I've been learning Squeak Smalltalk & have noticed that it's got a really faithful community and is used in some large academic and open-source projects, but I haven't found any examples of it being used commercially in any significant way. I'm curious about how this environment is doing in the world commercially. Maybe taking over older Smalltalk projects? Does anyone know?
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DabbleDB I think is (was?) one. They may have moved off Squeak but I am sure they used it at one point.
Michael Neale
2008-09-19 02:41:53
They still use it proudly.
Marcin
2008-09-26 16:58:48
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I'd bet it won't play any "important" role any time soon. The whole programming model with "morhps" is "alien" to anything in the commercial "surrounding". Just try to implement a small example in some Smalltalk like VisualWorks and than the same in Squeak. There are tried to get more "traditonal" GUI toolkit running with Squeak (GTK) but that's in it's infancy and it does not even compiler out of the box. It won't take over other Smalltalk environments, because there's not incentieve for using it instead let's say VisualAge, VisualWorks or Smalltalk/X.
Regards Friedrich
Friedrich
2008-09-22 05:03:00
This could be, but Seaside does not mean Squeak automatically any longer and I was thinking more along some sort of small utility things, which I'd think would be much easier written in Smalltalk, but they still are not around Regards
Friedrich
2008-11-12 16:37:07
Squeak is still practical because it's opensource. http://www.seasidehosting.st/ uses a modified VM for sandboxing of the users' custom images. And the other implementations don't necessarily integrate that well either; e.g. VW fakes the platform look but always has a very windowsish feel.
Damien Pollet
2009-04-15 09:24:03
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http://dabbledb.com/ is in fact using Squeak on commodity hardware, and they recently moved from Seaside 2.6 to 2.8 and are looking at 2.9 as it is being released.
Randal Schwartz
2008-09-29 22:28:52
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In general, I would agree that Squeak is not widely used commercially.
We have a scheduling app for manufacturing and warehousing called MaxScheduler.com. Its written in Squeak largely because an extensive code base was initially developed in this language. It has its issues though. It provides a 'strange' UI experience to the end user. Also it doesn't play nicely with native platforms like Windows. Recently WXSqueak was created, this really helps by providing a native UI experience.
On the plus side, Squeak has been massively beneficial for us. With our code base we have created complicated applications for customers in short time frames. Few languages give the same level of code re-use.
pgadzinski
2009-05-14 17:20:26
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Qwaq commercializing OpenCroquet - "Qwaq's technology helps employees collaborate in virtual meeting rooms."
igouy
2009-05-14 17:37:43
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Squeak has certainly the future, specially because of two happenings:
- at least 10 times faster Squeak VM is on the way,
- Pharo fork is cleaning the code with goal to make it viable for professional development.
That's why as otherwise VisualWorker I'm seriously looking at Squeak for Aida/Web based business web applications in the future
Janko Mivšek
2009-05-14 17:38:05