wise. Reading 'the tipping point' is sure a good idea but I observed it made a lot of people think they know "how success works" and they just need to find any idea/product that is willing to fit in. But you can't copy success stories easily.

So we all should focus more on what we can _do_ instead of distracting the motivaton of those that are willing to do something. I'm not a professional smalltalker but I spend a vast amount of my (spare) time in a lot of things smalltalk and try to build my small business. Without having faith, love and passion I could do J2EE instead.

ranting end.

Norbert

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I try to link to all the interesting Smalltalk news I see - if I miss something (and I did catch this one: http://www.jarober.com/blog/blogView?entry=3471489914), please ping me - I have a Google chat back widget right on my blog for that purpose :) On Mar 22, 2011, at 6:52 AM, Davorin Rusevljan wrote:

Well folks,

Strategic discussions are nice and welcome, but related to subject of this thread, Nick Ager recently posted link to his very nice blog post with included tutorial how to host Seaside app on EC2.

Now, raise your hands, who has tweeted, buzzed, commented or linked to this blog post.

Davorin Rusevljan http://www.cloud208.com/

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James Robertson http://www.jarober.com jarober@gmail.com

Am 22.03.2011 um 10:23 schrieb Julian Fitzell:

Hi Norbert,

I disagree entirely. This thread isn't sad at all; it shows how passionate this community is about Smalltalk and that people want to talk about how to share this passion with as many others as possible.

Ok, it seems we just have different definitions of passion.

Suggesting that one can do marketing without talking about marketing is, in my view, nonsensical. People are naturally free to do whatever they like, but the fact that they are having this discussion suggests to me that they are not quite sure what to do and would like to discuss ideas with others. They would like to focus their passion on ideas they believe will be successful, rather than doing whatever first comes to their minds. Presumably this discussions will involve some disagreement rather than a big love fest of mutual affirmation. "How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas?"? I find that a very very strange sentiment...

It is also quite obvious that you need to talk if you are not doing it alone (or by definition if you like that better). So I didn't mean it is forbidden to talk about marketing. And to be honest if you say "...are not quite sure what to do..." and you find "How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas?" a strange sentiment than I'm totally out of bussiness explaining it.

Since most of use here are developers, I think we are not used to thinking about the issues of markets and messages and can therefore benefit from all the groupthink we can get. Obviously writing a CMS is *an* idea - that's by definition; but this particular idea was being discussed in the very specific context of making Smalltalk wildly popular. Do you think it will?

Yes, I do. I don't believe there will be a single killer app that rejuvenates the investment in smalltalk. A lot of effort is to convince other people. And for that you often need to prove that you can do "that" also. I think it is good to have a portfolio of applications that you just can show. That is a language people understand that are not technical experienced (which we all agree is the majority). My assumption here is that we are not only talking about end-user products but about doing services for customers which build end-user products.

I'm not 110% certain of anything but looking at the idea of a CMS: * there are many established players already in the market, with mindshare and a big headstart * there are probably thousands of plugins already written for the existing platforms * we are less likely to be successful precisely *because* we would be using an uncommon language * our deployment story is still poor * users of a CMS are generally not going to be users of its underlying programming language * Smalltalk is really good at modelling complex domains and CMSes (at least the popular ones) are really quite simple - this isn't an area where Smalltalk is going to give a huge advantage over competing languages

That sounds like a quick market/risk analysis and would be the explanation why you would not invest money in this idea. But do you have an alternative what we _can_ do? If I would be a startup company I would agree completely with your reasoning. You need some "unique selling point" "something outstanding" to be able to be succesful on the market. My point is that you need enablers. Why I'm defending the CMS idea is not that I think the CMS to have is the final goal. But if we are talking about CMSes we are talking about web technologies. Integration of multiple services in a single html page is not that easy (making it _one_ application). If you can live with iframes and same domain origin policy than it is not a problem. If not you need to integrate things more tight. A CMS is just this placeholder for me that enables certain tasks to do with smalltalk in that case web technologies.

The award-winning Cmsbox is evidence that you can create a great CMS in Smalltalk. But that's not the point. You don't need to read The Tipping Point to see that we would be entering a saturated market with little competitive advantage; even if we were successful, we'd have been largely targeting the wrong people.

