Cincom Smalltalk Plans: UI
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As most of you know, Cincom embarked on the
creation of a new user interface framework for VisualWorks in 2001. It is
now 2007, and this framework, Widgetry, has been in development (but not
formally released) for six years. At this point in time, our customers
have many questions:
When will UI building tools appear?
When will Cincom start migrating the development tools to Widgetry? How will we migrate our applications to Widgetry? In looking at those questions, we stepped back and took a look at Widgetry and its goals. Widgetry was built as an entirely new framework, without concern for backward compatibility. Unfortunately, in making that decision, we had not adequately thought through the issues of migration (both on our part and that of our customers), tool support, and maintaining two large frameworks simultaneously for a lengthy period. As is clear from the length of time it has taken to bring Widgetry to this initial release status, still without tools or documentation, we also underestimated the effort involved in the task. When we began looking at migrating our own tools forwards, it became clear that we would have had to commit a large percentage of the total development effort to this task alone, sacrificing numerous other areas that are also important to our customers. We have come to the conclusion that the leap to
Widgetry is simply too large for most of our customers, and have decided not to
make it. Widgetry does offer improvements over the existing VisualWorks UI
framework, and we have invested a lot of time and effort into Widgetry - but
that time and effort is not nearly as large as what would be required of our
customers in a migration effort. We understand that many of our
customers have been patiently waiting for the improvements promised in Widgetry,
and we will be using Widgetry as a base from which to incorporate improvements
for the UI in VisualWorks in a more incremental fashion.
What does this mean for you, as a user of
VisualWorks? It means that your existing UI tools and applications will
continue to work, and will not need to be migrated. However, it does not
mean that there will be no improvements. In the next release (scheduled
for January, 2008), improvements to existing tools (the Refactoring Browser in
particular) will appear. Incremental improvements to the UI will start to
appear after that, including:
New and better widgets, incorporating some of the enhancements made in Widgetry Improved UI building tools - the painter tools will get updated and improved incrementally Improvements to the framework itself - many of the known issues in the underlying UI libraries will be incrementally addressed We think that incremental improvements will serve our customers - both existing and new - better than a large leap into a new and incompatible framework. Widgetry will stay in the preview directory on the installation media, and will remain available for anyone who is interested in using it. It will not be supported by Cincom, however, and will not be a direct part of our future plans for the product. In the future, we will be avoiding long term projects that require lengthy lead times before customers can examine and explore them. We are committed to working more closely with our user and customer community, and we apologize for the pain and confusion caused by this decision - but we think its the best one for our customers If you have feedback on this, please feel free to
send it directly to me, James Robertson, the Cincom Smalltalk Product
Evangelist. |
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First of all I take issue with the subject of your announcement. You call
this a plan? You call leading customers down a path and then off a cliff a plan? You call breaking promises a plan? So am I the only one who has been making plans and developing software for *years* based on the promise of Pollock/Widgetry? Am I the only one who for several years spent thousands of dollars to travel to Smalltalk Solutions specifically to obtain personal help developing for Pollock? How can Cincom dare to not finish this project? You don't think VisualWorks needs a newer, cleaner GUI framework? This change of direction, sudden and much too late in the game only begs the question what else will Cincom not finish? This is a serious breach of trust. VisualWorks is the flagship Smalltalk. This makes Smalltalk look really, really bad. -Carl Gundel http://www.libertybasic.