Pimp my grave is the title of a campaign of one of my customers and last weekend that site went live.

It’s an interesting site - we managed to completely separate design and coding work with help of lots of CSS and a bit of Javascript (rewriting the DOM tree to replace a title with a Flash). This URL is just one of the many faces the site will get, other designs are in the works that target completely different segments of the market.

The site itself was built in VisualAge Smalltalk - the customer’s CRM system runs on that so in the image, all the business logic the site needs is available. The CRM system runs in Oracle, and we didn’t look forward to having Oracle on the web server (apart from the license fees), so the site runs off a subset of the CRM system’s data held in SQLite 3. Especially in the first form, my friend XMLHttpRequest (aka “the AJAX Engine”) is used in various locations to call back to the image to execute business logic.

All in all, it’s a neat proof-of-concept. Existing software was reused to the max, code and design have been decoupled, and the run-time environment is very simple (just an image, a VM, and a SQLite db file). The weakest point is the HTML, because VAST’s WebConnect wasn’t really built with this in mind. Therefore, the next project will likely be done with HTML generation instead of form painting.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2006 at 11:41 am and is filed under Smalltalk, Stuff on the Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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