Smart-Pascal: A brave new world, 2022 is here

Trying to explain what Smart Mobile Studio does and the impact it can have on your development cycle is very hard. The market is rampant with superficial frameworks that promises you the world, and investors have been taken for a ride by hyped up, one-click “app makers” more than once.

I can imagine that being an investor is a bit like panning for gold. Things that glitter the most often turn out to be worthless – yet fortunes may hide beneath unpolished and rugged surfaces.

Software will disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years.
Uber is just a software tool, they don’t own any cars, yet they are now the
biggest taxi company in the world. -Source: R.M.Goldman, Ph.d

So I had enough. Instead of trying to tell people what I can do, I decided I’m going to show them instead. As the american’s say: “talk is cheap”. And a working demonstration is worth a thousand words.

Care to back that up with something?

A couple of weeks ago I published a video on YouTube of our Smart Pascal based desktop booting up in VMWare. The Amiga forums went off the chart!

For those that havent followed my blog or know nothing about the desktop I’m talking about, here is a short summary of the events so far:

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Smart Mobile Studio is a compiler that takes pascal, like that made popular in Delphi or Lazarus, and compiles it JavaScript instead of machine-code.

This product has shipped with an example of a desktop for years (called “Quartex media desktop”). It was intended as an example of how you could write a front-end for kiosk machines and embedded devices. Systems that could use a touch screen as the interface between customer and software.

You have probably seen those info booths in museums, universities and libraries? Or the ticket machines in subways, train-stations or even your local car-wash? All of those are embedded systems. And up until recently these have been small and expensive computers for running Windows applications in full-screen. Applications which in turn talk to a server or local database.

Smart Mobile Studio is able to deliver the exact same (and more) for a fraction of the price. A company in Oslo replaced their $300 per-board unit – with off the shelves $35 Raspberry Pi mini-computers. They then used Smart Pascal to write their client software and ran it in a fullscreen-browser. The Linux distribution was changed to boot straight into Firefox in full-screen. No Linux desktop, just a web display.

The result? They were able to cut production cost by $265 per unit.

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Right, back to the desktop. I mentioned the Amiga community. This is a community of coders and gamers that grew up with the old Commodore machines back in the 80s and 90s. A new Amiga is now on the way (just took 20+ years) – and the look and feel of the new operating-system, Amiga OS 4.1, is the look and feel I have used in The Smart Desktop environment. First of all because I grew up on these machines myself, and secondly because the architecture of that system was extremely cost-effective. We are talking about a system that delivered pre-emptive multitasking in as little as 512Kb of memory (!). So this is my “ode to OS 4” if you will.

And the desktop has caused quite a stir both in the Delphi community, cloud community and retro community alike. Why? Because it shows some of the potential cloud technology can give you. Potential that has been under their nose all this time.

And even more important: it demonstrate how productive you can be in Smart Pascal. The operating system itself, both visual and non-visual parts, was put together in my spare time over 3 weeks. Had I been able to work on it daily (as a normal job) I would have knocked it out in a week.

A desktop as a project type

All programming languages have project types. If you open up Delphi and click “new” you are greeted with a rich menu of different projects you can make. From low-level DLL files to desktop applications or database servers. Delphi has it all.

Delphi offers a wide range of projects types you can create

The same is true for visual studio. You click “new solution” and can pick from a wide range of different projects. Web projects, servers, desktop applications and services.

Smart Pascal is the only system where you click “new project” and there is a type called “Smart desktop” and “Smart desktop application”. In other words, the power to create a full desktop is now an integrated part of Smart Pascal.

And the desktop is unique to you. You get to shape it, brand it and make it your own!

Let us take a practical example

Imagine a developer given the task to move the company’s aging invoice and credit system from the Windows desktop – to a purely web-based environment.

The application itself is large and complex, littered with legacy code and “quick fixes” going back decades. Updating such a project is itself a monumental task – but having to first implement concepts like what a window is, tasks, user space, cloud storage, security endpoints, look and feel, back-end services and database connectivity; all of that before you even begin porting the invoice system itself ? The cost is astronomical.

And it happens every single day!

In Smart Pascal, the same developer would begin by clicking “new project” and selecting “Smart desktop”. This gives him a complete desktop environment that is unique to his project and company.

A desktop that he or she can shape, adjust, alter and adapt according to the need of his employer. Things like file-type recognition, storage, getting that database – all of these things are taken care of already. The developer can focus on his task, namely to deliver a modern implementation of their invoice and credit software – not waste months trying to force JavaScript frameworks do things they simply lack the depth to deliver.

Once the desktop has the look and feel in order, he would have to make a simple choice:

• Should the whole desktop represent the invoice system or ..
• Should the invoice system be implemented as a secondary application running on the desktop?

If it’s a large and dedicated system where the users have no need for other programs running, then implementing the invoice system inside the desktop itself is the way to go.

If however the customer would like to expand the system later, perhaps add team management, third-party web-services or open-office like productivity (a unified intranet if you like) – then the second option makes more sense.

On the brink of a revolution

The developer of 2022 is not limited to the desktop. He is not restricted to a particular operating system or chip-set. Fact is, cloud has already reduced these to a matter of preference. There is no strategic advantage of using Windows over Linux when it comes to cloud software.

Where a traditional developer write and implement a solution for a particular system (for instance Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X or Linux) – cloud developers deliver whole eco systems; constellations of software constructed from many parts, both micro-services developed in-house but also services from others; like Amazon or Azure.

All these parts co-operate and can be combined through established end-point standards, much like how components are used in Delphi or Visual Studio today.

The Smart Desktop, codename “Amibian.js”

Access to products written in Smart is through the browser, or sometimes through a “paper thin” native host (Cordova Phonegap, Delphi and C/C++) that expose system level functionality. These hosts wrap your application in a native, executable container ready for Appstore or Google Play.

Now the visual content is typically the same, and is only adapted for a particular device. The real work is divided between the client (which is now very much capable) and your server back-end.

So people still write code in 2022, but the software behaves differently and is designed to function as a group (cluster). And this requires a shift in the way we think.

Above: One of my asm.js prototype compilers. Lets just say it runs fast!

Scaling a solution from processing 100 invoices a minute to handling 100.000 invoices a minute – is no longer a matter of code, but of architecture. This is where the traditional, native only approach to software comes up short, while more flexible approaches like node.js is infinitely more capable.

What has emerged up until now is just the tip of the ice-berg.

Over the next five to eight years, everything is going to change. And the changes will be irrevocable and permanent.

The Smart Desktop back-end running as a system service on a Raspberry PI

As the Americans say, talk is cheap – and I’m done talking. I will do this with you, or without you. Either way it’s happening.

Nightly-build of the desktop can be tested here: http://quartexhq.myasustor.com/