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "James Robertson" <[hidden email]> To: <[hidden email]> Sent: Monday, September 10, 2007 8:34 PM Subject: Cincom Smalltalk Plans: UI As most of you know, Cincom embarked on the creation of a new user interface framework for VisualWorks in 2001. It is now 2007, and this framework, Widgetry, has been in development (but not formally released) for six years. At this point in time, our customers have many questions: When will UI building tools appear? When will Cincom start migrating the development tools to Widgetry? How will we migrate our applications to Widgetry? In looking at those questions, we stepped back and took a look at Widgetry and its goals. Widgetry was built as an entirely new framework, without concern for backward compatibility. Unfortunately, in making that decision, we had not adequately thought through the issues of migration (both on our part and that of our customers), tool support, and maintaining two large frameworks simultaneously for a lengthy period. As is clear from the length of time it has taken to bring Widgetry to this initial release status, still without tools or documentation, we also underestimated the effort involved in the task. When we began looking at migrating our own tools forwards, it became clear that we would have had to commit a large percentage of the total development effort to this task alone, sacrificing numerous other areas that are also important to our customers. We have come to the conclusion that the leap to Widgetry is simply too large for most of our customers, and have decided not to make it. Widgetry does offer improvements over the existing VisualWorks UI framework, and we have invested a lot of time and effort into Widgetry - but that time and effort is not nearly as large as what would be required of our customers in a migration effort. We understand that many of our customers have been patiently waiting for the improvements promised in Widgetry, and we will be using Widgetry as a base from which to incorporate improvements for the UI in VisualWorks in a more incremental fashion. What does this mean for you, as a user of VisualWorks? It means that your existing UI tools and applications will continue to work, and will not need to be migrated. However, it does not mean that there will be no improvements. In the next release (scheduled for January, 2008), improvements to existing tools (the Refactoring Browser in particular) will appear. Incremental improvements to the UI will start to appear after that, including: New and better widgets, incorporating some of the enhancements made in Widgetry Improved UI building tools - the painter tools will get updated and improved incrementally Improvements to the framework itself - many of the known issues in the underlying UI libraries will be incrementally addressed We think that incremental improvements will serve our customers - both existing and new - better than a large leap into a new and incompatible framework. Widgetry will stay in the "preview" directory on the installation media, and will remain available for anyone who is interested in using it. It will not be supported by Cincom, however, and will not be a direct part of our future plans for the product. In the future, we will be avoiding long term projects that require lengthy lead times before customers can examine and explore them. We are committed to working more closely with our user and customer community, and we apologize for the pain and confusion caused by this decision - but we think it's the best one for our customers If you have feedback on this, please feel free to send it directly to me, James Robertson, the Cincom Smalltalk Product Evangelist. |
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In reply to this post by James Robertson-7
At what state will it be left to rot? There are a number of outstanding issues that Sam is working on now correct? Will those be addressed? This is a horribly disappointing move to me, as I have been building Widgetry UI's for the past 4 months as well as waiting for a long time before that to begin. Jim you spend a lot of time disparaging other companies on your blog for far less egregious "plans" as this. This is a bad thing.
Mike On 9/10/07, James Robertson <[hidden email]> wrote:
-- Mike Hales Engineering Manager KnowledgeScape www.kscape.com |
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And now that I'm royally pissed off, how about the Mac VM? We've been waiting a year and half for that, and the only one making progress on it (visibly anyway) is a customer? And how about Vista support? It seems like a bunch of important things are dragging, but you are going to use resources to support Seaside? An open source framework with an active community of developers more than qualified to assist folks. Support something that doesn't need support, yet let the things that customers really need from Cincom languish, sounds agile to me.
Mike On 9/10/07, Mike Hales <[hidden email]> wrote: At what state will it be left to rot? There are a number of outstanding issues that Sam is working on now correct? Will those be addressed? This is a horribly disappointing move to me, as I have been building Widgetry UI's for the past 4 months as well as waiting for a long time before that to begin. Jim you spend a lot of time disparaging other companies on your blog for far less egregious "plans" as this. This is a bad thing. -- Mike Hales Engineering Manager KnowledgeScape www.kscape.com |
Re: Cincom Smalltalk Plans: UI
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The Mac VM is moving more slowly than we would
like, but we are seeing progress. We should have a much more solid Mac VM
ready for the January release, and people with access to vw-dev will see
progress on that front sooner.