I don't understand the last sentence. Norbert

(By the way, your suggestion of attracting developers with good tools sounds like one reasonable focus. From what I've seen, good developer tools are in fact still "market breaking" - this used to be one of Smalltalk's strengths and is a perfect opportunity to borrow, integrate, and innovate...)

Julian

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 11:48 PM, Norbert Hartl <norbert@hartl.name> wrote:

...

This is a very sad thread. It started with a nice idea to talk about and it became more ridiculous with every single reply. I don't understand why everybody is so 110% confident what is the right thing to do if it turns out that we are all completely clueless? How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas? We don't have tons of ideas and need to select. And we don't need _one_ idea!

Writing a user friendly CMS is not _the_ idea but it is an idea. It doesn't help to shift perspective either to the low level side, the business side or the end user side. It is an idea and it is good. Looking at the current smalltalk development than I can just state that it flurishes at least in the open source corner. From an end user perspective neither pharo, seaside, pier or FFI has a value in itself. But all of these are a good foundation to enable people with ideas to produce wonderful products. I think to do marketing you need something to show. And if we are not the ones with the market breaking ideas than we should focus building the good tools and attract developers. Good applications will follow.

Yes, marketing is good. Talking about how marketing should be done is not. Analyzing markets, building a product for it and advertize might work but it is a corporate view. Open source devlopment works the opposite way most of the time. So what is better? Isn't that dependent on the fact if you are inside or outside corporate wise. Reading 'the tipping point' is sure a good idea but I observed it made a lot of people think they know "how success works" and they just need to find any idea/product that is willing to fit in. But you can't copy success stories easily.

So we all should focus more on what we can _do_ instead of distracting the motivaton of those that are willing to do something. I'm not a professional smalltalker but I spend a vast amount of my (spare) time in a lot of things smalltalk and try to build my small business. Without having faith, love and passion I could do J2EE instead.

ranting end.

Norbert

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It's great that people are willing to talk about this, and some are doing things too. Admit it though: most of this discussion is programmers talking about marketing, which is as useful as marketers talking about programming. I'm in my 20th year of Smalltalk, so I've seen this a fair few times. My 2c: I'm fairly certain that the only way Smalltalk could achieve major success is by dying and being reborn with a new name. If anyone has a minute (and access rights!), the ESUG pages could do with some love: 1) they crashed yesterday, and have often slowed to a crawl 2) there's a top-level menu "Robotics" that leads to a page saying "A place for Jordi to write, ok!" 3) The search box does nothing 4) On IE8, there are Javascript errors. All pages have "Ajax is not defined", and many have some "idX is not defined" errors (for various X) Believe it or not, those are the kinds of things that register with outsiders when they check out Smalltalk, in particular if they're considering using it to build things on the web. Of course I understand this is all done as volunteer work, and I appreciate the effort people have put into it. I'm just pointing out the facts and providing a bug report. All the best, Steve -- Steven Kelly, Ph.D. Co-President and CTO, MetaCase Tel.: +358 14 641 000 ext. 21 Fax: +358 420 648 606 Cell: +358 40 7331 286 Web: www.metacase.com <http://www.metacase.com/> Blog: www.metacase.com/blogs/stevek/blogView Email: steven.kelly@metacase.com SD TIMES 100 Winner 2007 & 2008 MetaCase Recognized as Software Development Leader and Innovator <http://www.metacase.com/news/SDTimes100-2008.html>

Talking to me but also to us: we are lacking broader professionalism from time to time and our websites (mines included) mirror that lack. This part is also hard to understand for us developers, we can be professional in our field, but harder in fields like "public relations" (good meaning of that term). If we accept at least critics from others, this would be a good first step ... Best regards Janko On 25. 03. 2011 10:27, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:

Steven

this is fun that you shoot on us while you were never able to come and present your products at ESUG while I'm sure that it would have helped the community. Now I like all the talking here, but how many are we to do something for others (I mean others than our little business).

Stef

On Mar 22, 2011, at 3:03 PM, Steven Kelly wrote:

...

It's great that people are willing to talk about this, and some are doing things too. Admit it though: most of this discussion is programmers talking about marketing, which is as useful as marketers talking about programming. I'm in my 20th year of Smalltalk, so I've seen this a fair few times. My 2c: I'm fairly certain that the only way Smalltalk could achieve major success is by dying and being reborn with a new name.

