In November I was at Smalltalks 2024, the annual conference of FAST in Argentina, with stops in Buenos Aires and Mar del Plata, and gave two talks there. FAST invited me over, which I'm very grateful for.
One was "ApptiveGrid: solve (business) problems without programming" (slides). The starting point is a simple idea: what if a URL wasn't just an address but an actual reference to an object, and a URI together with a verb was the operation you perform on it, the same way the web itself already works? ApptiveGrid is built around exactly that principle, trying to be a "hyper application" rather than a conventional backend with a bolted-on API. Responses come back in the HAL format, so that every object carries its own identity through self-links and can still be embedded inline where that keeps things fast, and ApptiveScript sits on top as the layer where the actual business logic gets expressed. None of it would work without a database that treats objects as first-class citizens instead of translating them into rows and columns, which is where Soil comes in.
The other was "Soil: an object oriented database for fun and profit" (slides). Soil is the object oriented database behind ApptiveGrid, and the talk puts it in context by walking through four decades of database history, from msql in the 90s through the usual relational suspects, the object database attempts of the 2000s, and the document-store era, before arriving at what Soil is trying to do differently: speak Smalltalk natively instead of forcing every query through SQL or a JSON-based query language. A deliberately unfair comparison table against MongoDB, Postgres and Sqlite makes the point with a wink, but the substance behind it is real: ACID transactions, MVCC for isolation and for being able to travel back in time through the data, and both skip-list and BTree indexes for fast lookups. What's still missing is just as honestly laid out: removing keys from an index without breaking it, multi-index collections, a proper query planner, and garbage collection.
Full talk list is here.