This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Smalltalk2EE? Feed Title: Michael Lucas-Smith Feed URL: http://www.michaellucassmith.com/site.atom Feed Description: Smalltalk and my misinterpretations of life Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Michael Lucas-Smith

Just to bring up a bastardisation of an idea. Lets talk about J2EE's success. Aside from the fact that 'Java is the world', J2EE does have a few things going for it.

From a technical point of view, JSP was a great idea, even if 'Beans' and all its ilk are a waste of time.

From a Business point of view though, J2EE is brilliant. We are a standards based group who advocate a technology consistently - This is a message that has been lost with Smalltalk. Back in the olden golden days, Smalltalk beat ObjectiveC because Smalltalk had a standard class library. ObjectiveC does not, and still does not.

A lot of talk has been about "What is the standard smalltalk" in news groups and on blogs. Joseph Pelrine made a speech about it for ESUG (or was it SS?)

So clearly we need standards, we need to be able to say "This Smalltalk is Smalltalk2003 Enterprise Edition compliant". One of the mandates of the Smalltalk Industry Council is: Encouraging additional standards for Smalltalk (quoted from their website).

I believe the STIC should actually review Smalltalks and promote a Best-of-Breed approach to writing standards. For example, apparently Visual Smalltalk has a really good Files and Directories API. If that's so, and it is best of breed, then get permission off VST to publish their API as a proposed standard.

Most API's an EE smalltalk needs already exist in various Smalltalks. This would be just a process of pulling them all together and saying "If you do all this, you have an STEE product." - it would then be up to vendors to be compliant.