If anyone has a minute (and access rights!), the ESUG pages could do with some love: 1) they crashed yesterday, and have often slowed to a crawl 2) there's a top-level menu "Robotics" that leads to a page saying "A place for Jordi to write, ok!" 3) The search box does nothing 4) On IE8, there are Javascript errors. All pages have "Ajax is not defined", and many have some "idX is not defined" errors (for various X)

Believe it or not, those are the kinds of things that register with outsiders when they check out Smalltalk, in particular if they're considering using it to build things on the web. Of course I understand this is all done as volunteer work, and I appreciate the effort people have put into it. I'm just pointing out the facts and providing a bug report.

All the best, Steve -- Steven Kelly, Ph.D.

...

SD TIMES 100 Winner 2007 & 2008 MetaCase Recognized as Software Development Leader and Innovator

-- Janko Mivšek Aida/Web Smalltalk Web Application Server http://www.aidaweb.si

Stéphane Ducasse wrote

...

this is fun that you shoot on us

I guess you really know I'm not shooting at anyone, and you don't need to react negatively. I stand by my comments, both praise and (hopefully insightful and constructive) criticism, and welcome any debate on the actual points.

...

while you were never able to come and present your products at ESUG while I'm sure that it would have helped the community.

You've been good at asking me to come over the years - well done! As I've replied each time, I don't like travel, and I have to do a lot of it for our business. I've presented MetaEdit+ at the Cincom Smalltalk conference in Frankfurt, and many times at OOPSLA and ECOOP. Presenting at those places has made commercial sense; presenting at ESUG hasn't seemed to - mostly because the attendees aren't potential customers. That's just the way companies make decisions.

as I already told you, I imagine that Smalltalk developers do not leave in a bubble with only Smalltalk teams and products and they can probably push your product to Java people because they know that this is in Smalltalk. But I can understand that you do not like to travel since I do not like that either. Now this is up to you to present or not MetaEdit+ at ESUG. Stef

Yes There is no problem. I'm just tired about the crying tone of the community. Let us stand up and build the next generation. Stef

Dear Stephane, one of the ways Steve often contributes significantly to Smalltalk is by swiftly finding the bugs that others only spot - or fail to spot till later. And where it is code, he often fixes bugs, not just finds them.

It was good that Steve a couple of days ago pointed out that the pages were down. It would likely have been noticed soon anyway but faster is better than fast, right.

So I value his input on the pages I write, or on anything else. I may or may not agree, and may or may not have effort to fix, any particular thing, but his taking the time to notice, describe and email is valued.

Yours faithfully Niall Ross

Stéphane Ducasse wrote:

...

Steven

this is fun that you shoot on us while you were never able to come and present your products at ESUG while I'm sure that it would have helped the community. Now I like all the talking here, but how many are we to do something for others (I mean others than our little business).

Stef

On Mar 22, 2011, at 3:03 PM, Steven Kelly wrote:

...

It's great that people are willing to talk about this, and some are doing things too. Admit it though: most of this discussion is programmers talking about marketing, which is as useful as marketers talking about programming. I'm in my 20th year of Smalltalk, so I've seen this a fair few times. My 2c: I'm fairly certain that the only way Smalltalk could achieve major success is by dying and being reborn with a new name. If anyone has a minute (and access rights!), the ESUG pages could do with some love: 1) they crashed yesterday, and have often slowed to a crawl 2) there's a top-level menu "Robotics" that leads to a page saying "A place for Jordi to write, ok!" 3) The search box does nothing 4) On IE8, there are Javascript errors. All pages have "Ajax is not defined", and many have some "idX is not defined" errors (for various X) Believe it or not, those are the kinds of things that register with outsiders when they check out Smalltalk, in particular if they're considering using it to build things on the web. Of course I understand this is all done as volunteer work, and I appreciate the effort people have put into it. I'm just pointing out the facts and providing a bug report. All the best, Steve -- Steven Kelly, Ph.D. Co-President and CTO, MetaCase Tel.: +358 14 641 000 ext. 21 Fax: +358 420 648 606 Cell: +358 40 7331 286 Web: www.metacase.com Blog: www.metacase.com/blogs/stevek/blogView Email: steven.kelly@metacase.com

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On 25 March 2011 13:44, laurent laffont <laurent.laffont@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 1:39 PM, Stéphane Ducasse <stephane.ducasse@inria.fr> wrote:

...

