6 February 2011

This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format

Organic Design to become Squeakers

Toward the end of 2010 we contacted a number of different languages and platform's developer mailing-lists to try and determine the best choice of software to use for the organisational system and project management aspects. We came to the conclusion that for the short-term Drupal would be best since it has all the tools we need now. However, our ideal system must run in a fully p2p and offline-capable manner which the LAMP environment is not well-suited to, so we've ended up deciding on Squeak (an open source version of Smalltalk) for a number of important reasons.

Squeak works in a way which is very aligned with our Nodal Model in that it's self-contained (it's own interpreter and virtual machine are described in its own language) and unified (the class and instance structures are aspects of the same runtime object structure). Being self-contained means that any part of it can be changed through collaboration using the same tools that are used to develop the content. It also has the Seaside web-application framework and the Pier CMS so that we don't have to build our system from scratch.

A major advantage of Squeak is that each application that's added extends the Squeak object structure itself so that modifications can be made to the core workings of the system using high-level tools at the model level. We've found in our research that this is an essential feature for being able to migrate the system from a single instance's runtime to a unified network-wide p2p persistent runtime.