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Re: Cincom Smalltalk Plans: UI
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In reply to this post by James Robertson-7
Are you simply dumping Widgetry ? Do you say don't use it ? Are you abandoning all efforts in Widgetries developpement even to get it stabelised ? Can one of the tool guys (preferably the one who did'nt manage to make the Widgetry GUI tool) standup and explain me how to make new cool software with decades old widgets ? Personnaly I really don't give a heck about 10 extra browser menus, refactoring name spaces etc, what I need is to get away with this horrible anoying details of table headers, missing modern date selectors etc. etc. VW now looks like east european products did before the wall thumbled down and they all catched up. 15 years ago somebody explained me that DOS and VGA was as good or better then windows. Is this all of the same thing ? Reorientating the product that I can understand. Fixing the graphics underlayer before developping Widgetries Gui tools that I can understand also. Providing a much longer transition path with continued improvement in old technologie that I can understand. Cutting the roots for new products and new developpers and all those who make the effort to build cool things the hard way I really don't. As for abandoning a product released 2 months ago, that sounds like,....... James please go back to this binary corporate descision maker and explain him that only idiots never change their minds. Regards, @+Maarten, James Robertson a écrit :
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I am sure there can be ways to keep the framework evolving. Either go the open source way controlled for code acceptance by Sam or through any other means of funding partial or otherwise to enable a group externally to work through the various parts of making Widgetry complete viz: break off migration tool, core framework completion, widgetry canvas tool as separate project heads with a year to complete at the max.
More than anything Widgetry/ Pollock promised to be the new path breaking evolution and if not for its promised functional enhancements, the feel of a new UI framework that is responsive, cleaner framework, better widget and lots more, should be reason enough to let it run through to its logical state.
skrish
On 9/11/07, Maarten Mostert <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: Cincom Smalltalk Plans: UI
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In reply to this post by James Robertson-7
Jim,
I was afraid something like this might happen when Vassili left. From your missive it is clear that you don't have enough staff to write and support a 'commercial-quality' UI builder and migration tools. But you have this very nice Widgetry framework just sitting there now, and it would be a shame to let it rot. I'd like to see you open source Widgetry and whatever other pieces of the VW world are needed to make it possible to port to other dialects. The Smalltalk world could really use a good standard UI framework that worked on most dialects. If Widgetry worked on Squeak, Smalltalk/X, GnuST, Dolphin and VW, it would stand a good chance of becoming the universal Smalltalk UI. The support and development would come from a community much larger than just the VW alone. Open source Widgetry tools, particulary for migration, may not be as high quality as what Cincom would have developed, but they don't have to be. Users are more forgiving of software they didn't pay for and can fix themselves. You have to get away from the idea that it cost you a lot to build it, so you can't give it away. That no longer matters, as sunk costs are sunk. Your alternatives are: (i) let Widgetry rot, or (ii) open source it. The first does no one any good, and the second will work best if you can get the larger Smalltalk community involved. If Widgetry does become a good cross-dialect UI, you can sell VW as an industrial-strengh upgrade to the lesser dialects. -- Jeff |
RE: Cincom Smalltalk Plans: UI
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Uh ... The code is all in Store, AFAIK. Anyone can pick it up and run
with it. > -----Original Message----- > From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of > Jeffrey J. Hallman > Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2007 9:49 AM > To: James Robertson > Cc: [hidden email] > Subject: Re: Cincom Smalltalk Plans: UI > > Jim, > > I was afraid something like this might happen when Vassili left. > > From your missive it is clear that you don't have enough > staff to write and support a 'commercial-quality' UI builder > and migration tools. But you have this very nice Widgetry > framework just sitting there now, and it would be a shame to > let it rot. I'd like to see you open source Widgetry and > whatever other pieces of the VW world are needed to make it > possible to port to other dialects. The Smalltalk world > could really use a good standard UI framework that worked on > most dialects. If Widgetry worked on Squeak, Smalltalk/X, > GnuST, Dolphin and VW, it would stand a good chance of > becoming the universal Smalltalk UI. The support and > development would come from a community much larger than just > the VW alone. > > Open source Widgetry tools, particulary for migration, may > not be as high quality as what Cincom would have developed, > but they don't have to be. Users are more forgiving of > software they didn't pay for and can fix themselves. > > You have to get away from the idea that it cost you a lot to > build it, so you can't give it away. That no longer matters, > as sunk costs are sunk. Your alternatives are: (i) let > Widgetry rot, or (ii) open source it. The first does no one > any good, and the second will work best if you can get the > larger Smalltalk community involved. If Widgetry does become > a good cross-dialect UI, you can sell VW as an > industrial-strengh upgrade to the lesser dialects. > > -- > Jeff > > NOTICE: If received in error, please destroy and notify sender. Sender does not intend to waive confidentiality or privilege. Use of this email is prohibited when received in error. |
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In reply to this post by Mike Hales
Hi, Mike,
I agree almost completely with you.
