DabbleDb

When I first saw Avi give a presentation on Seaside at Smalltalk Solutions two years ago, I thought: "Man I wish I was smart enough to have done that!". Now, I have had the chance to play with the Dabble beta created using Seaside and it happened again. What an amazing application. In just a few minutes I created a bug tracker, feature request and development time tracking system for my real job. Then I added another app for tracking todo's on non dev projects that I also have to take care of. Dabble creates an RSS feed for me, and if someone reports a bug, I see it in my newsreader. It is super slick.

Of course it is still beta software, so there is a bug or two left to be found. Enter the amazing power of Smalltalk. When I hit one, a stack trace goes to Avi and Andrew, they fix it and email me saying its fixed within a few minutes. All the while I haven't even logged out. Operating on a live image is pretty normal for Smalltalkers, and it lets these guys have a real-time feedback - change - feedback cycle with their customers. It's totally great and about as agile as it gets.

Patrick Logan comments that it's too bad that Dabble is a commercial endeavor, because it won't benefit developers. This isn't so. Even though we don't have access to the Dabble code, everything that makes it work is available in Squeak (or VisualWorks) and Seaside. This is one of those occasions where the creators of the tool actually use the tool. Subsequently, all of us benefit because they are constantly evolving Seaside which is readily available.

There has been a lot of buzz about this, but rightfully so. It's very impressive.