I am slightly behind on my blogging , better late than never. Last Wednesday James Robertson, product manager for Cincom Smalltalk and which is now co-in charged of business development, stopped by to give NYC Smalltalk a presentation on 7.3 and their immediate plans.

I think that by now it is clear that Cincom is committed to Smalltalk. Ever since Cincom took over , their Smalltalk division has been aggressively improving the VisualWorks product line. This next year does not let up the pace. The current product roadmap for VW 7.3 can be found here.

Some of the more interesting questions that came up during the presentation dealt with whether Cincom anytime soon planned to support / become involved with Croquet and Traits. The answer was no and maybe.

There is no current plan for Cincom itself to port over Croquet. For those that don’t know what Croquet is it is an amazing collaboration framework which has an even more amazing 3D virtual world interface to it. Croquet is currently written in Squeak a dialect of Smalltalk. More info can be found on the NYC Smalltalk wiki for which I provide a link below.

As far as Traits , there has been some interest expressed by at least one of the engineers at Cincom. The maybe answer is that were something to be built by the community Cincom Smalltalk would evaluate it and contemplate its integration or at least supported distribution.

Currently, there is an initial port of Traits out in the Cincom public repository which was implemented by Terry Raymond. The port basically provides “core” trait services i.e. synchronization between client and traits and installation albeit manually. I have extended the initial port so that it integrates with StORE and is in general more transparent in use but more about that later.

One further very noteworthy news is that Cincom Smalltalk plans to support a migration path for VisualAge Smalltalk customers who wish to stay with Smalltalk and keep up with the new developments in Smalltalk. Talks are underway with some potential partners.

Next month we will have a presentation on Traits. More info on Traits, a new and very interesting mechanism for code re-use, can be found along with info on Croquet on our wiki.