Yes There is no problem. I'm just tired about the crying tone of the community. Let us stand up and build the next generation.

yep :) "The best way to complain is to make things." -- James Murphy Laurent.

Indeed. No time to be desperate. I have a full plate of todos now. -- Best regards, Igor Stasenko AKA sig.

HwaJongOh wrote:

...

"The best way to complain is to make things." -- James Murphy

I cannot figure out James's words to make sense, yet.

I guess it means "don't complain that something is broken: fix it, or make something better". That's good advice, but of course sometimes it's not possible - I may not have the knowledge, skill or right to fix it. In that case, reporting the problem to the owner is sensible. It helps to say nice things about the owner and his product at the start and end of the report, and report the bug calmly and objectively. If that's advice for the bug finder, then advice for the code owner is of course "don't shoot the messenger". We need to distinguish between the fact that there's a bug (which is bad) and the fact that we now at least know about the bug (which is good). We made the bug (bad us!), and the bug reporter told us about it (good for him!), so we should grit our teeth and thank the bug reporter. ...and of course, I find this advice as hard to follow as anyone else! Steve

The main problem the community has is one that's common across (non major corporate funded) Open Source projects - developers tend to build something right up to the point where it's useful for their purposes, and then they top. Issues, problems, bugs - we work around those as part of our workflow. This isn't so much anyone's fault as just the way things are. On Mar 25, 2011, at 11:32 AM, Geert Claes wrote:

I am slowly slowly starting to think that maaaaaaaybe I shouldn't have mentioned anything about a Smalltalk based Blog/CMS .. now everyone, http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/take_a_chill_pill take a chill pill have a beer or whatever tickles your fancy and enjoy your weekend :)

-- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Smalltalk-hosting-tp3384077p3405652.html Sent from the ESUG mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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James Robertson http://www.jarober.com jarober@gmail.com

Steven and Andrew, Thank you for taking the time to point out where things can be improved. I propose that all criticism - right, wrong, good, bad, whatever - be answered in the same way: "Thank you." I personally am grateful for the HUGE amount of work done by the ESUG, Squeak & Pharo teams. And, I'm sure it can be demoralizing to be one of the people putting in all that effort (probably for free) and hear criticism. That having been said, I cringe every time criticism is met with resistance, frustration, or defensiveness. Criticism is solid gold - all of it. It is a wake-up call to how our community is perceived from the outside. The truth doesn't matter! It's all about perception. I think it would be far more valuable to pull in as much criticism as possible than to explain it away point by point. Let's give critics water and sunlight to flourish on our mailing lists and smack us awake, rather than throw up their hands and move silently to a different language/community. Of course, after the "thank you", relevant info like "such and such has been fixed" or "an engineer would really help move things along here" would be great, resting on a foundation of acknowledgement and gratitude that someone took the time to reach out instead of disappearing or gossiping, providing a service to the community. Sean -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Smalltalk-hosting-tp3384077p3407992.html Sent from the ESUG mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Thanks sean. We are always trying to improve ourselves and we accept and value criticism. Now there are moments where I would like to see more doing than talking. Stef

Steven and Andrew,

Thank you for taking the time to point out where things can be improved.

I propose that all criticism - right, wrong, good, bad, whatever - be answered in the same way: "Thank you."

I personally am grateful for the HUGE amount of work done by the ESUG, Squeak & Pharo teams. And, I'm sure it can be demoralizing to be one of the people putting in all that effort (probably for free) and hear criticism.

That having been said, I cringe every time criticism is met with resistance, frustration, or defensiveness. Criticism is solid gold - all of it. It is a wake-up call to how our community is perceived from the outside. The truth doesn't matter! It's all about perception. I think it would be far more valuable to pull in as much criticism as possible than to explain it away point by point. Let's give critics water and sunlight to flourish on our mailing lists and smack us awake, rather than throw up their hands and move silently to a different language/community.

Of course, after the "thank you", relevant info like "such and such has been fixed" or "an engineer would really help move things along here" would be great, resting on a foundation of acknowledgement and gratitude that someone took the time to reach out instead of disappearing or gossiping, providing a service to the community.