BTW, I think that what a lot of customers need is not a GUI Builder, but a GUI framework you can count on, that is easy to use programmatically to generate UI, (and Widgetry is almost there). So what we need is mostly bugfixing and upgrading of the framework., not tools. (what Sames is doing at the moment, more or less). This will probably be an acceptable solution.
Also, considering the discussion between Sames and Andre, related to the way Widgetry use GC (almost no copies of it) and it's not using of direct display, it seems that, on a general way, widgetry is a lot ahead of Wrappers in terms of openess to future implementations. So, I don't know if what James says about moving something from widgetry to wrappers means at the end to make a seamless integration of widgetry in wrappers on some magical way....
On the other way, we loose a big opportunity, and, also considering what happened lately (Shared perm space is somewhere or almost killed???), I'm starting to feel really unsicure about the future of VW. What can we count on? Widgetry has been released as a supported product not many months ago...
ciao
Giorgio
On 9/11/07, Mike Hales <[hidden email]> wrote:
And now that I'm royally pissed off, how about the Mac VM? We've been waiting a year and half for that, and the only one making progress on it (visibly anyway) is a customer? And how about Vista support? It seems like a bunch of important things are dragging, but you are going to use resources to support Seaside? An open source framework with an active community of developers more than qualified to assist folks. Support something that doesn't need support, yet let the things that customers really need from Cincom languish, sounds agile to me. |
Re: Cincom Smalltalk Plans: UI
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giorgio ferraris wrote: I am sort of neutral on widgetry vs wrapper -- I have used wrapper enough (and have some modifications) to know the things it has problems with. However -- for whatever GUI framework -- I would need a GUI Builder -- we subclass the builder for use by all our applications developers, who do use smalltalk but only in controlled circumstances, and would never want to have to code a GUI. I do understand the issues with conversion for clients -- we have about 3000 GUI's which are based on wrapper and use every nuance of wrapper -- so that conversion would probably be a very large job.
-- Dennis Smith +1 416.798.7948 Cherniak Software Development Corporation Fax: +1 416.798.0948 509-2001 Sheppard Avenue East [hidden email] Toronto, ON M2J 4Z8 <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="sip:dennis@CherniakSoftware.com">sip:dennis@... Canada http://www.CherniakSoftware.com Entrance off Yorkland Blvd south of Sheppard Ave east of the DVP |
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In reply to this post by giorgiof
Absolutely, I have been building lots of Widgetry GUI's and I could care less about a GUI Builder, what I want is a stable, fast framework with widgets that support a modern gui, like edit in place, easy drag and drop, easy extensibility and especially the ability to programatically and dynamically change the GUI around while running. I think Widgetry is really good for all of those things. We need the framework to keep progressing.
On Sep 11, 2007, at 9:11 AM, giorgio ferraris wrote:
Having the tools be improved is great, but guess what, nobody will use great tools if they can only use them to make an ugly, outdated gui using an ugly outdated framework. Mike |
RE: Cincom Smalltalk Plans: UI
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I think what should happen next is a move to a common
framework such as wxwidgets (www.wxwidgets.org).
Since we as Smalltalk programmers march under the
banner of "reuse", what sense does it make to write our own framework from
scratch? Let's use a framework that already exists, particularly if that
framework uses each platform's native widgets (which wxwidgets does).
