If I had my way Gemstone/S would be a primary component of any enterprise application I was involved with. There is simply no better way of storing your objects that in an object database. Gemstone goes further since for one it also behaves as an app server. “Stored Procedures” are simply just good ole methods. One essentially gets to persist the object model. There is no painful object relational mapping but distributed objects between clients and Gemstone . Queries basically work the same way as iterating over standard Smalltalk collections work. There is of course, special optimised support for various uses but what it boils down to is that Gemstone is simply a much simpler way than the rdms based alternatives.

I was lucky enough to have spent over 5 years working with Gemstone on large enterprise apps for the utility industry. One of the apps involved using Gemstone with a GIS, which was a lot of fun. Gemstone is not “new” technology. It is just extremely current , relevant, modern technology. It has been used commercially since at least the early 90’s. Many strategic mission critical applications have been built with Gemstone. Florida Power & Light where I started my Smalltalk career uses it in a number of apps including their Emergency response system i.e. that which handles hurricanes. JP Morgan has a large bread and butter financial framework built with Gemstone. Right down the street from me a huge Japanese multinational uses Gemstone to support its transportation business. These are just a few examples.

Its been a while since Gemstone has presented to NYC Smalltalk. One of the most noteworthy news is that Gemstone/S is now 64 bit which just blows open many of the scalability thresholds for a system that was already very scalable.

Norm Green of Gemstone will present on February 1st, 2006. Please visit our wiki for further details and directions.