Cincom has been delivering ChannelStream—its Document Output Management product—continuously to customers almost since Day 1. Using Smalltalk, a small team was able to turn out regular working iterations at an amazing pace. As the project grows and team members are added, we continue to manage regular deliveries. However, automation has become increasingly important and the effort required to integrate common build automation tools with our Smalltalk development environment is a real challenge.
This case study will discuss our progress towards build automation and continuous delivery and will highlight issues we faced, solutions we found, and challenges that still remain. It will also ask whether the Smalltalk community should be integrating with existing tools, collaborating on a made-for-Smalltalk solution, or carrying on the current roll-your-own model of application deployment.
Best known as one of the creators and current maintainers of the Seaside web application framework, Julian currently works for Cincom Systems in London, UK.