So hats off to Nucleus Research for firing a salvo at SAP for causing customers to shell out millions on software with little more than added worker productivity in return. link

This situation provides much of the motivation for our architecture, ERP5, which offers several advantages for business. All ERP5 tools are open source, so are free and have openly available source code that a business can change to suit its processes. ERP5 incorporates, from scratch, advanced concepts such as object-oriented databases, a content management system, synchronization, variations, workflows, and a method to model and implement business processes. ERP5 is also a Web site where researchers can share innovation on management techniques and their implementation through software.

In 2001, two companies initiated the ERP5 project: Nexedi, a Zope service provider in France (Zope is a well-known open-source application server), and Coramy, a European apparel manufacturer. They aimed to develop a set of ERP software components for small and medium-sized companies. In addition to source code, the project also produced educational material and a clearly defined theoretical model. To fit the needs of smaller companies, they also designed ERP5 for distribution across distant sites with slow and unreliable Internet connections.

link

 I have run Compiere251d with Oracle10g & Java 1.5 beta :-), and I am very nice.

 You have to make the step:

 1.- Copy the $ORACLE_HOME/jdbc/lib/ojdbc14.jar
 to $COMPIERE_HOME/lib/oracle10g.jar

 2.- Change into $COMPIERE_HOME/RUN_setup.sh  in the -classpath oracle.jar for
 oracle10g.jar

Of course, the devil’s in the details: there’s inventory to manage, backorders to fulfill, outstanding invoices to collect, orders to process, bills to pay, and customers to service. The goal of business may be simple enough — but the business of running a business is anything but.

Fortunately, computers are a natural for the back office, and software to manage a business — called customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource management (ERP) software — has become a big business in itself. SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and Microsoft charge plenty of beans for bean counting software. For example, Microsoft’s Great Plains Software division charges $50,000 for a license, $100,000 for implementation, and $20,000 a year for maintenance.

But just as Linux has provided a free alternative to proprietary operating systems like Windows and Solaris, Compiere, this month’s "Project of the Month," provides an open source alternative to commercial CRM and ERP solutions. link

link

How well does the Oracle-compatability mode work for SAP DB? I got to check that as it might be an option to replace the existing Oracle DB dependency.

I will post a few pics from the Linuxtag later. Not too many people here this year. Linux has simply made it into mainstream. The adventure has long gone :-). Got a nice yellow "no software patents" t-shirt.

Significant functionality was added:

• Credit Management & Dunning
• Improved Discount Management
• Payment-Invoice Allocation improvements (incl. Auto Match)
• Ship/Receive in multiple UOMs
• Service Level Agreements
• GL Distribution
• Prepayment Order Improvements
• Financial Report writer improvements

Technical Improvements:

• Support of Oracle 10g
• Improved Database Connection management
• Performance improvements

Significant reduction of open bugs.

The code is on SqueakSource: kilana.unibe.ch:8888/ObjectiveCBridge/ObjectiveC-avi.70.mcz You can get a prebuilt plugin (for use with Ian’s 3.7 VM) here: beta4.com/~avi/ObjectiveCPlugin The browser demo can be run with "CCBrowser test". It requires this nib file: beta4.com/~avi/CCBrowser.tgz You need to untar that and place it inside Contents/Resources/English.lproj of your VM application bundle. I’m announcing this partly because I’ve run out of steam on it for now, and am hoping someone else will take it the next step of building UIs for the various Squeak tools (browsers, debuggers, workspaces, inspectors, etc) in Cocoa. A custom NSMorphicView would also be cool, although might be pretty tricky. Anyway, if someone does try to take this on, I’ll be more than happy to answer any questions they have about the underlying bridge code.

(Source: Avi Bryant) I came across Avi Bryant's blog. Tons of interesting stuff, especially about Seaside. http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/avi/blogView

The last 20 years of the PC have been boring. PC vendors aim at businesses, who aren’t creative in their tool-use. They’re adults: they learn a system and stick to it. We should think about children. The printing revoltuion didn’t happen in Gutenberg’s day, it happened 150 years later, long after Gutenberg was dead, when all the pople alive had grown up with the press.

A small minority of Gutenberg’s contemporaries got the printing press, but it wasn’t until they were dead that the children who grew up with the press were able to put the ideas into practice.