Sean

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Andy, I understand what you are saying and your predicament is not a happy one, other than the fact that at the moment you are still able to earn your living working in Smalltalk:)... From my perspective there are two markets for Smalltalk ... the old legacy market and the new web-driven market. These two markets are very different and have completely different needs ... I think that the hope that the Enterprise customers will buy into Smalltalk the way that they once did is not very bright. It is difficult to walk into a corporation through the front door with the intent to compete head to head with Java. In my opinion the hope is to be had by following the route that Ruby has pioneered: sneak in the back door through small projects in the enterprise or small startups that become fantastic successes ... Small, back room enterprise projects and startups value programmer productivity and Smalltalk can win big in the productivity game ... ... with caveats, and in my opinion, Smalltalk still has some work to do be really competitive in that game and the work needs to be done on several fronts... I don't think that there is a single silver bullet that will catapult Smalltalk back into the conversation, but I think that the combined efforts of the whole community will do the job... Diversity in this environment is a good thing ... it means that different things are changing at different rates for different reasons and when a "really good idea" shows up in one Smalltalk dialect, it will show up in the others which then strengthens everyone .... ...Dale On 03/22/2011 06:13 AM, Andrew J Lindquist wrote:

After this email, none of you will have to put up with me, because I've already removed myself from the ESUG list.

I find this email chain, like the barcelona conference, extremely sad. I went to the conference hoping that I could tell my employer that Smalltalk is alive and strong. The conference like this email shows it is weak and divided. Adding more flavors of Smalltalk that are not 100% compatible with what already exists only dilutes the Smalltalk world. Creating email chains, like this one, that drags in people like me, longing to see progress, but only emphasizing the fractures in the Smalltalk community, want to cry.

The Smalltalk community should have worked to keep the .NET interface alive, but it was allowed to die at a version 1. Because of incompatible Smalltalk flavors, I'm stuck on VA which still lacks Unicode support. The result is that my employer is moving all new development to. C# .NET using MVC, Fluent NHibernate, S#arp Architecture, and jQuery. I just came back from a .NET conference that showed a strong unified community. Many of them are still trying to understand OOD, but they are learning and supporting each other.

Out of six Smalltalk developers here, I am the last one dedicated to Smalltalk development. When there is no more Smalltalk to be done, my programming days will end.

I've lost hope, but wish Smalltalk the best.

Andy

On Mar 22, 2011, at 6:35 AM, "Norbert Hartl"<norbert@hartl.name> wrote:

...

Am 22.03.2011 um 10:23 schrieb Julian Fitzell:

...

Hi Norbert,

I disagree entirely. This thread isn't sad at all; it shows how passionate this community is about Smalltalk and that people want to talk about how to share this passion with as many others as possible.

Ok, it seems we just have different definitions of passion.

...

Suggesting that one can do marketing without talking about marketing is, in my view, nonsensical. People are naturally free to do whatever they like, but the fact that they are having this discussion suggests to me that they are not quite sure what to do and would like to discuss ideas with others. They would like to focus their passion on ideas they believe will be successful, rather than doing whatever first comes to their minds. Presumably this discussions will involve some disagreement rather than a big love fest of mutual affirmation. "How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas?"? I find that a very very strange sentiment...

It is also quite obvious that you need to talk if you are not doing it alone (or by definition if you like that better). So I didn't mean it is forbidden to talk about marketing. And to be honest if you say "...are not quite sure what to do..." and you find "How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas?" a strange sentiment than I'm totally out of bussiness explaining it.

...

Since most of use here are developers, I think we are not used to thinking about the issues of markets and messages and can therefore benefit from all the groupthink we can get. Obviously writing a CMS is *an* idea - that's by definition; but this particular idea was being discussed in the very specific context of making Smalltalk wildly popular. Do you think it will?

Yes, I do. I don't believe there will be a single killer app that rejuvenates the investment in smalltalk. A lot of effort is to convince other people. And for that you often need to prove that you can do "that" also. I think it is good to have a portfolio of applications that you just can show. That is a language people understand that are not technical experienced (which we all agree is the majority). My assumption here is that we are not only talking about end-user products but about doing services for customers which build end-user products.

...

