Cincom, smalltalk, and being popular
Cincom announced Web Velocity, their new Seaside product. In their words:
Web Velocity is the synergistic combination of Cincom Smalltalk, Seaside, Glorp (Object relational mapping software) and tools along with examples and documentation. This product will be targeted at folks wanting a development product to do leading edge database-to-web applications. On one hand you could compare Web Velocity functionality to Ruby-on-Rails (RoR), and we should certainly be able to compete in that market. On the other hand, we hope that the combination of products and tools make it easy for newcomers to use, and help grow the community.
It’s clear that Cincom has no idea what it takes to compete with Rails, or what it takes to court developers like me. About me: I have been both a full time Rails developer for opencongress and a full time Seaside developer on Dabble DB. It’s hard to imagine anybody more in the target market for Cincom’s Seaside product. However, this product as it’s currently imagined has no shot to be popular or appreciably grow the Smalltalk community.
Name
Two things about the name “Web Velocity” stand out right away: i) it’s crappy, and ii) it’s taken. Some names of the competition:
- Rails
- Seam
- Django
- Pylons
Naming is a tricky thing, and if the name were the only problem with Web Velocity I don’t think that alone would sink it. Unfortunately, it’s not.
Price
In the comments on the announcement, Rich Demers asked a critical question:
Q: Will there be a non-commercial version of it for those of us who want to “try and learn?”
A: Possibly, has not been determined yet
Not only does the answer to this need to be yes, but there needs to be a free version even for commercial use. It needs to be downloadable within a few clicks of the homepage, and I should be able to build a simple web app in fifteen minutes including downloading the software. I did this with Rails, and so did thousands of others.
Not one of the other packages Cincom wants to compete with requires developers to pay a dime for low end tools. Newcomers aren’t going to pay for tools. Gemstone also has a Seaside product coming, and here’s their take: “the Web Edition has to have enough punch for people to be successful using the free version.”
Stack
Glorp is an object-relational mapper, and I have gathered it’s a fine one. Without getting into it too much, I believe an ORM throws away some of the key advantages of Smalltalk’s “everything is an object” nature.
For new web apps without an existing relational database to pull from, I wouldn’t recommend any ORM. Nothing against Glorp. A transparent object database would be ideal, and I don’t see why many smaller web apps can’t use the image itself for persistence. But I might be biased.
Marketing
An image is worth some words:
I don’t think I really need to say anything about that. Here are some additional things that would horrify most of the web developers I know:
- “Synergistic combination”
- You have to register to download the noncommercial VisualWorks
- Here’s an exercise you can try at home: visit Cincom Smalltalk and try to figure out how much it costs without submitting a form. I gave up, and so did Patrick
- The screencasts are done on Windows
I’m not trying to embarrass Cincom, but instead to make them realize that they don’t know how to court people like me.
