Wishes for a great new year for Pharo..
!..
Subjective topics are the easiest to waste one's
effort on, though are essential in their own way,
if we restrain ourselves. Pharo to me is headed in
the right direction with the right evangelists at
its core. There should not be a dilution to it in
any pursuit.
a) PR and spreading the awareness is important to a
pursuit of increasing usage of the technology but
not essential.
b) For a software platform ( again I say Pharo /
Smalltalk is a platform not a langauge ), it is
question of :
Success is not from Pharo Platform per se but from its
usable frameworks:
������ * Seek success organically, evolve to be the best
fit for enterprise programming, this can be through any
of Seaside, Teapot+Zn, Glamour toolkit, Jun, Open CL/R
other interfaces, R Pi custom OS, etc.. or as in mega
framework like OpenStack in Pharo weaving in existing
elements of the mega framework for now.. et als. Make
the framework use simple, scalable, flexible that it is
viral in its growth for the programmers.
���� * Small business application ( not helloworld )
should be say a�� 1-3 hr work with documentation given.��
Rails promised that hiding its complexity to user
discovery but by then the user is hooked on enough to
provide his inputs / improve the framework. I liked the
Teapot, Amber need to push more around that kernel to
make it scale upto creating a full application framework
deployable in 3 hrs.
Pharo Platform:
���� * The platform offers stable and guaranteed behavior
across fundamentals of operations (all of CPU/ Mem/ OS
resource use et als ), security specially that ensures
programmers can easily convince the CEO/CTO's to allow
their pet projects to be integrated. Gaps will exist and
programmers will fulfill it and grow the frameworks.
Make the users feel as both "winners" and "owners" in
using the frameworks. Yes we need visionaries to lead
those frameworks.
������ * Make it as modular as possible to be able to
use it just plain commandline, with or without UI and
its varied tools but with any of the packages with
dependencies that are well structured and easily
updateable.
������ * The platform if it targets the enterprise will
have to target enterprise interfaces viz: DBMS, MQ, WS ,
deployment through easy integration with Apache
webserver or other common platforms. This is an
incremental goal driven by state of Pharo now and overal
ecosystem of its platform progressing together.
PR:
������ * Seek to push what you have to others through PR, at
best this can only be adjunct to the above, will probably
yield some benefit but will not be the raison-de-etre of
the success of a product. Infact one part of PR I believe
works ( not something many intellectuals prefer) create
sub-forums/ sub-committees and make more and more people
be part of it.
���� * I would much rather prefer having a website that
showcases each enterprise use like in Seaside the web
application framework. But what the seaside site lacks is a
complete brief on deploying a web app end to end with DBMS
integration, easy css, js, et als integrated in 1 - 3 hrs,
fairly customized to my first prototype I require. Similar
focussed sites should exist that can be simple 1-2-3
instruction for the helloworld and scale up quickly within a
day to a workable app customized for requirement. Most
important leverage as much of pre-existing skills as in
HTML, CSS, JS, MQ, DBMS, ORM et als.. rather than create a
new learning curve of the developer. The kernel should be a
killer feature as in Seaside/ Teapot but they need to keep
the continuum.. while taking the high ground