Why I Can't Take Smalltalk Seriously

Please notice that I wrote can't, not won't! I'm on the technical advisory board for a startup and they are intent on doing everything the right way. When we started to talk about web frameworks, everything was on the whiteboard for discussion: .Net, JSF, Tapestry, PHP, Ruby/Rails, Django, etc. I also mentioned WebObjects and Seaside. That caused a mix of puzzled looks and laughter. On the upside, the architecture we are proposing will allow them to consider Seaside but, this is the exception to the rule.

Meanwhile, back at my day job, I couldn't consider Seaside. We have billions of dollars worth of data and information stored in SQL Server, Oracle and DB2. That's a big, brick wall to hit. I need tools like JDBC, ODBC, JPA, Hibernate, iBatis, multi-threaded connection pools, drivers for each RDBMS (plus MySQL and Postgres would be nice) etc. Yes, I know there's GLORP but please ...

I also need scalability to tens of thousands of simultaneous users. That's also one of the reasons we can't use Ruby/Rails, either. When we need hundreds of servers to run a single application supporting thousands of users, cost of manageability becomes a very important factor. At this level, programmer productivity really counts for nothing. I'm far more interested in lowest cost of operation rather than cost of development. If it takes a dev a month or two longer to code something robust and manageable in Java or .Net, and the application is going to be in production for years, guess what wins? Just add more hardware is no longer a viable strategy when datacenters have been maxed out for both space and power consumption.

If I'm wrong about some points here, please let me know. Although, I did put some fair effort into researching how Smalltalk could meet some of these requirements but, I guess I was using the wrong keywords. Perhaps the Smalltalk community can help me get Smalltalk into at least one enterprise.