2006-05-28 - Up and down

Our last feature enhancements for the TidelandSmalltalkObjectStore - SosFeatureVersionNumber and SosFeatureDateAndUser - have a deep impact on the internal management of roots, instances and references. Those changes couldn't have been realized so quick without an environment like Smalltalk. As far as it is just refactoring other IDEs eg. for Java are comparable. But deeper design changes really benefit from the paradigm of different browsers working on an living image and allowing dynamic changes everywhere, even inside the strong debugger. Together with the inspektors all affected parts of the code are found and changed very fast. Unit tests help a lot to verify the accurate work.

This was the positive aspect of the latest development work - which is still in progress. But we've got also one negative: feature creep. The SOS grows and grows and provides more and more features. But this delays the open beta test. So we'll change the process in future. Beside the two features above only the ex- and import will be completed and then the beta will be released. After that we'll switch to timeboxes of two months.