I believe there is already the beginning of such a
project underway. I think we should encourage its
progress.
Just my 2 cents.
--Tom
NOTICE: If received in error, please destroy and notify sender. Sender does not intend to waive confidentiality or privilege. Use of this email is prohibited when received in error. |
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In reply to this post by James Robertson-7
Some interesting perspectives, if you have
not seen them yet: - From: James Robertson
[mailto:[hidden email]] As most of you know, Cincom embarked on the creation of a
new user interface framework for VisualWorks in 2001. It is now 2007, and
this framework, Widgetry, has been in development (but not formally released)
for six years. At this point in time, our customers have many questions: When will UI building tools appear?
We have come to the conclusion that the leap to Widgetry is
simply too large for most of our customers, and have decided not to make
it. Widgetry does offer improvements over the existing VisualWorks UI
framework, and we have invested a lot of time and effort into Widgetry - but
that time and effort is not nearly as large as what would be required of our
customers in a migration effort. We understand that many of our
customers have been patiently waiting for the improvements promised in
Widgetry, and we will be using Widgetry as a base from which to incorporate
improvements for the UI in VisualWorks in a more incremental fashion. What does this mean for you, as a user of VisualWorks?
It means that your existing UI tools and applications will continue to work,
and will not need to be migrated. However, it does not mean that there
will be no improvements. In the next release (scheduled for January,
2008), improvements to existing tools (the Refactoring Browser in particular)
will appear. Incremental improvements to the UI will start to appear
after that, including:
If you have feedback on this, please feel free to send it
directly to me, James Robertson, the Cincom Smalltalk Product Evangelist.
No virus found in this incoming message. No virus found in this outgoing message. |
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In reply to this post by James Robertson-7
OK, so I’m lucky: we never developed anything in Widgetry, nor did I ever seriously spend time looking into it. My reasons have turned out to be economically sound: there seemed little chance Cincom would persuade all customers to migrate all applications to a completely different framework, so Wrapper would have to be continued for the foreseeable future.
I really feel the pain of those new VWers who started with Widgetry – and I’m sure they’ll make their pain known to Cincom in the strongest possible terms. What we’ve seen in public forums has been mild and reasonable, in comparison :-).
AFAICS the only way forward is the painful one: existing applications will have to be updated to cope with incremental changes to ostensibly private parts of the Wrapper components. The good news is those improvements to Wrapper should mean that in our apps, we mostly replace ugly code with nice code. And of course many improvements to Wrapper can be made without our needing to change anything.
I’m ready to commit to supporting non-backwards compatible evolution of Wrapper, and I hope other paying customers are. If they aren’t, and make a stink to Cincom every time a horrid “container container container” chain breaks, I really don’t see much hope for the future of VW.
Good luck to all of us! Steve
-----Original Message-----
Some interesting perspectives, if you have not seen them yet:
- Arden Thomas From: James Robertson
[mailto:[hidden email]]
As most of you know, Cincom embarked on the creation of a new user interface framework for VisualWorks in 2001. It is now 2007, and this framework, Widgetry, has been in development (but not formally released) for six years. At this point in time, our customers have many questions:
When will UI building tools appear?
We have come to the conclusion that the leap to Widgetry is simply too large for most of our customers, and have decided not to make it. Widgetry does offer improvements over the existing VisualWorks UI framework, and we have invested a lot of time and effort into Widgetry - but that time and effort is not nearly as large as what would be required of our customers in a migration effort. We understand that many of our customers have been patiently waiting for the improvements promised in Widgetry, and we will be using Widgetry as a base from which to incorporate improvements for the UI in VisualWorks in a more incremental fashion.