I'm not 110% certain of anything but looking at the idea of a CMS: * there are many established players already in the market, with mindshare and a big headstart * there are probably thousands of plugins already written for the existing platforms * we are less likely to be successful precisely *because* we would be using an uncommon language * our deployment story is still poor * users of a CMS are generally not going to be users of its underlying programming language * Smalltalk is really good at modelling complex domains and CMSes (at least the popular ones) are really quite simple - this isn't an area where Smalltalk is going to give a huge advantage over competing languages

That sounds like a quick market/risk analysis and would be the explanation why you would not invest money in this idea. But do you have an alternative what we _can_ do? If I would be a startup company I would agree completely with your reasoning. You need some "unique selling point" "something outstanding" to be able to be succesful on the market.

My point is that you need enablers. Why I'm defending the CMS idea is not that I think the CMS to have is the final goal. But if we are talking about CMSes we are talking about web technologies. Integration of multiple services in a single html page is not that easy (making it _one_ application). If you can live with iframes and same domain origin policy than it is not a problem. If not you need to integrate things more tight. A CMS is just this placeholder for me that enables certain tasks to do with smalltalk in that case web technologies.

...

The award-winning Cmsbox is evidence that you can create a great CMS in Smalltalk. But that's not the point. You don't need to read The Tipping Point to see that we would be entering a saturated market with little competitive advantage; even if we were successful, we'd have been largely targeting the wrong people.

I don't understand the last sentence.

Norbert

...

(By the way, your suggestion of attracting developers with good tools sounds like one reasonable focus. From what I've seen, good developer tools are in fact still "market breaking" - this used to be one of Smalltalk's strengths and is a perfect opportunity to borrow, integrate, and innovate...)

Julian

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 11:48 PM, Norbert Hartl<norbert@hartl.name> wrote:

...

This is a very sad thread. It started with a nice idea to talk about and it became more ridiculous with every single reply. I don't understand why everybody is so 110% confident what is the right thing to do if it turns out that we are all completely clueless? How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas? We don't have tons of ideas and need to select. And we don't need _one_ idea!

Writing a user friendly CMS is not _the_ idea but it is an idea. It doesn't help to shift perspective either to the low level side, the business side or the end user side. It is an idea and it is good. Looking at the current smalltalk development than I can just state that it flurishes at least in the open source corner. From an end user perspective neither pharo, seaside, pier or FFI has a value in itself. But all of these are a good foundation to enable people with ideas to produce wonderful products. I think to do marketing you need something to show. And if we are not the ones with the market breaking ideas than we should focus building the good tools and attract developers. Good applications will follow.

Yes, marketing is good. Talking about how marketing should be done is not. Analyzing markets, building a product for it and advertize might work but it is a corporate view. Open source devlopment works the opposite way most of the time. So what is better? Isn't that dependent on the fact if you are inside or outside corporate wise. Reading 'the tipping point' is sure a good idea but I observed it made a lot of people think they know "how success works" and they just need to find any idea/product that is willing to fit in. But you can't copy success stories easily.

So we all should focus more on what we can _do_ instead of distracting the motivaton of those that are willing to do something. I'm not a professional smalltalker but I spend a vast amount of my (spare) time in a lot of things smalltalk and try to build my small business. Without having faith, love and passion I could do J2EE instead.

ranting end.

Norbert

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Hi andrew

After this email, none of you will have to put up with me, because I've already removed myself from the ESUG list.

I find this email chain, like the barcelona conference, extremely sad. I went to the conference hoping that I could tell my employer that Smalltalk is alive and strong.

Why is it not more alive now than in 1998? I think that the community is in a much better shape now.

The conference like this email shows it is weak and divided. Adding more flavors of Smalltalk that are not 100% compatible with what already exists only dilutes the Smalltalk world.

So what is the idea? Get stuck with a language that will never change and has no vision because some people do not have the vision for their implementation? If this is what you propose we can just close the shop now.

Creating email chains, like this one, that drags in people like me, longing to see progress, but only emphasizing the fractures in the Smalltalk community, want to cry.

What have you been doing for Smalltalk around you in the past years? You know just drinking a beer with colleagues and have a show me your projects is a start. I created the swiss smalltalk user groups, pushed esug, support students, wrote books, .... so of course not everybody should do the same but you can ask yourselves what you want and how to help.