James Licklieder: in a couple of years, human brains and computers will be coupled. It hasn’t happened yet. Except in science, where scientists and computers are indeed thinking as no human brain has ever thought before. .. craphound.com/kayetcon2003

And it is important to consider that once you commit to, say, iterating over an entire file, that the file must be reasonably small anyway to get decent performance. The same issue exists with collections. Who cares if collect: creates an extra collection or if WriteStream wastes space at the end of a long underlying collection; if these concerns are really so important then probably this huge collection should not exist and/or you should not be iterating over the entire thing anyway.

To put it very simply: you just can not expect a program to work on large data structures just because you micro optimized everywhere. If you want to handle large data structures then it takes planning and specialized algorithms and test cases. If you are not going to put in that effort, then don’t sweat the small stuff. It is very liberating to code with an eye towards correctness and towards algorithmic performance, and not to worry about getting down the constant factor. It seems to lead to lower stress, faster code production, and fewer bugs generated.

It’s probably because in order to post in the Java ng he has to be 10x as verbose as in the Smalltalk ng.

He probably has to declare himself, cast himself, wrap himself in a try catch block, bubble up any exceptions, use some external iterators, implement some interfaces, and wrap up his primitives in real objects. Maybe after auto-boxing and generics are supported, he’ll only have to post 7 or 8x as often.

Don’t worry James, we appreciate and understand your terseness over here. ;-)

 > PPS:
 > I remember working for a company, where it took the make utility3/4 of
 > an hour to figure out *what* to compile, and the compilers a day to
 > compile- it was a C++ project b.t.w. which was canceled and replaced by
 > a Smalltalk program after they spent 50man-years on a non-working
 > program - so much for non-toy languages !

Yeah and I just spent 3 days in an inhouse J2EE workshop held by one of our chief architects. We spent most of our time fighting with the tools. Changed setting over and over. The goal of the workshop was to demonstrate how to insert a row into an oracle table. At the end of the 2 days the table was still empty. Another non-toy language.

I have written two small apps (apx 5000 LOC) one in squak and one in stx. It was a dream. Got up in the morning and fixed two or three bugs before breakfast. You can only do this with a real cool environment.

Welcome to my little book. In it, my goal is to teach you a way to think about computation, to show you how far you can take a simple idea: that all computation consists of sending messages to objects. Object-oriented programming is no longer unusual, but taking it to the extreme - making everything an object - is still supported by only a few programming languages.

Can I justify this book in practical terms? Will reading it make you a better programmer, even if you never use "call with current continuation" or indulge in "metaclass hackery"? I think it might, but perhaps only if you’re the sort of person who would read this sort of book even if it had no practical value.

The real reason for reading this book is that the ideas in it are neat. There’s an intellectual heritage here, a history of people building idea upon idea. It’s an academic heritage, but not in the fussy sense. It’s more a joyous heritage of tinkerers, of people buttonholing their friends and saying, "You know, if I take that and think about it like this, look what I can do!"

link

 GM> Are there any accepted or already practiced ways for
 GM> companies to prevent Ruby source code from being read by potential
 GM> competitors? I can vaguely imagine redefining Ruby's
 GM> "require"-type methods so they can include zipped and passworded
 GM> ".rbz" files, say. Or using exerb (except for UNIX and without the
 GM> potential license issues).

 GM> I want to use Ruby at work but this is one of those "steps to
 GM> convincing your boss to use Ruby" I need to go through.

Just look at the "eval.c" file, i think the require is defined there and then write your hook. Or write a dll/so and add embedd your rb files as large c strings there (using maybe the "wrap" tool from the Fox Toolkit) and then do rb_eval_string("my c file"). After this protect the dll with something like "armadillo" (use google to find the URL). This works perfectly for me.

 Ich habe mal ein erstes deutsches 3.7g zusammengestellt:

 http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker/Squeak3.7gDeutsch.zip

 Das ist einfach das letzte 3.7g Full Image + deutsche uebersetzungen.
 Die englischen Fenster habe ich geloescht, die engl. Demo-Projekte sind
 aber noch drin.

 Was wir brauchen ist

 -> Eine deutscher Willkommen-text
 -> ein paar deutsche Demo Projekte
 -> am besten ein deutsches tutorial...

 Bi den Einfuehrungs-texten sollten wir uns nicht an den englischen orientieren,
 die sind naemlich eher sinnlos, denke ich.