[Help-smalltalk] beginner coming from VAST

[RK]

Hi all!

I receive the posts of this list since months and I tried to experiment
with it.

*** My questions are in the middle of this e-mail.
All the others are just the story...

I'm a VisualAge Smalltalk programmer since 1997 - or actually I was.
However, we have some applications developed in smalltalk, and version
5.5 was the last we licensed from IBM. The main question is that some of
these application software are still in use at our customers and they're
just happy with that. And they are even asking for changes and additions.

We are in a dilemma of these:
- port our applications to other ST system.
- port to other language/framework (some already done and moved to Python)

I tried gst and the BLOX browsers which are nice and easy, and really
enough for start.

*** My questions:
- is there a HOWTO or a QUICK GUIDE about GST for Stupid VASTers? :)
(main differences in the use of the system, etc)
- 90% of our customers use Win32. Any plan for a native release?
- One of our key application running at 6 customers is a CMS system,
heavily depending on the WebConnection feature of VAST. Is there any web
server component for GST? Pure CGI is more than enough, as it is only a
CMS system, not the runtime. I'm also afraid of moving the database layer...

We would like to preserve the application logic existing in smalltalk
and we would like  to move to open source as VAST is still painfully
expensive and its long term (long term!!!) existence is not guaranteed
(if IBM drops something....)

I personally DO LOVE smalltalk as the most productive language
environment I ever used.

Thanks for any help, recommendations.

best regards!

Robert

GNU Smalltalk version 2.3.3
Linux tpgentoo 2.6.22-gentoo-r9