The Smalltalk community should have worked to keep the .NET interface alive,

but it was allowed to die at a version 1.

I do not know the story. I cannot compile any .net code on any of my machine. Now of course microsoft and java are big player.

Because of incompatible Smalltalk flavors, I'm stuck on VA which still lacks Unicode support. The result is that my employer is moving all new development to. C# .NET using MVC, Fluent NHibernate, S#arp Architecture, and jQuery. I just came back from a .NET conference that showed a strong unified community. Many of them are still trying to understand OOD, but they are learning and supporting each other.

Out of six Smalltalk developers here, I am the last one dedicated to Smalltalk development. When there is no more Smalltalk to be done, my programming days will end.

Sad. VA was nearly killed by IBM and they played it well not selling their smalltalk part to google. We will see how they will play it in the future. Now we cannot move moutains. If people with power do not play the way the community benefits from it than this is like that. Now microsoft has a lot of money and we do not have it.

I've lost hope, but wish Smalltalk the best.

IMO the argument cuts both ways... we also need to look at the work of other communities in a positive light. Unfortunately, as a community, sometimes we tend to look down on anything not done on Smalltalk. But there are some Very Clever People out there, working just as hard as we do... On 3/21/2011 10:32 AM, Eliot Miranda wrote:

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 4:59 AM, Julian Fitzell <jfitzell@gmail.com <mailto:jfitzell@gmail.com>> wrote:

Completely agreed, Helge.

I also have to wonder if the Smalltalk community would really benefit as much as everyone seems to think from having a "successful CMS written in Smalltalk". Does anyone who uses Wordpress care much what language it is written in? I guess there could be some vague peripheral benefit in terms of the appearance of acceptability, but really the only way to have a successful CMS is to write a good CMS, and at that point people are judging the product, not the language it was written in.

So, sure, someone could go create a great, free CMS with Smalltalk. But why do we as a community feel a need to champion the idea? Is it just that we want to be able to use our favourite language to write CMS plugins?

How much more effective to enable one to write plugins in Smalltalk and then plug them into existing CMS systems. Insularity and lack of interoperability can hobble Smalltalk. Emphasis on interoperability in general and the FFI in particular. These are the multipliers that will cause greater adoption and penetration. Reimplementing an insular and there-by inferior version of something already in existence is pointless. Providing a platform that allows us to join in with the world is essential.

