On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 11:56:46AM -0500, Chris Muller wrote:

If anyone is interested in a story about Squeak being used in real business today, the slides for my STIC 2012 talk are available on STIC's website.

http://www.stic.st/conferences/stic12/stic12-abstracts/location-aware-networks-context-and-business-intelligence/

It's an experience report about an upgrade to 4Dst's "Awareness Engine" product, a Squeak-based telephone switching system which they market. In 2011, a GIS module plug-in was integrated into the application to provide regional call routing capability to this production system which has been running continuously since 2009.

What's not mentioned in the talk is that we simultaneously upgraded the underlying Smalltalk platform from Squeak 3.9 to 4.2 (a significant improvement). Squeak's practical attitude about backward-compatibility proved to be very business-friendly -- the upgrade was completed rapidly and implemented into production without issues.

Thanks for sharing this Chris. Zero service interruptions since August 2009 is very good performance, and is hard to achieve with any new software system.

Dave

On 26 April 2012 17:56, Chris Muller ma.chris.m@gmail.com wrote:

If anyone is interested in a story about Squeak being used in real business today, the slides for my STIC 2012 talk are available on STIC's website.

http://www.stic.st/conferences/stic12/stic12-abstracts/location-aware-networ...

It's an experience report about an upgrade to 4Dst's "Awareness Engine" product, a Squeak-based telephone switching system which they market.  In 2011, a GIS module plug-in was integrated into the application to provide regional call routing capability to this production system which has been running continuously since 2009.

What's not mentioned in the talk is that we simultaneously upgraded the underlying Smalltalk platform from Squeak 3.9 to 4.2 (a significant improvement).  Squeak's practical attitude about backward-compatibility proved to be very business-friendly -- the upgrade was completed rapidly and implemented into production without issues.

Thank you very much for the slideshow, Chris.

I knew 4Dst was one of the very few Smalltalk-using companies in South Africa (I know of only one other - FinWorks - and a handful of others, scattered from Rand Merchant Bank), but I had no idea they/you were doing such sophisticated stuff. Nice!

frank