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From: aland@servio.slc.com (Alan Darlington)
Subject: Re: The role of Smalltalk on a Server
Message-ID: <1996Jan8.195153.22751@slc.com>
Sender: news@slc.com (USENET News)
Nntp-Posting-Host: servio
Organization: GemStone Systems, Inc., Beaverton OR, USA
References: <4ce8nh$rdp@locutus.rchland.ibm.com>
Date: Mon, 8 Jan 1996 19:51:53 GMT
Lines: 39

ericj@vnet.ibm.com writes:
> I would be interested in opinions regarding Smalltalk applications
> running on a server.  Specifically:
> 
> 1. Does it make sense?  Under what circumstances?  
>    I have seen opinions range from "Smalltalk on a mainframe is 
>    an oxymoron" to "We need Smalltalk on the xxx server platform yesterday."

As always, it depends on your application!  :-)  If the application code is
exclusively on the server, server resources (CPU, disk, etc.) may limit the
response time and/or the number of concurrent users of the application.  If
the application code is exclusively on the client, network resources may be
the limit.  In many large applications, you may have to distribute the
application's code between the client and server machines in order to get
adequate performance for the number of users you want to support.  In the
best of all worlds, you could do this distribution dynamically, based on
the current client/server loadings.

Assuming you want to do this, will Smalltalk work?  In general, yes.
Despite the various flame wars over performance, memory footprint, etc.,
I think the advantages of Smalltalk (less code, more flexibility, faster
response to changes, good performance tools, etc.) outweigh the problems.
There may be good arguments for putting well-defined pieces of a Smalltalk
application into DLLs or user-defined primitives written in other languages.

> 2. Has anyone successfully deployed Smalltalk applications running
>    on a server?  What products were used on which operating systems?

GemStone has a number of clients running enterprise-wide applications
with Smalltalk on both client and server machines.  I believe most
servers are Unix (HP & Sun), but some use Windows NT servers.

> Looking forward to interesting discussions.
> 
> Mike

  Hope this helps,
  Alan
    (I'm just a programmer and don't speak officially for GemStone!)