best, Eliot

Julian

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 8:36 AM, Helge Nowak <hknowak@yahoo.de <mailto:hknowak@yahoo.de>> wrote: > Janko and ariliquin: very well said! > > The original poster's intention was to create a Smalltalk based CMS as > successful as the leading open source ones. This can only be reached by > making the system easily accessible to end users, not developers. Developers > are a minority. They don't decide on what will be used as an end user tool > in companies, organizations and communities. > > If we think Pier and Scribo shall be end user tools they need end user UIs. > If we don't think so we have to accept the fact that their target audience > is the Smalltalk fraction of the developer community. > As Ralph said: marketing is thinking about your market first and then build, > advertize and distribute your offfering to your target segment's needs and > expectations. And don't forget your return on investment! Without ROI people > will soon leave because no-one can afford to just spend. > > My 2 € Cents > Helge > ________________________________ > Von: Janko Mivšek <janko.mivsek@eranova.si <mailto:janko.mivsek@eranova.si>> > An: ESUG Mailing list <esug-list@lists.esug.org <mailto:esug-list@lists.esug.org>> > Gesendet: Montag, den 21. März 2011, 0:02:48 Uhr > Betreff: Re: [Esug-list] Smalltalk hosting ... > > Well said, thanks! I also beleive that a right way to the average "CMS > user" friendly CMS is to hide Smalltalk as long as possible, until user > is encouraged enough to customize his website in depth. > > And in this customization is where we actually have an advantage over > others. But, we need to build that non-Smalltalk front part first. There > is no way to skip that part. > > Best regards > Janko > > On 20. 03. 2011 23:49, ariliquin wrote: >> I am a smalltalk newbie and interested in Smalltalk CMS. In answer to your >> question, from my point of view, I would like to say: >> >> 1. The ability to achieve something functional, say a my own custom main >> page, quickly and easily, is very encouraging (I haven't even begun to be >> able to do this in Pier etc, I am still wading through the concepts that >> are >> being presented, as opposed to the functionality that is made easily >> accessible). >> >> 2. The CMS is built on top of the Smalltalk platform, both an advantage >> for >> obvious reasons, yet a big disadvantage for this reason, from my point of >> view: I have to be familiar with Smalltalk BEFORE I can even approach the >> CMS. I don't mean familiar with the finer details and vast libraries, I >> mean >> familiar with the main screen and how to simple navigate, what the >> concepts >> are, the terminologies etc etc etc etc. NO other CMS requires this as >> obviously as Pier. The Smalltalk interface is NOT intuitive. I am not >> spoon >> feed everything. I have to research and digest and understand and grow to >> be >> able to do anything here. Yes, there are many simple concepts, however my >> experience was, upon seeing the Smalltalk environment in its totality, was >> to be completely lost. >> >> 3. Every other CMS like Wordpress, Concrete 5, Joomla are designed to >> present a user interface, not a programmer interface. Hence they are >> attractive to users immediately, in general. Yes a programmer can delve in >> and do things, but a user can get things they want done, point and click. >> (Although some of the interfaces can be overwhelming with navigations etc, >> also). >> >> If you want a SmallTalk CMS that is Amazingly Attractive to End users and >> Programmers, this would be a good start for me: >> >> Provide a USER interface that can be used to quickly produce publishable >> content (a lot of work, as many have pointed out, yet achieved by many >> other >> CMS projects) >> >> Provide an underlying Programmer interface that gives simple and powerful >> access to the framework to allow extension and manipulation of the system >> (already there) >> >> Identify the STRENGTHS of smalltalk, LEVERAGE these and present these, in >> a >> simple and meaningful way, to End USERS and programmers, to create a CMS >> with capabilities that others cannot match easily and that is Attractive >> because of its inherent nature and abilities. >> >> Provide Tutorials, Video How-To's and Documentation from Within the CMS. >> This is were I am wondering how to do things, this should be were I find >> the >> answers also. > > > -- > Janko Mivšek > Aida/Web > Smalltalk Web Application Server > http://www.aidaweb.si > > _______________________________________________ > Esug-list mailing list > Esug-list@lists.esug.org <mailto:Esug-list@lists.esug.org> > http://lists.esug.org/mailman/listinfo/esug-list_lists.esug.org > > > _______________________________________________ > Esug-list mailing list > Esug-list@lists.esug.org <mailto:Esug-list@lists.esug.org> > http://lists.esug.org/mailman/listinfo/esug-list_lists.esug.org > >

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Hi, I created a screen cast showing how to rapidly get up and running on Amazon using an AMI I created a few months ago: http://nickager.com/blog/Screencast-creating-a-new-instance-based-on-pre-con... The AMI is preconfigured with Seaside 3, Pier2 and Gemstone and Gemtools and Pharo based IDE for use within Gemstone. You can deploy the AMI using a Amazon EC2 Micro Instance which is free for a year. The accompanying blog post is: http://nickager.com/blog/Create-a-free-Gemstone-server-in-the-cloud-in-10-mi... Cheers Nick

Wouldn't it be great to have a force.com like concept with a Smalltalk backend on Seaside (or Aida or Iliad) with a cloud based objectstore using GemStone (or Magma, or Amazon S3). Oh and please one frigging Smalltalk dialect so I don't have the really useful library that I'd love to use only available in the flavour of Smalltalk that I'm not currently using.

YES! We thought that gemstone thought that they have the technology to jump in the cloud but so far this is not clear. Stef

Good! We want smalltalk getting strong :) and having GS, VA and VW strong is important.

At the moment, all I can say is that we are headed that way, but there are several things that need to be done along the way.

Dale

On Mar 31, 2011, at 1:15 PM, stephane ducasse wrote:

...

...

Wouldn't it be great to have a force.com like concept with a Smalltalk backend on Seaside (or Aida or Iliad) with a cloud based objectstore using GemStone (or Magma, or Amazon S3). Oh and please one frigging Smalltalk dialect so I don't have the really useful library that I'd love to use only available in the flavour of Smalltalk that I'm not currently using.

YES! We thought that gemstone thought that they have the technology to jump in the cloud but so far this is not clear.

Stef