But in general, I personally, 100% agree with you. Nothing better attracts the likes of me and at the same time proves the potentials of Smalltalk. I've already started a small project named Simin[1] with the exact same goal.
I strongly encourage you to have a look at magritte because with magritte you can describe you objects and get for free seaside components, validator â¦. The idea is that you describe your domain objects and build/use interpreters(programs) that are aware that the domain objects are described with magritte. Voyage uses mongotalk and magrrite to serialize objects in mongo. The pier cms is using magritte. http://www.ibizlog.com, the association and consortium web site are magritte-based. There is an old chapter on magritte 2 on the seaside book http://book.seaside.st.
* that say say its a Model Driven Architecture with everything in an "Active Data Dictionary" defining where stuff is rendered, how its rendered - so I wonder if that eases hooking Smalltalk in
IIRC Jorg Janke (the original developer) made the first Compiere prototypes in Smalltalk back in 1999. However he switched to Java because he couldn't sell it as a Smalltalk app :-(
* the number of times "refactoring" was mentioned - so I wonder if a good student research project would be an IDE for refactoring Java, even to the degree of refactoring Java into Smalltalk
Most of the trouble of Compiere/Adempiere[2] refactoring stems from the fact that it's just spaghetti code and there is no clear distinction between UI and model. With a good technical design[2], most of that *nightmare* just vanishes away.
argh :)
* they made simple prototype of web interface in 2 weeks - obviously they have the advantage of their own code, but maybe something similar would be reasonably achievable as a demonstrator.
* reminded me of the massive amount of work in the world just customizing applications to match customer business processes. eg millions of dollars in the SAP world
That is right. I am an independent ERP consultant who's been in this field for more than 7 years now, implementing Compiere and later Adempiere.
One of my dreams, is re-writing Adempiere functionality in a language/framwork/paradigm/whatever that removes the technical flaws and reduces the development/extension time. That's the reason I keep searching for a new language/framework even though I normally don't code these days.
This would be really good :)
* Compiere has some good branding in the business world.
Had :-)
Ah. Can't view the video. YouTube is filtered out here :-(
Regarding writing a business app or re-writing an existing one, I have lots of ideas but I hold them for another time as they seem OT.
[1] http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~Bahman/Simin/
[2] There was this fork of Compiere back in 2006 named Adempiere. Today Adempiere has both Swing and web (done using ZK) UIs. Also Compiere was bought and closed source'd by Consona in 2010 IIRC.
[3] Compiere/Adempiere really don't need business re-design :-)
-- Bahman Movaqar (http://BahmanM.com) ERP Evaluation, Implementation, Deployment Consultant