Some time ago i have written about seaside and squeak on my polish blog - here. reason for that was because people do not always realized that smalltalk didn’t die at the same time as dinosaurs. Anyway, i’m lucky and working not only with one technology so was very happy to find something called Glare. What it is ? This is simple speaking a project that integrate smalltalk (visualworks in that case) and adobe flex. Sounds brilliant at the first look, but when i thought about it, was really confused. Why ? Smalltalk for example in Squeak or VisualWorks implementation is for development the same thing like ipod for music listening. It’s just incredible well thought. Everything is in one place, and we have IDE which is really truly intregrated. This IDE is not like NetBeans for Rails for example -  there are not a big difference to develop with simple editor or complicated IDE. But here IDE is one of the biggest advantage of using Suqeak for example. So now, when you think about it, we have two different style of thinking about web development:

  1. Adobe Flex & AS3 - brilliant RIA framework with AS3, which is not the best language ever and comparing to smalltalk really complicated (+ use with puremvc, caingorm etc.)
  2. Smalltalk (VisualWorks & Squeak) - brilliant language with DSL, Metaprogramming and IDE which gives us improvement kick.
Old-Simpl—Beautiful and New-Complicated-Enterprise, it is good connection or not ? Not so simple to asnwer, but i’m not a big enthusiast of connecting milion technologies in one place, unfortunatelly often it’s a must. I’m also using Ruby on Rails and Flex but the best practice will be using one technology, one language, sadly you are not doing what you want everytime. But glare is really interesting thing to try. On other hand remember that we have here Gemstone/S giving really scallable possibilities. I’m not sure we can use it inside glare but if so, this solution will be brilliant.