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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Not paying attention
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
What I'd prefer instead is if I could purchase the features of these apps on a more granular level, and plug them into my workspace for working with photos. I want Photoshop for its drawing tools and filters, Picasa for it's slideshow, AOL for sharing and publishing, and ACDSee for thumbnail browsing. I'm tired of dealing with Picasa's bizarre UI for selecting photos, AOL's weird way of retouching them, Photoshop's image browser which knows nothing about my Picasa collection, and ACDSee's awkward zooming and panning tools.
MS has tried that (more than once) - DDE, COM, now .NET. All make that idea (some more, some less) possible. Sun tried it in Java - Beans (client) and EJB (server). Heck, it was tried long before that (Lisp machines, Smalltalk machines, Lisp systems, Smalltalk systems). The problem is, it's not really feasible - it's non-trivial technically speaking (having multiple components from multiple sources that don't communicate beforehand be able to snap together and agree on basic domain issues), and the economics is even harder. If I'm going to write a component for one part of that, I need a whole application to test it with - and I may as well sell the whole application. The only place this has really taken off is at the UI widget level. At the business component level, I have doubts whether it ever will
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