What does this mean for you, as a user of VisualWorks? It means that your existing UI tools and applications will continue to work, and will not need to be migrated. However, it does not mean that there will be no improvements. In the next release (scheduled for January, 2008), improvements to existing tools (the Refactoring Browser in particular) will appear. Incremental improvements to the UI will start to appear after that, including:
If you have feedback on this, please feel free to send it directly to me, James Robertson, the Cincom Smalltalk Product Evangelist. No virus found in this incoming message. No virus found in this outgoing message. |
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In reply to this post by James Robertson-7
James,
Some feedback for you. I think that it is good that people are responding on mail lists and cls to your announcement. Replying to you direct would just end up restricting the information flow - this discussion is far more healthy. Under exactly what terms will people be able to go on using Pollock/Widgetry? Clearly a number of people have invested quite heavily in the library and would like to know if it is safe to continue doing so. I think a FOSS licence would be great, but I imagine that is not something that would be easy to do given the investment made by Cincom so far. Whatever the deal, clarity is key here. I confess that I was also surprised that Cincom will be directing resources at Seaside. Seaside seems to be doing just fine, while other things in VW are crying out for attention. I like Tom Sattlers suggestion of enabling something like wxWidgets. Giving Travis more time on Cairo would be good too. Producing that minimal start-up image (one that had just enough umph to load a parcel) would be good. The Store schema could do with some work ... so is Seaside really really at the top of the list of things Cincom should focus on? All the best, Bruce -- Make the most of your skills - with OpenSkills http://www.openskills.org/ |
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In reply to this post by Steven Kelly
Steven Kelly wrote:
Yep. Let's clean up Wrapper. I definitely support incremental improvements to it. A new Chimera Look & Feel is already done, which emulates the native MacOS X look quit nicely. I'll post a screencast soon that demonstrates what beautiful and powerful things can be done with Wrapper and Wrapper-based extensions on a blast fast native Aqua VM. Andre |
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In reply to this post by James Robertson-7
It is a strange coincidence: the announcement of the dead of widgetry
was on 9-11! |
Re: Cincom Smalltalk Plans: UI
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In reply to this post by Jeffrey J. Hallman-2
Indeed this would be really interesting to see if we can port
Widgetry to the other Smalltalk. I would help if widgetry would get open-sourced. Stef On 11 sept. 07, at 15:48, Jeffrey J. Hallman wrote: > Jim, > > I was afraid something like this might happen when Vassili left. > > From your missive it is clear that you don't have enough staff to > write and support > a 'commercial-quality' UI builder and migration tools. But you > have this very > nice Widgetry framework just sitting there now, and it would be a > shame to let > it rot. I'd like to see you open source Widgetry and whatever other > pieces of the VW world are needed to make it possible to port to other > dialects. The Smalltalk world could really use a good standard UI > framework > that worked on most dialects. If Widgetry worked on Squeak, > Smalltalk/X, > GnuST, Dolphin and VW, it would stand a good chance of becoming the > universal > Smalltalk UI. The support and development would come from a > community much > larger than just the VW alone. > > Open source Widgetry tools, particulary for migration, may not be > as high > quality as what Cincom would have developed, but they don't have to > be. Users > are more forgiving of software they didn't pay for and can fix > themselves. > > You have to get away from the idea that it cost you a lot to build > it, so you > can't give it away. That no longer matters, as sunk costs are > sunk. Your > alternatives are: (i) let Widgetry rot, or (ii) open source it. > The first > does no one any good, and the second will work best if you can get > the larger > Smalltalk community involved. If Widgetry does become a good cross- > dialect > UI, you can sell VW as an industrial-strengh upgrade to the lesser > dialects. > > -- > Jeff > |
RE: Cincom Smalltalk Plans: UI
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In reply to this post by James Robertson-7
Can
somebody tell me how viable the suggestion made by Thomas is (see below)?
Are there any technical issues that make it impossible? Does anyone have an idea
of the workload involved (do we have to think in terms of man months or man
years?). Could it be done as a community effort?
It
seems to me that in the long run Cincom will not be able to maintain everything
that is currently part of the Cincom Smalltalk product. Interfacing with an
existing cross platform widget framework seems to me one of the strategic
choices and it will free resources for doing other more pressing stuff. I think
this is a better way to go than other suggestions I have heard like open
sourcing Widgetry and making a community effort of extending and maintaining
it.
Ron
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